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Perfect is the enemy of the great.

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.




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