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Comment by flixic | Hacker News Reader

Today's Bitcoin's average transaction fee is $6.34. For "coffee shop purchases" that is horrendous. Ethereum is better, at $1.43, but still not usable for coffee. Only highly-centralized cryptocurrencies, such as Stellar, have reasonable transaction fees.

I think for the time being it's meaningful to think of cryptocurrency transactions as stock purchases / fees to the stock exchange.

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I agree with you that the fees for some of the cryptocurrency’s make them impractical, and this certainly will hinder mainstream adoption. I do not think that I will try to pay for coffee with some of my antique gold coins any time soon, but that does not render them any less valuable. bitcoin plays a similar role in the context of digital assets for the moment. It frustrates me when I read other comments here dismissing cryptocurrency out of hand without taking the time to understand it. As you rightly point out, some tokens are better at certain tasks depending on the situation In the same way that some fiat currencies are circumstantially better than others... I think a number of people in Lebanon would prefer BTC to LBP right now regardless of the fees. For my part, I am more concerned with micro transaction fees for running applications, and I will leave the speculation to someone else.

I know what you're trying to say but 99.999% of people do not own antique gold coins, are you saying the same about bitcoin?

Not at all. I suppose that I am just trying to point out that every asset has its pros and cons depending on the situation. The Euros at the bottom of my travel case are just as useful to me as my gold coins at the moment, and the pennies under my couch cushions, though easily more liquid, are much less valuable than either. Bitcoin is obviously far more accessible and convenient than gold, but I just cannot see anyone using it for small transactions... at least while the network fees are as high as they currently are.

There are decentralized crypto currencies that have sub 1 cent fees - where the fee even gets smaller as the blocksize automatically adjusts larger to accommodate more transactions.

Edit: Monero. It's currently 15th on Coin Gecko by market cap at $2.3 billion. It's 3rd in the number of most developers behind Bitcoin and Ethereum.

> It's 3rd in the number of most developers behind Bitcoin and Ethereum.

It's a gameable metric. How do you track it anyway- by github contributors? By number of people submitting patches?

Also, not all contributors are equal...

A simple native payment on Ethereum is only $0.16 right now, complex transactions inflate the average.

And roll-up transactions are currently sitting at less than a penny.

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