Hacker News Reader

Comment by heinrichhartman | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much banks are the problem here. I am not sure if payments of a few cents can be realized online without loosing money on fees to payment providers or banks.

AFAIK, this is the "micropayment" problem, that people were hoping bitcoin would solve.

View on HN

Bitcoin is only economical for very large transactions - the energy cost of even a single btc transaction is huge. It doesn't solve the micropayments problem at all.

The banks are 100% of the problem.

Bitcoin solved it, and then AML/KYC made it illegal to not have bank-like overhead costs.

Miners don't do AML/KYC, they just charge higher transaction fees than Visa etc al on small payments.

Bitcoin didn’t “solve” the micropayment problem.

Compared to Visa, Bitcoin solved micropayments only if micro refers to the daily transaction volume.

Visa settles at the end of financials days with revocation possibly up to 80days out. Bitcoin settles every 10mins with revocation possible up to 1 hour out.

To keep the comparison accurate, you can transact many times within an “accounting block”. Bitcoin has the shorter accounting block and tier 2 systems laid on top of it seem to scale Bitcoin well beyond any accounting block maximum transaction cap.

The GP is probably not referring to speed of settlement though. Bitcoin solves KYC and trust and allows frictionless micro-payment.

AML/KYC is not the problem.

Companies can issue gift cards that are entirely anonymous, paid for in cash, redeemed anonymously for cash.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com