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Comment by crazypython | Hacker News Reader

Even if fees are $50, it's still useful as a competitor to ACH and other payment systems. Commercial bank to bank transfers costing $50 in total fees isn't unusual.

I heard the Fed is working on lowering bank transfer fees.

> For one thing, it’s likely that transaction fees will rocket, as miners try to replace revenues no longer provided by the emission of new Bitcoins.

Difficulty readjusts every 2016 blocks, changing money needed to mine a block. Congestion would be temporary.

> The hope was that by having a hard-coded limit on the number of Bitcoins ever to be produced, the value of a Bitcoin couldn’t be inflated away by an endless supply of new coins.

Technically not true, the code was written incorrectly so as to trigger undefined behavior / underflow, allowing far more than 21 million bitcoins. This was corrected in a non-controversial hard fork.

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> For one thing, it’s likely that transaction fees will rocket, as miners try to replace revenues no longer provided by the emission of new Bitcoins.

That's not how Bitcoin fees work. Miners do not define a fee. A transaction has at least 1 input and 1 output. If the input value differs from the output value, the miner gets to keep the difference. Miners will prioritize transactions that offer the most change/fee per byte.

Fees go up because users want their transaction processed before other transactions.

Fees are more based on congestion than on whether there are block rewards.

If the fees are too low, less efficient miners will stop mining and difficulty will drop, making mining cheaper.

> Difficulty readjusts every 2016 blocks, changing money needed to mine a block. Congestion would be temporary.

The number of transactions per block is fixed (IIRC it's about 6 transactions/second), so transaction fees will always rise to the level that the world is willing to pay for 6 transactions/second at.

> Commercial bank to bank transfers costing $50 in total fees isn't unusual

This is interesting. What amounts are we talking about here? What would be the equivalent tx costs if BitCoin were used do you know?

$50 is for wire transfers, usually used for amounts above $1000. $35 for sender, $15 for receiver.

The equivalent transaction costs would be $0.53- Bitcoin fees don’t increase if the amount is higher: https://mempool.space/ (and it works on weekends and arrives in an hour)

If Bitcoin means “be your own bank,” Bitcoin is a decent bank. You can even get a trustless, psuedonymous Visa debit card with Lightning: https://paywithmoon.com

not to mention lightning, which is where a majority of transactions would actually be occurring.

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