Hacker News Reader

Comment by klntsky | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen the fees on ethereum L2s? Your opinion may be slightly outdated, I wouldn't consider a single digit number of cents a large fee

View on HN

Single digit cents is not a large fee, but blockchain fees are dynamic. And the more traffic, the more expensive. I would not appreciate if that 2.6 cents suddenly became $2.60. Also the maximum number of transactions for Bitcoin (not sure etherium) is about 10/s. Processors like Visa and MasterCard process thousands of transactions per second. And if every article read is another transaction that would need at least 1-2 orders of magnitude more transactions. The way I see it, blockchain is a broken model for micro payments. If I am missing something, please let me know.

Yes. Solana has been sub-cent for it's entire lifespan. So have other blockchains. They're not going to ever be above a cent by design.

Yes you missed something: He talked about L2, which is a general term for "layer 2" networks that work on top of the blockchain.

For example for Bitcoin there's the Lightning network as L2, where you do one transaction to open the channel, and one to close it, and channels can remain open for months. Payments are routed through a network of channels, so you only need one or a few channels to other nodes and can reach all nodes in the network.

The transactions are much cheaper in this network precisely because they're not on chain, but it's still secure because each L2 transaction leads to a signed (but not published) blockchain transaction that each party of the channel can choose to publish at any time (and close the channel).

There's a bit more to it, and I recommend anyone who isn't aware of L2 networks to look into it.

I buy a magazine where $3 gets you 114 short articles, each about 1/3rd of a page. So I'm paying 2.6¢ per article, if I read every single one.

Some people dream of 'micropayments' at a similar price point. Being able to buy a single article for about 2.6¢.

And that's probably around the price point that people mean by micropayments. It's not $1 per article. And that's probably an exhausting amount of mental transaction costs as Clay Shirky observed ages ago and probably not a sustainable revenue stream for producers.

For consumers, a subscription model seems to fit the bill for most people but some media are apparently better suited than others.

True, but that’s made possible by the aggregator (the publisher who’s printed the magazine)

This dream of eliminating that middle-person is still a dream.

My dream is for ~5c micropayments, where the money goes either goes to the publisher or a charity depending on if I liked it after the fact. Basically fighting low quality clickbait without the publisher being able to tell which I specifically did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com