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.
If their vision is "applications" it feels like any price is too high. Would you sign up for hn if it cost 5 cents? Even though that is nothing in terms of money (for most of us), the friction of money actually being involved in and of itself probably makes it not worth it. Especially when its just a silly internet thing.
I think it's helpful to realize that most everything on the internet is already financialized by default. Whenever you post a comment, upvote, or "write", it costs some company somewhere an amount of money to maintain the marginal amount of server capacity required to process your request. And if you aren't paying for the product, then you are the product of course (ads).
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).
> 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
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.
Farcaster is doing it (allowing posting, upvoting etc) with a pragmatic architecture with different degrees of decentralization (identity onchain, posts on a p2p storage à la bittorrent), and it's going pretty fine... https://warpcast.com/
I'd happily pay a subscription to a closed community if I thought the value of the community was higher than the entry cost. However, I'm glad Hacker News is open and democratic.
If that was the cost of decentralization I am sure a lot of users and especially content creators would consider it. I would rather pay 5c per year on Twitter and own my social graph, rather than pay 0c and leave the platform in the hands of the highest bidder.
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.
I totally agree. The perception that, say, credit cards are fast and free is completely wrong, and based on the comfortably ignorant idea that things that only impact other people don't really exist.
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.
What parts of the world? In non developed countries bank fees are actually higher than in the West.
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.
Most major developing countries in Asia have p2p instant payments and bank accounts for free or with minimum balance requirement.
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.
Which is great when sending to someone in the same country, but we live in a globalized world.
Sending between countries (except within EU) is best done using crypto.
In many parts of the world people are basically cash-only and don't pay fees for handling money most of the time. The "unbanked". This is the market Ethereum wants to serve.
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.
> The "unbanked". This is the market Ethereum wants to serve
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.
