The mining and gas fees for BTC and ETH respectively are going to be higher than the cut a payment processor would take.
The one advantage that you might be alluding to is that bitcoins are divisible into satoshi’s, which are much more granular than cents.
There's much more to it, many smart people have put a lot of thought into LN, so I recommend reading the whitepaper and other documentation about it.
And looking at how many people use a custodial Bitcoin wallet today (e.g. Coinbase), many will probably use custodial LN wallets as well, with only the wallet service requiring a channel. Not recommending this of course.
Also, my use case was regarding micropayments (e.g. for reading a news article) and nanopayments (e.g. for an API call). That's below $0.30. If you're now going to say that you could top up some balance (like $20) and just deduct a cent from that for every payment, that was exactly the other point of my use case: No accounts required, neither in the DB of the news or API service, nor in the DB of some payment processor that must keep your credit card data.
So it's not just about fees, it's also about privacy.
The reason we don't have micropayments isn't an accounting issue, fee-related or a technical issue -- or even a privacy issue -- it's a human biology issue. IMO hooking it up directly to a wallet without topping off isn't going to change that, especially since you still have to top off the BTC wallet regularly as you get paid in real currency. Boat-anchoring two things that are complex and people don't really want (crypto + micropayments) isn't going to make the two work all of a sudden.
The only way to really solve the news business model with something other than ads is a Netflix-for-news. I hope that Apple News becomes that because newspapers deserve to exist.
And that's if you want really fast confirmations.
What is the alternative? Card? 2% + .3 fee. That's expensive. ACH? takes 5 days to be processed.
What is the fast, cheap digital alternative?
Works great if you're settling transferring between friends doesn't work for buying/selling goods[1], otherwise you get charged the same 3%. Also, the "free" transaction aspect is most likely a loss leader.
[1] https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/217532097-Can-I-use...
Besides, talking worked well for thousands of years, what use would humanity have for the Internet? /s
The reality is that for the rest of the world bitcoin is missing the initial distribution problem. Nobody in Venezuela has bitcoin. How are they going to get it? If they can trade with other countries, they would just get USD and be better off. If not, then net, it's zero sum. That's really all there is to it. Even after that, it's like cash if cash had a $1.50 transaction fee for handing it to your buddy. Not exactly tenable in countries where thats basically a daily wage.
Edit: ...and LN transactions are essentially instantaneous and free. Also you can’t program cash without a middleman.
Nothing in that twitter account refutes that in Venezuela the minimum wage is $6.70USD per MONTH [3] so a single transaction fee is nearly a WEEK of wages. And that's up from $2.20 per MONTH so a single transaction fee was THREE WEEKS of wages.
LN transactions are "instantaneous and free" once you open a channel ($1.50) and lock in your balance, then close out your channel ($1.50). Again, two weeks wages.
Bitcoin is not a solution to the problems of Venezuela. Changing the government is. They're totally disconnected.
[1] https://bitcoinist.com/venezuela-now-requires-bitcoin-miners...
[2] https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/05/31/officials-in-venezuela-be...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-wage/v...
I pity someone who is so offended by a simple technology.
Look at Bitcoin's yearly lows, and tell me more people aren't finding it useful every year. Again, YOU mentioned the Venezuela example, and IT IS BEING USED THERE. I never claimed it would save that country, nor have I heard anyone else make that claim. Clearly some people there find it more useful than other alternatives to their hyperinflationary fiat currency.
Bitcoin doesn't care about Venezuela nor any other specific use case. It keeps existing because people keep running the software. You can deny this, but there's no point being exasperated over it. Just let it go and concentrate on whatever you do care about.
But don't go around claiming fiat currencies are the final solution when situations like Venezuela are happening right before our eyes.
Trading with other countries opens up many different options for storing value like fiat currencies backed by 'stable' governments like AUD, CAD, NZD, USD, EUR -- or assets like gold, equities, real estate, etc. Each of which would have stored value 5X better than BTC over the last 2 years. However, the real issue remains, you have to trade to obtain either these assets or BTC and nobody wants to trade anything for Venezuelan Bolivars because they in turn don't believe they'll get anything for them. That won't be solved until the government is replaced.
Until the government is replaced any BTC "solutions" for the Venezuelans are efforts to legitimize BTC and increase the value of the holdings of the "helpers," not to really solve the problems on the ground there. If they were trying to help, they'd just raise money for NGOs.