Blinken, I agree with your assessment of the banks. Their efforts are entirely misguided and show utter incompetence. I think it is a severe psychological problem for them to realize that their profitable business as it has been and with it their power is going to die. Their blockchain-efforts will lead to nothing but wasted funds, since the advantages of Bitcoin/blockchain are only relevant for a decentralized network. If you want a centralized transaction system using "blockchain technology" makes no sense at all in terms of efficiency.
Only those banks that are able to give in to fundamental change will have a chance to survive. I imagine that some of today's banks could transform into insurance service companies that cover digital theft / data loss.
What is actually going to happen is that a new iteration of Bitcoin is going to emerge in which transactions records are distributed, dividing that 90 terabyte mass into many myriad of chunks on different nodes and allowing for unlimited transactions. Then Bitcoin II is going to destroy the banking and credit card system as it currently exists.
We don't need a new iteration of Bitcoin for this to happen. Lightning Network will help Bitcoin to scale significantly. But of course there will also be constant innovation with Core. I'm pretty confident that most of us will be witness of the historic transformation from a bank-based monetary system to a p2p one.
ya.ya.yo!