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Comment by unboxingelf | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin fixes this

Yea please let me pay $30 in fees for a $10 purchase instead of $0.27. Afterward I can sit in the waiting area for 45 minutes while they wait for my transaction to be finalized.

Transactions on the Lightning Network are near instant and cost about ~$0.04, or 1000x cheaper than Visa or MC.

People were so distracted by the circus that is 'crypto' that they failed to notice as the original opensource cypherpunk money has been steadily coming of age. Lightning does what these people want. The volatility spooks people but only if you have a high time preference. Best savings account on the planet + open and efficient payment network.

No, it doesn't. Transaction processors are paid by the proceeds from mining. That only lasts until the bitcoin cap is reached. Then they will start charging to process the blockchain.

  Transaction processors are paid by the proceeds from mining

The miner that wins the block gets the sum of the transaction fees and the block reward. Once all Bitcoin has been dispersed and the subsidy is done, miners only get transactions fees.

Yes, which means once block rewards are no longer subsidizing transactions, those fees will need to increase.

Agreed, besides the many other problems with PoW. What about Ethereum and the many improvements it's making to scalability?

Of course it's not solving the exact same problem (e.g. fraud protection), but it does seem like a basis for payment services which can.

Ethereum is essentially a private tech company.

Proof of Work is the innovation that solves the distributed consensus problem. It’s a feature not a bug.

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