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Comment by djschnei | Hacker News Reader

If only there was an instantaneous, nearly free (cost per transaction), opensource, anyone-can-access, infinitely scalable, infinitely interoperable, payment rail that we could start building solutions on top of...

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If you're referring to cryptocurrency, isn't the average cost-per-transaction for something like Ethereum on the order of $40-$50?

Parent is a Bitcoin maximalist, just to be mindful.

Currently it's about $0.85 USD to send ETH or $2.50 USD to send ERC20[1]. Most people will suggest not using a L1 as a payment system, but instead something application-specific like a rollup or state channel. In Ethereum those will be in the range of 5 - 20 cents per transaction[2], and may be much lower after EIP-4844[3].

Other non-Ethereum blockchains and L2s have similar range of low fees.

[1] https://etherscan.io/gastracker

[2] https://l2fees.info/

[3] https://www.eip4844.com/

I made characteristic claims about a solution I see fit for the OP problem statement.

When he asked if I was talking about ETH, I told them I wasn't.

You're hijacking a thread to push your form of maximalism.

Would you like to discuss the differences between ETH/Altcoins and Bitcoin/Lightning? Or would you rather just label me a maximalist to dismiss the claim?

Sorry but the statement "Not 'crypto' which is by and large a scam" is a common statement from Bitcoin maximalists who refuse to engage with the rest of the crypto currency system. "Crypto" is a broad umbrella and Bitcoin exists underneath it.

I do believe 99% of crypto projects vastly misrepresent their risks, their control/influence structures, and their intent. I do believe 99% of crypto projects are clever ways to hop on a hype train to farm dollars from retail. I do believe Bitcoin is different. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency -- 'crypto' is colloquial term to specify an industry.

Just sending a payment is typically cheap for eth. Calling a lot of code can get expensive for the code execution costs, though L2s are available for that if you do it regularly.

It’s more like $1 these days due to the bear market, granted these remain high fees.

Cheaper payments can be sent on a zero-knowledge Layer 2 like starknet or zksync. Beta services but usable (except the whole on-ramp off-ramp part). Once sharding is implemented, fees are likely to drop to sub-cent levels.

Ideally payments would be anonymized on a privacy-preserving L3, but I don’t think those exist yet

Aztec is live on mainnet:

https://aztec.network/

Not Ethereum. Ethereum has a lot of massive problems. Not 'crypto' which is by and large a scam.

I'm talking about Bitcoin with The Lightning Network.

Most payments I make over Lightning, regardless of size, carry a fee of fractions of a cent. On an average day I make 50+ payments over lightning - on aggregate the fees add up to less than $.01

what's the cost of lightning Network these days??

I like where your head's at but the fact that it's possible to do an overthrow of the system if you have 51% of the miners worries me.

> overthrow of the system if you have 51%

You may want to look into this further as it is fascinating. For example, a theoretical reorg to unspend or respend your own transaction does not allow signing transactions for others.