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Comment by riku_iki | Hacker News Reader

> we tap our Visa card to pay instantly with no fees

I guess it's businesses, who pay high enough fees on your transactions.

The current Bitcoin transaction fee is $20+. Credit card processors charge you under 3%. If you're doing transactions of under about $700 USD, credit card fees are cheaper than Bitcoin fees.

Credit card processors also pay the user of the CC a cashback on a significant portion of that fee... And are also liable for fraud.

Who do I chargeback when an online merchant takes my BTC, and doesn't ship the goods I bought? BitPay will tell me to pound sand. VISA will process a chargeback, no questions asked.

Good problems to solve in this space.

By creating an off-chain payment processor called BISA, and we're back to charging merchants fees for cashback + fraud losses, except now we're for some stupid reason doing it on a blockchain.

I moved $1800 worth of LTC (Litecoin, one of the subjects of this thread) last night. The Tx fee was $0.01 and the funds were received in less than 1 minute. No more processing, no waiting for the next business day (or 3)... For 1 cent and 1 minute later the receiver can do whatever they want with it immediately.

That is cheaper than CC, faster than Venmo, or whatever.

Why are Litecoin's transaction fees multiple orders of magnitude smaller than Bitcoin's? Is this a result of genuinely better technical decisions than in Litecoin (mining is cheaper because it's less hardware-friendly, blocks are generated more quickly) or just lower transaction volume / demand for transactions because it's less well-known? That is, if Bitcoin somehow implodes tomorrow and everyone moves to Litecoin, would you still expect similarly low Litecoin fees?

Was this an on-chain transaction or a Lightning transaction?

> Why are Litecoin's transaction fees multiple orders of magnitude smaller than Bitcoin's?

Supply and demand. People pay more to transact in bitcoin, because it is more secure, because it is more decentralized.

Bitcoin's pretty broken at the moment due to some bad decisions by the development team. All other cryptocurrencies have very low fees.

The price of bitcoin disagrees with your assessment.

>The price of bitcoin disagrees with your assessment.

What does the price of bitcoin have to do with an objective assessment of how well the Bitcoin network is currently functioning?

If it wasn't working, people wouldn't be buying it. You are just going to have to accept that the great bulk of people who use bitcoin do not care about your use case.

As I continue to learn about the broader cryptocurrency scene and the emerging ecosystem, I have been looking at Bitcoin more and more as the Model T of crypto and less like the BMW i8...

partially its the 4x increase in transaction throughput, but also a lot less people use litecoin than bitcoin

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