Been giving this some thought, and although I'm a serious BTC enthusiast, it just seems that it the idea of alerting the entire internet every time someone buys a pack of gum is never going to work.
Decentralization is great but isn't this a fundamental flaw that will make it impossible for it to become an every-day payment method?
If you are a Bitcoin enthusiast, you must have heard about the Lightning Network. Not only it solves the problem of buying a pack of gum, it also opens a brand new way to do business because it enables efficient transactions of fractions of a penny. Bitcoin developers are not amateurs, they know what they are doing.
Comparison with AOL doesn't hold, because Bitcoin's competitors are more like those busted dotcom companies while Bitcoin is the next Google/Apple/Amazon.