"Is Bitcoin going to give me a home loan? Or a business loan? "...

"Is Bitcoin going to give me a home loan? Or a business loan? "

For a home, you could simply save with a deflationary currency (There will be a lot more purchasing power once the current financial fraud system is obsolete). For a business idea you could do the same or the market could crowd source.

"XRP is going to improve the efficiency of the global banking system. "

It will more likely move the banking system from the current clearing house system into a cartel based system. But it will fail to compete with cryptocurrencies in the long run because you don't need a middle man.

"majority controlled by a small number of Chinese mining groups"

Recent historical events prove this to be false. Entities with special interests like certain miners and exchanges have repeatedly attempted to increase the Blocksize through various methods (Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin Unlimited, Hong Kong Agreement, NYA/S2X, Bcash, etc), and have all failed in their attempt to takeover the market (Link goes into more details about motivation). In reality economic full nodes along with the market are what control Bitcoin. The miners merely provide a service, and the person paying (Sender) can set the fee at any price they believe is reasonable. If a hostile miner mines an incompatible block, it's not so much that the network rejects the block, but in fact the network doesn't even see it.

In short, miners are at the mercy of their customers, and there will be more realisation of this fact over time

"make transaction times and costs useable."

Research the Lightning Network and see the link I provided above.