Topic: The average joe would never accept bitcoin as means of payment due to tx fees - page 6. (Read 1485 times)

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.

I don't think Bitcoin transaction fees are hard to bear compared to the convenience that it could provide. Transaction fees in any form of payment are necessary even with banks. Bitcoin provides anonymity that no other mode of payment can do so its transaction fees are justifiable. Also, the tx fees nowadays aren't that high so it isn't a burden for most of the users.

Indeed, that's why I mentioned that card transaction fees don't burden the consumer directly. Vendors pay an approximate 1.5 - 2% fee per card transaction, which has been factored into the consumer of course. Vendors take into account such costs when they create their pricing policy, however they are not directly visible to the consumer.

For the love of all that is holy, if you use the lightning network and compare that to your regular joe's bank fees, you will realize that its the bank thats demanding the higher fees not Bitcoin. Furthermore, Joe has absolutely no control over his bank account and he is at the mercy of the government and the bank. Freezing accounts, forcefully withholding money, demanding arbitrary fees for the simple act of holding on to his fiat, which is becoming more and more worthless over time as the government just prints more and more as much as they want.

You really do not see how average Joe might prefer Bitcoin? Because everyone here on this forum definitely does.

Reimbursement of lost/stolen funds isn't a point that should incentivise people to use fiat/whatever payment method there is. It is a stupid excuse for people to have and it acts too much like a safety net that people can rely on. That shouldn't be the case, each individual is responsible for their own funds and in no circumstances should anyone be babysitting you or reversing your transactions at will. Coincidentally, payment methods like those also highlights the flaw with certain transactions that deals with intangible items, and resulting in a hard to proof scenario.

The main problem isn't the fees, it is the scalability and the transaction settlement. On-chain transactions cannot scale nor can it be faster than traditional payment methods. You are bound to face certain instances where you find the transaction fees surging after you send the transaction, and you end up waiting a ridiculous amount of time and spending more time trying to RBF it.

I agree, LN is not a solution. It merely alleviates the problem to a certain extent because you would still eventually be bounded by on-chain capacity when it gets large enough.

Bitcoin was not created for those who are afraid of new challenges and for those who are blind followers of a system that keeps them on a short leash. Also, Bitcoin is not the ultimate solution to all our problems, but only an alternative for people who are able to be their own bank and accept all the risks that come with such responsibility.

Fees are never too high if you understand what input, output, transaction size, and mempool mean - I agree that the average Joe doesn't want to understand that, but Bitcoin is still for those who use a little more brain than the average Joe who has a plastic card and PIN and is incapable for nothing more than that.


For some, Bitcoin is nothing more than that - but everyone has the right to interpret it in their own way. Find out what the director of the ECB thinks about Bitcoin, and what the governor of the Bank of England or maybe the famous Warren Buffett thinks? Should they determine our destiny or maybe it’s time to start thinking with our heads?

You must be young, as in below 40 years old.
I'm 54 y/o and when I was a kid there were no bank cards, no PayPay, no banking machines, and credit cards were for the rich. I would say that 90% of all transactions were done with cash, 5% were done with cheques, and less than 5% with credit cards.
Now, with the 90% done with cash, there was no such this as "consumer protection". Once you paid for your coffee, the deal was done, you couldn't reverse your transaction.

And at the time, there was very little fraud. Most of the fraud was done with cheques and counterfeit fiat.

Today credit card fraud, bank fraud, and banking card fraud are big business. Nobody robs a bank at gunpoint anymore, they rob the bank at mouse cursor point now. And it's a far bigger problem than most people imagine.

The problem is that you no longer walk around with a few $20 bills in your wallet. Now you walk around with the keys to your entire bank account on your phone or plastic card. That has caused a great deal of fraud.

People just have to relearn how money is supposed to work, like it did 40 years ago.

Money is supposed to be a store of value. It's not supposed to be a store of value you can manipulate or take back any time you want.

You just have to learn to be responsible with your money. You have no idea the cost of accepting payments that can be reversed for businesses.
Most businesses prefer cash over digital payments because the digital payments always comes with strings attached and fees. That gets baked into the price of everything you buy.

And you haven't looked very well into LN. It is far more private than any credit card payment you could ever think of.

You could be right and we can also look at its volatility that will also stop some from accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment. Who wants to accept a certain amount only to fall in value in the next hours? However, I believe the market's varying times might spell different for Bitcoins acceptance as a means of payment since, during some times, it could be profitable to accept Bitcoin cos it will just increase in price. 

DO YOUR RESEARCH

1. LN is not bitcoin. this topic is about bitcoin.. THE BITCOIN NETWORK and its fee's
please stop trying to advertise other networks.

2. EL salv' used a chivo wallet that was not bitcoin, the balance screen was measured in dollar not btc. . it allowed them to convert, but most payments were done within the chivo wallet system.. NOT BITCOIN and not LN

3. when el salv users using LN for 'payments' (as an option) they found using LN to be a failure with many payments failing and lots of liquidity problems with their exit hubs

4. el salv' actually dropped its lightning support many months ago. they now use a custodial service, because they seen first hand how many bugs, flaws and issues LN has

yep they now use alphapoint, a custodial service much like coinbase which handles merchant shopping cart tool, exchange and custodial wallets.

so please stop holding onto the utopian dream of LN being the answer..el salv tried it and dropped it in months.
LN is not the solution.
LN actually causes more headaches and issues for people. and the promise of cheap fee's is a lie if you do the maths of adding up all the micro fee's of the many hops needed per payment. aswell as how much value is locked up from use to open/close sessions, along with having your liquidity raided by other 'routers' using your balance before you can.

LN is not the solution
DO YOUR RESEARCH


to even be able to route. you, the nodes on the route and even the destination actually need to make all make their nodes and channels public, available and online. just to make a payment
 
yep.
there is even a LN statistic/explorer website that can tell you the identity of many merchants.. im sure you know it. so dont pretend you dont

ill give you a hint without linking it directly.. it sounds like 'wonemel'
1ml  .. but personally with all the boys club ass kissing and hugging each other i hear it more like 'wanna male?'

Bank fees are way higher than LN fees, it's just that typically merchants pay them, so customers don't notice it, because it gets priced into the goods. Idk what you mean by LN exposing merchant id, sounds like you are misinformed.

The bigger reason why Bitcoin is not adopted for payments is its volatility, it's frustrating to use a currency that changes its value every week.

For small transactions you may be right, but it's used internationally more than you might think. There's a disappointingly small amount of development in regards to making bitcoin easier and faster to use for everyday transactions.

The average fee is meaningless, because many exchanges and other centralized services which account for a large proportion of all transactions use unnecessary high fee rates at all times. The average fee I use, and I spend bitcoin far more frequently than most, is around 5 cents, not 50.

Then either the store owner accepts zero confirmation transactions or they accept Lightning.

Vendors don't just eat those fees though. They are priced in to everything you buy. You, the consumer, pays them, you just don't realize it.

I would challenge you to go and make a non-RBF 1 sat/vbyte transaction right now and then try to reverse it. I am certain that you will find it near impossible. It is certainly orders of magnitude more difficult than reversing a credit card transaction, which can be done with a simple phone call at any point in the next 6 months.

And don't forget all the other bank fees and issues.

With cash you not only have to worry about out and out theft but also counterfeit bills and honest mistakes of wrong change amounts given.
More and more banks are charging fees to smaller businesses for certain types of transactions. Night deposit? Fee every month. Want a standing order for your opening cash in the morning? Fee every month. And so on. Do you think your or your employees time to count out the cash is free?

CCs have their own issues.

BTC is not perfect, but you can work with one of many payment processors, who for the most part take a smaller fee then CC processors, and you don't have to worry about anything and your fiat is transferred to your account daily, or however often you want it to be.

-Dave

No, the point is the likelihood. Everything's possible to happen. The entire game theory can be proved wrong. Everyone can reverse transactions and destroy bitcoin. What matters is that it's highly unlikely, because everyone's discouraged from doing it.

I've never had any transaction with 1 sat/vbyte reversed. The longest I've waited is 1 week. Even if they do, which I find unlikely, they shouldn't revisit the same store. The reversal is, also, down to the merchant. If the merchant pays the parent, as I've said, your friends will normally have their transactions confirmed.

Its not the point that it is unlikely to happen, but that it can possibly happen. For example I can see many people go shopping and just use a fee of 1,01 Sats vBite and get the transaction refunded after a few days without any effort.

It's possible to reverse an unconfirmed transaction, but much harder if it doesn't have opted-in RBF. Same can be said for a transaction with 1 confirmation. It's just very unlikely to be reversed.

If it has RBF disabled, then it'll be rejected from the overwhelming majority of nodes. You can bribe a miner do this for you, but still, it's not worth it. You'll have to pay the pool a decent amount and it's significantly uncertain. Since most pools will have the first transaction, it has more chances to be confirmed. And all this hustle and bustle for what? A hundred dollar bill in the supermarket?

Besides, credit card transactions are also reversible within the next few months. Remember, trust comes with a cost.

Somehow transaction fees have been miraculously okay for almost a year now. Sure, sometimes they were higher than one would wish, but most of the time the fee is below $2, which is quite acceptable. Of course, if we're talking about paying for coffee, and then $1.5 of fees, it's not good. But if it's a solid purchase, such as groceries for a few days or a monthly pass for transport, or utility bills, the fees are, IMO, very acceptable. The problem might be with waiting if 0-confirmation transactions don't get accepted. But realistically, to pay for things that require fast processing of a transaction (in a physical shop or at a train station), custodial wallets or something like the LN would be needed.
But of course, for countries where many live in poverty, even $1.5 is significant and unacceptable as a fee. So yeah, it's not for everyone and not for every place.