Wow, did gas fees drop to $0!? That's huge news, I'm surprised the media hasn't reported on it!

Right now the average on-chain Bitcoin payment for $0.94 USD. I bought a conference ticket a couple weeks ago from someone in Thailand for $0.24 USD. One confirmation took 6 minutes. This isn’t a Lightning payment which would be nearly instant and almost free. It is a payment on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Remember, that payment includes final settlement, something that can take months for a credit card merchant.

Also, there are many other Proof-of-stake chains that offer faster and cheaper settlement.

$0.24 > $0.00, though. And:

> something that can take months for a credit card merchant

OK, instant closing is desirable for sellers - but why would a consumer care?

Whether consumers realize it or not, the risk of chargebacks does increase the cost to the merchants which they absolutely pass onto consumers in the form of higher prices.

And those merchants will still charge those higher prices no matter what method you're using to pay, unless they only accept crypto. So by paying with crypto you're paying an artificially-higher price _and_ paying gas fees.

That's quite a high fee for zero fraud protection.

PayPal is around 2-3%, credit/debit around 0.5-5% depending on where and whether you have a physical card reader. ACH is, to my understanding, cents or even less than one, but suffering from an utter lack of security/authentication.

Meanwhile, in the Eurozone, electronic cash and wire transfers have had fees of exactly €0.00 for many years, and my online-only bank does “instant” transfers (takes a few seconds but that’s mostly the app latency) up to €2000 for the same price.

The transaction-cost problem has many possible solutions.

CashApp/Venmo is free from the perspective of the average American if they have a debit card. (They make money off data and credit card fees).

Last I looked, they did not seem to be free for commercial use (including cases with just B2C transactions).

I see these as worse, because they suggest to the average consumer American that sending money is free, reducing pressure on a proper low-delay settlement system with sufficiently low fees to allow users to ignore the fees in most instances. Say, 1ct + 0.05%. (That's AFAIK comparable to SEPA's version of electronic checks (i.e., asynchronous pull), and fees for low-latency push shouldn't exceed 0.2%, either. With delayed settlement, even push should allow the very low fees, though.)

Correction: They make money by selling your transaction data to hedge funds and advertisers for profiling and targeting.

As I said, data and credit card fees.