Hi all,
doing an assignment for school and I would like to find information on if and if so why it is cheaper to pay with bitcoin instead of a debitcard or a creditcard when purchasing something online or with a debitcard even in a physical location. I would like to find numbers on the costs involved in these payments?
Thx a lot
http://blockchain.info/stats has the numbers you want. The cost per transaction at present is about US$ 30 and the average transaction size in dollar terms is about US$ 1,300, so as a percentage, the cost per transaction is just over 2%. This is somewhat less than the cost of credit card transactions, for which merchants pay ~ 3% or more, depending on the card.
Note that this is
not the fee because it is not paid for by the people doing the transfer. Instead it is paid for by inflation (new bitcoins earned by the miners who process transactions), which means in effect that all holders of bitcoin are paying the cost of all transactions on the network in proportion to their bitcoin holdings. At present, the bitcoin rate of inflation is about 11% (ignore all the nonsense you read about bitcoin being a deflationary currency - it is nothing of the sort). So all things being equal, all holders of bitcoin will experience a devaluation of their holdings by 11% per year to pay for transactions made during that year.
At present direct transaction fees are minimal (a fraction of a percent) but this will have to change over time as bitcoin inflation falls (it halves every four years) so that miners will increasingly come to rely on transaction fees. Nobody knows what level transaction fees will be in the future or how they will be charged (this is a huge topic of research), but ultimately somebody has to pay for the costs of the network. There's no such thing as a free lunch (except maybe POS, but that's another story ....)