Still think the benefit of sending something over such a secure network is well worth the cost. Was hardly ever my issue anyway, LN or my debit card should cover my pizza spends...
The question, how do you load your LN wallet? And how much money sent to your LN wallet at a time?
Do you think it makes sense, sending $200 and paying $50 in fees?
LN does not solve the problem of super high fees on mainnet. It can facilitate commerce, by having lower fees and faster transactions. But the movement of money between layer 1 and layer 2 continues to have high fees. And in this sense, it continues to be of little interest for the true use of the network.
I don't =) Like I said, LN or debit card, and debit card is now how I pay for food buys. It was expensive even in normal times on chain (because the processor*cough*Bitpay*cough forces you to overkill on network fees). I've simply stopped using Bitcoin for those buys. Hasn't changed other deposit/sending habits, so I don't see that "true" use being harmed.
There's also the time, convenience, KYC, cost factored. The certainty of sending. These true nature things don't change. Just in September, a client asked for a bank transfer instead of crypto. One off. The transaction went through on my end, not on hers. Two weeks of confusion, calls, wondering where the hell the money went, finally to conclude a clerk in her branch rejected the amount because of wrong spelling of currency. This is 2023, but I wasn't shocked. I have 15 years of remote and distance work across multiple countries to know how difficult it can be to transmit money!
Bitcoin's true nature in a nutshell: if we follow the rules, I send something to you, I say exactly how much you get, I say exactly the fees I pay, you know exactly how much you get, you know for certain you'll get it, you know no one else will, you know it will never be revoked. People don't understand how precious this certainty and finality of settlement is... until you live and work all over the world (and have a not-so-desirable passport).
I'd happily pay these onchain settlement fees if I needed to maintain a node though, if most businesses knew the cost comparison with regular processor and all traffic uses Bitcoin, they'd move too.
But you guys talk about the same thing, you say that the only annoying thing is the relation between the sats paid in fees and the size of the tx, but being angry about paying
- 1 mbtc for 2 mbtc
is no different than saying
- $40 for a $80 transfer
It makes a difference to talk about percentage, not raw cost.
So yes, I'm not angry paying 1 mbtc for 100 mbtc, or $37 for $3700 (let's put it like that). Because to send the same $3700 with PayPal costs me 4% fees + bad rate. A bank costs me a flat fee but very poor rate. A remittance costs me 1.5% at great rate.
So to make my point clear, it's not the dollar value, but the percentage cost.
Besides I really doubt too many would know to say in a split second if paying 17295 satoshi for a transaction for example is expensive or not without doing the math in $.
Actually, when people complain about the cost, they usually convert the fee amount to dollar, precisely why they then conclude expensive or not. But it's not meaningful without comparing percentage cost.
I agree it's expensive now to do small purchases/sends. I now keep mt spends to debit card. But my regular remittances/big purchases/deposits still far cheaper with BTC.