Hacker News Reader

Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

Whatever ills Ethereum was trying to solve these gas fees certainly aren't helping. Even a slow transaction is averaging $120.

View on HN

I don't think this is correct. Are you confusing gwei with USD? A normal funds move is around $10 USD right now https://etherscan.io/gastracker which, yeah, is high, but a lot less than $120

Imagine paying $10 to send money in 2021. Crypto is a joke.

It's 10 cents or less on layer 2 solutions like Polygon or zkSync.

Ethereum mainnet has incredibly high demand for block space right now because there's hundreds of billions of dollars worth of value trading on top of it. And at that scale $10 is peanuts.

Not if I'm trying to pay for something like a $10/month recurring fee!

So, you’re telling me there’s a massive inequality in the system controlled by those with wealth and everyday people basically can’t participate because there’s no room for their petty needs.

This is $10 for sending a transaction in the base Ethereum blockchain. Imagine you're sending millions, can do so quickly, only for $10, and without needing permission or paperwork from any bank? Also, most normal transactions should happen at Layer 2, which would cost orders of magnitude less. zkSync, which is a layer 2 solution for Ethereum, is incredibly cheap and inherits the same security as the base chain. The costs would be fractions of a penny.

So the blockchain is for the rich, got it.

This is such a ridiculous take. Blockchain is completely fixing the remittence industry. It is one of the most empowering technologies for the developing world.

And your statement isn't even true. On layer 2s like Polygon you can send $0.50 anywhere in the world for less than a penny in fees. Think of Ethereum like the New York Times. You want to place an ad--so do many other people, and page space is limited. It's a pretty ridiculous critique of the entire advertising industry to say it's only for the rich because placing an ad in the New York Times is expensive. You can post your ad on craigslist for free.

> Blockchain is completely fixing the remittence industry. It is one of the most empowering technologies for the developing world.

I'd love to see some numbers to that effect.

Happy to oblige:

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/crypto-fast-becoming-a-prefe...

https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/09/crypto-remittances-are-a-l...

https://restofworld.org/2021/crypto-remittances/

And a fun (mind-blowing, to me) demo https://twitter.com/jackmallers/status/1441089090628177933

to be very honest, this experience isn't much different from early days of bitcoin. It's only recently that fees have gotten exorbitant and we've had to invent layers to fix that.

Bitcoin in 2008 was as good for remittances as it is today - it's just easier to acquire and costlier to move (lightning being the exception). However, it manages by ignoring all regulations (Indian examples: [0], [1]). Whether these laws are just or proportional in a world where information moves at the speed of light is a question for democratic processes, not multinational corporations to answer.

Payments via SWIFT are slow not because the bits transferring money over SWIFT are much slower, but because international remittance regulations are genuinely complicated.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Exchange_Management_Ac...

[1]: https://fcraonline.nic.in/home/PDF_Doc/FC-RegulationAct-2010...

> Imagine you're sending millions..

This is the problem.

Ethereum is for those who can afford the astronomical gas fees even on a slow transaction speed which is quite worse than card payment at this point.

Basically it is useless for anyone that pays for their groceries given that the gas fee itself will be more expensive than the food you are paying for.

Other blockchains already exist to avoid these issues from the start without relying on, fixing / patching, building on top of Ethereum.

> Imagine paying $10 to send money in 2021.

Your imagination is wrong in its estimate of absurdity: Western Union charges $60 to transfer $999 to the US:

https://www.westernunion.com/us/en/send-money/app/price-esti...

Up to $158 depending on what option you use, which is somehow even more than the claimed gas fees.

Meanwhile Wise charges $7.5.

I get paid in the EU, move it to the UK, and then send it to my US account. All in all this takes around 2 days and costs around $60. Wish I was paid in crypto and had quick $10 transactions instead (albeit offboarding it into fiat would cost a bit too, because of exchange fees).

I don't understand what you get downvoted for. People in your replies are proving your point. Crypto is for rich people and the .01% who send money over borders regularly. Crypto IS a joke.

Probably it's because of the generalization. Just because one store has a 2000% markup on an item, doesn't mean stores in general are a joke.

This is focusing on the current worst case for sending money in all of crypto though. At the moment sending btc is about 50 cents and solana remains less than 1 cent.

It was gwei but this site never made it apparent https://crypto.com/defi/dashboard/gas-fees

And prices, in USD,were higher when I posted my statement earlier.

The move to rollups for cheaper transactions has begun but isn't fully distributed yet. You can use Arbitrum or Optimism for much cheaper transactions today. And transaction fees are free on Immutable X (NFT marketplace) and Dydx (perpetuals marketplace), which are zero knowledge rollups that leverage a clever compression technique to transact with 1/100th the cost or less.

If I'm a regular human being who's trying to purchase an actual product with Ethereum, is any of this helpful to me?

The translation from the GP comment is: No.

You are better off using a different cryptocurrency that can scale and handle payments with extremely low fees better than Ethereum or failing that use something like Apple Pay.

Even if you did all of those suggestions, you still need to pay the gas fees to put it on a layer 2 solution, or that rollup solution / zkSync contraption the web3 guys speak of in order to have 'less' transaction fees in the first place.

After all of those steps, the gas fee will still cost more than paying for your groceries in the supermarket. Making it totally useless for paying for your food.

One more thing:

   You better have enough to cover the gas fees for approving and transferring otherwise the transaction can 'fail' and is non refundable.

No wonder the banks are still laughing at this 'payments' contraption.

>Even if you did all of those suggestions, you still need to pay the gas fees to put it on a layer 2 solution, or that rollup solution / zkSync contraption the web3 guys speak of in order to have 'less' transaction fees in the first place.

Not necessarily. Exchanges are starting to support some of these so you can skip the Ethereum mainnet completely.

So the recent radical solution that the blockchain is empowering is moving off the blockchain and relying on a centralized store of information?

Exchanges have always been the most common onboarding method, nothing recent or radical there. Of course, you can also always go p2p and buy directly. One way would be to use localmonero and then use bridges through cheap networks while avoiding Ethereum mainnet or use bridges directly if you have crypto already.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com