5 cents per transaction is high for many parts of the world, and exceptionally high if every interaction in normal life is turned into a financial transaction.
> the friction of money actually being involved ... makes it not worth it
This is it. There are very few people who live for this level of financialisation.
So blockchains don't necessarily financialize things that aren't already financialized, they just tend to make money flow in a more direct way from a group of people using a service to a group of people hosting/providing it. Instead of paying using a micropayment of attention that gets monetized through a complex and often bespoke advertising arrangement, you can pay using a micropayment of a recognizable asset that has actual market value.
Personally, if I could click a single Apple-pay-like button in my browser to attach say 0.5 cents of postage to this Hacker News comment to get it to post, I doubt I would think twice about it. In fact, I would probably participate more confidently knowing it's a deterrent for bots (less of a problem for Hacker News, but a huge problem on Reddit and Xitter).
I suppose there is a certain sense that transaction fees go to people providing services to the blockchain... but i would mostly describe it as paying rent and not actually paying the person responsible for the service.
Credit card users pay $1+ fees per transaction all the time. They don’t complain only because vendors usually eat the fees on their behalf to obscure the issue.
I have a “2% cash back on everything” card which I know is actually a “we charged your vendor 4% and shared half of that with people like you who clicked the right button” card. I don’t like it. But, that’s the game.
People complain about the impossibility of crypto having fees of pennies with settlement times of minutes while constantly using credit cards that have fees of dollars with a settlement time of days.
If there's one useful thing to take from it, it's that I think it does usefully highlight just how critical that perception is for adoption -- specifically, how thoroughly it dominates technical concerns like throughput and latency. Perhaps if shop owners were prepared to eat the bitcoin transaction fee the same way they eat the credit card fee, bitcoin might have a resurgence as a cash alternative. There would still be the transaction speed issue -- I think it would require a third party to step in to provide merchants with guarantees (in exchange for a fee), so that the merchant wouldn't have to wait for the transaction to go through. But that's not a tech problem -- it's the same problem that credit cards already have, and have already solved.
In Bosnia a most basic bank account costs about $3 per month, or 60 Ethereum transactions (most people usually have 10 - 20 transaction per month). For paying bills banks usually charge a commission fee of 1%. And if you want to send money to someone 50 kms away but across the border the fee is $20 with few days wait for money to be received.
Also I'd challenge 10-20 transactions per month. I think in many near cash-less societies it might be closer to 5 per day.
M-Pesa got there first, and without the taint of cryptocurrency. It's a real, deployed, working system at scale, and has been for years. The idea that a "hope to serve" after a bit more crypto tech innovation will open an untapped market ... well, I wouldn't take it seriously. It's wishful thinking at both ends of the supply and demand equation.
My budget is $20 dollars a day.
Lmao people are so out of touch with reality.
5 transactions a day? For what? Honestly can I get off this train.
UPI (Indian market) launched cross border support with a couple countries starting this year. 118 billion transactions happen via UPI annually.
I do think there is some niche market where ethereum payments will shine but hard to beat free and instant systems already in place at far bigger scale.