Topic: The average joe would never accept bitcoin as means of payment due to tx fees - page 5. (Read 1372 times)

Are you old enough to remember when credit cards were in their infancy?
Only the well to do had credit cards. And if you had Visa while the merchant only accepted MasterCard, you were out of luck unless you also carried cash at all times. In fact everyone carried cash at all times, even those with a credit card because they knew they could not depend on it.

And if you were lucky enough to find a merchant who accepts your brand of credit card, you would have to show ID to make sure you are the holder of the card. Than it would be put in a card scrapper where the card would be scrapped to produce 3 carbon copies. And those had to be filled manually with items bought, price, taxes, and total. Than you had to sign it.
You kept a copy, the store kept a copy, and the 3rd one would be sent to the credit card company.

It was a lengthy and tidious process. Expensive too. Not something the common man would use.

If you had told me 50 years ago that even students will use credit cards in the future to buy a coffee, I would have called you a nut job. Nobody is going to fill out a triplicate carbon copy to buy a coffee. Are you insane? Do you really think you will have to run around town to look for that one coffee shop that accepts your brand credit card? You think shops will all accept to fill out tons of paperwork for every coffee they sell?

So all those who tell me Bitcoin is not a viable payment system, you sound a lot like the naysayers 50 years ago.

I imagine in the future it will look like this: you have your wallet and your LN node running on your phone. When you want to pay for something, you just tap your phone or flash the QR code. Your phone will automatically decide if it should be an on chain payment or LN, or something else we come up with in the future. It will automatically adjust miner fee, rebalance your LN channels, and send the payment.

So you have BTC and the coffee shop only accepts Monero or fiat? No problems. LN just does an atomic swap from your BTC to whatever the shop takes. All done for under a penny.

Most people won't even know the difference between LN and on chain payments. It's all done in the background by your wallet. Just like most people who use email don't even know what a POP server eats during mating season.

Actually, there's no property confiscation risk with bitcoin, in contrary with gold, houses, cash. If you've taken the steps to secure your coins and don't have your seed phrase lying around, nobody can steal them from you - without your permission. Write the seed phrase in bunch of pieces of paper, hide it under the ground, inside your walls, into your books, etc; it's a matter of creativity after a certain point.

Freedom of choice is the most important thing in my opinion, and people are so deep in the mud of centralization that they no longer want to think that there is an alternative. However, people are completely wrong if they think that Bitcoin can become something that will interest a significant percentage of people in such a short time - changes will take decades if they happen at all.

The average Joe is not at all interested in Bitcoin, and far from being bothered by some fee he doesn't even know exists. When I came to this forum in 2015 it was said that Bitcoin is used in some way or owned by 1-2% of the total population, and today it is maybe 5% (although some claim it is much more). So I don’t think the problem is how Bitcoin works, but how people think about it.

Yeah, the payment processosrs like western union or paypal charge much more fee as compare to the bitcoin transaction fee. Secondly with the implementtion of lightening network, both the speed and fee of the bitcoin transaction fee  will be reduced to a good extent. Bitcoin payment has so many advantages that people will prefer it over the fiat currecny. It's just a matter of adaoption before we see this change.

Maybe it is time for people to assume their wrongdoings instead of blaming a decentralized system for not helping them out.  If we want something decentralized, there is really no way we can have reimbursements or some kind of 'I lost my password' recovery.

I rather believe there is still a lot of time Bitcoin needs before it can become an understood system in the average Joe's mind.  The newborns of today will understand Bitcoin so much easier than we did.  The newer generations there are, the easier advanced technology is for them to understand.  Only recently did 2FA and encryption become a more widely used thing, and most humans still have no idea why and how that works.

I get what you mean.  But maybe we have to understand one particular thing.  This is how I see it.  When you are on your own, you have to pay the price to continue being on your own.

Take a bank safe for example.  A bank safe is the easy way out.  You just pay a fee and they take maximum care of your stuff.  If you want to store your stuff with the same security in your own home, you have to pay a price for it.  You have to dig holes, buy safes, create a properly hidden environment with the proper storage conditions et cetera.

Same with Bitcoin.  You are your own bank, so you have to pay a price for that.  You pay a few cents or dollars in fees, but at the end of the day look.  You can have one million moving around and no bank will ask why, where, what and who for.  You can have multiple wallets without having to sign agreements.  You can do whatever, you are now on your own.

And that is really not a bad thing.  I think we are very close to defining what Bitcoin actually is.  A payment system?  A store of value?  Or maybe a combination of both.  You can see there is a pretty long list of merchants accepting Bitcoin payments, so the beauty of it all is that even as a store of value, you can still use it as a payment system as well.

You can not do that with Gold.  I mean you can, are Gold coins with tender value not accepted in the USA?  They are, if you want to give one ounce of gold in exchange for a one or five dollar item.  To make both equal, we would have to have merchants accepting grams of Gold for payment and, since Gold is not as easily divisible as Bitcoin is, they would have to give you back change in grams of Gold.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

Much as I detest that, it's true.

Even my preference for a direct and on-chain settlement is an outlier. If I actually did get to the point where I'm transacting daily, replacing current methods like inter-bank network or visa, I'd really like it to be simpler, dumbed-down fee payment.

I don't mind checking up on fees to find the efficient cost-speed ratio but I accept it's time-consuming and only for non-urgent transactions. I will pay the required fee, even a bit more, just to ensure next-block confirmation, and that, while "affordable" is more fees than I pay for other methods.

And I do remember coming from where I do (Southeast Asia), even if the fee is small, you'll always choose the fee-free option at some inconvenience.

I suppose LN-apps is the future. Scan, pay, fuss free. And I think guys like Synonym might be on to something.

That is EXACTLY RIGHT. You win the internet today, my friend.
If having bankers and bureaucrats control your every financial move all for the promised of safety and protection, Bitcoin is not for you. Pay your taxes, make sure all your transactions are approved, tracked, documented, and googlelized.
Freedom is not for pussies and mommiesboyz.

Yes I completely agree with you . But who told you that Bitcoins should be used as a payment method?
We trade Bitcoins and hence treat it as a digital asset.
Yes it’s not limited to asset only, we have the feasibility to use it as a payment method also.
But now it completely depends on individuals and varies from users to users.
I too don’t like to use Bitcoins to buy groceries from my local supermarket, as who will spend the extra transaction fees(though it is very less).
Also rather spending the Bitcoins, if I manage to hold it for more time then I might get more profit while selling it.
So yes we shouldn’t use it as a local means of payment.

What OP said is a part. People are much connected with making budget for the month's spending. A separate column gets added when paid with bitcoin to mention the transaction fee. From a common man's view, he/she will surely think twice before spending when there is access to spend free as well as cashbacks. How far this works isn't known, but in each and everything something return is assured though the mentioned things will be useless.

And during the very rare times where the minimum fee was 200 sats/vbyte then you wouldn't even be able to broadcast a 1 sat/vbyte transaction because it wouldn't be relayed. You would instead be forced to use a much higher fee that would ensure your transaction isn't immediately dropped. And in these very rare times, then the merchant can just refuse to accept transaction with low fees. There are plenty of payment processors out there which already give you a minimum fee rate for your non-RBF transaction to be accepted with zero confirmations. If you pay above this rate, then it is essentially impossible for your transaction be replaced/cancelled/double spent, and so the merchant will accept it with zero confirmations. If you don't mind wanting, you can pay below this rate but the merchant will wait for 1 or more confirmations. Simple.

And if that still isn't good enough for you, then just open a Lightning channel with a fee rate of 1 sat/vbyte when the mempool allows.

NO IT DOES NOT SOLVE IT
DO THE MATH

first of all..
LN fee's are not cheap.

when someone has a channel balance liquidity of say $100. and knows the fee is $1 to close the channel and $1 to open it to 'rebalance' he is going to math out the fee being $2. or 2% of balance

meaning yes if you are only using up $5 of the $100 balance your payment fee is going to be 2% of $5. which is 25cents.
(please read on, the story is not over.)


but if you are going to want to do a payment of $50 then you are using up 50% of the liquidity meaning they will charge you 2% of $50 which is $1
(please read on, the story is not over.)

.. then you have to realise that a $5 payment is only 25cent fee or a $50 payment is only $1 fee IF you only want to make a payment 1x'hop' away
because, the thing you forget and all LN fangirls do not like to reveal is that you have to pay a fee to EACH 'hop' along a route.
(here is the part the LN fangirls never tell you when they read you their story)

so if you are moving 10 hops to get to a destination. thats 9 payment fee's .. which soon add up
9X25c or 9x$1.. do the math

now have a nice day doing some actual math and not waste your time on utopian dreams of pretend cheapness that you have not actually thought of independently

please do your research, LN is not as cheap as you think unless you are only doing very small purchases and only using route with very large liquidity. and only to a channel partner. not a distant user many channel hops away
(in short its only cheap when very few are using it to fight over liquidity and not need to have lots of 'hops' to travel through to reach certain destinations and not need to dilute/spread their value into separate channels)

now go open excel, and run some scenarios. not on dreamed up best case utopia. but on realistic use-cases.

The Coinbase solution works until coinbase decides that it doesn't work anymore. For me you could use paypal instead I don't see the benefits of coinbase then.

As Elon Musk has stated a number of times already, this is where he feels 3rd party solutions will takeover.  For example, many vendors today use Coinbase to accept payments.  You can log into your Coinbase account, finish their invoice, and you have 0 fees with an instant payment.  Sure, this isn't exactly how Bitcoin should be used, but it is the custodial solution that gives people what they want.  Those who are more versed with crypto can use other solutions that offer more privacy and security, but for a majority of people, a service like Coinbase payments is what they are looking for to use their Bitcoin.

Every technology when new has high cost, the simple reason of high cost is  non viable or high operational  costs. But with mass adoption operational costs come down. ANd little Joes adopt the most premium material the last and this is the reason why they remain averege

I agree. But the reason why people think otherwise is because a large portion of the population never really used cash in their lives. They have lived their entire life with the bank's safety net under them to baby them.
If your bank can reverse your transactions, or block them from every occurring, that's not a feature, it's a bug. And a very bad one too.
Unfortunately we have on our hands an entire generation completely unable to assume their own responsibilities because they have never been given financial freedom.
Freedom comes with responsibility over your own life. Sadly, most people nowadays don't understand that and they have a warped view of what freedom is.

Right now the network is empty and it would not easily possible. In times where the price was high you had to pay 200+ sats per vBite to get instant confirmation and a 1 Sat vBite transaction would be refunded in 99% of the cases.

Lightning Network solves this, right now the fees are nothing for the security it provides. We lose 10% each year due to inflation anyway so a $1-2 fee on a tx is negligible.

You haven't made the math on this.
Right now the Bitcoin blockchain can only process 7 or 8 transactions per second at the very most. In reality, it's closer to a maximum of 5 or 6.
That's not enough to serve a small city of less than 1 million people, much less a large city like LA or Paris. And don't even mention a whole country or the world.
Bitcoin needs to scale, by an order of magnitudes, even with LN in tow.

I do think in the next 10 years an other fork will need to happen to increase block size. There is no way around that. 1mb doesn't mean today what it meant 13 years ago.

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This reminds me of some guy on Quora who postulates as some sort of crypto expert. Everything he posts is about crypto and he is doling out "crypto investment advises" by the truckload.

He said 2 years ago when BTC was below $10k that the network can't handle the load and at it reaches $40k it will likely collapse due to ridiculously high miner fees.

Small minds can't see big things.

First of all you can adjust the fee level and it’s not that expensive. Things will only get better over time and to completely rule out lightning network already is foolish.

Also your comparison of saying people in poor countries use cash with no extra fees is misguided. Many people in those countries can’t trust their government or banks or possibly even able to open bank accounts due to poor credit standing. Also fiat carries the risk of high inflation which essentially is a fee.

To be fair here, very few people in El Salvador uses Bitcoin. It's used in touristic places, but not really at all anywhere else.
I think it will be gradual. But I'm cool with that.

The world is not ready for Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is not ready for the world either.