Payments are generally batched because individual payments are slow and/or have restrictions applied, like time of day they can be sent or received, which are easier to reason about when aggregated.
If you remove these burdens by having a technology that is cheap and nearly instant for all payments, then there's no real need to batch.
We're not quite at cheap + instant with crypto, but there's nothing preventing it in principle. And when we get there, there's no reason batching needs to continue to be part of the equation, at least not with the same tradeoffs.
> Payments are generally batched because individual payments are slow
They're slow to enable batching. Fedwire is time-limited, but many other real-time payment networks are not.
> If you remove these burdens by having a technology that is cheap and nearly instant for all payments, then there's no real need to batch
Yes, there is. To make payments even cheaper. For any given transaction price and speed pair, there's a market that cares more about price than speed. You'll always be able to layer a net settlement layer on top of an RTGS network to serve that market at lower cost.
In any case, if we're arguing for RTGS, it will always be faster and cheaper to transfer money via database operations than on a blockchain. Fast and cheap are not–and should never have been–cryptocurrencies' selling points.
If you remove these burdens by having a technology that is cheap and nearly instant for all payments, then there's no real need to batch.
We're not quite at cheap + instant with crypto, but there's nothing preventing it in principle. And when we get there, there's no reason batching needs to continue to be part of the equation, at least not with the same tradeoffs.