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I know one of the goals for Lightning Network was to cut transaction fees. Did that actually work out - is it realistic to pay someone $0.05 USD-equivalent in Bitcoin using Lightning? Or do I need to use an exchange/intermediary still?

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Lightning is a bit of a difficult system to host yourself. But point is you set up something akin to a running total between you and your friends. The nice thing here is that, you only lose money when you total up at the end, like clearing all transactions and merging them into one. You are becoming your own Visa/Mastercard/ACH essentially.

You can certainly use a hosted wallet with lighting which is a sane alternative. There are still fees but only on cash ins and cash outs on the total amount tallied up between you and your friends when you chose to settle up in the form of BTC transaction fees. As far as I understand there are pretty much no transfer fees.

But I am just a novice interested in this tech. So correct me if I am wrong.

The alternative would be to use big block Bitcoin fork (like Bitcoin Cash). Last time I checked, average transaction fee is $0.008.

I personally use it sometimes to pay for some services with minimal transfer fee, but BCH can't seem to win the branding game against Bitcoin.

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