Richie..... I think to be objective, you gotta concede a bit on your rendition of the cost(s) of credit cards. We cannot calculate costs from only one side of the transaction.... Credit card transactions are generally at least 2%... and frequently closer to 5% by the time you add all the various charges on merchants.
I'll happily concede. But when someone is comparing apples to oranges, forgive me if I wax lyrical on the properties of bananas.
Quite simply, you have to look at the system, what backs it, what kind of market it is (monopolistic, oligopolistic, competetive, peer-to-peer etc) , the respective costs and so forth. What, really, is a reasonable cost to process and store 250 bytes of data? Is that not between the miner and their customer?
Here is a Bitcoin transaction to give an idea:
0100000001f07dc78617ee497ce81d9c3024ba052f532c76dea9c7cba6479fdfbf803f9d76010000006b483045022100fc5af108513379925a1925ba287659303acac924158b271dbd49d7e0e70fee11022056ac8c66cac785a6bfd08863f4b4e846995afaa55662e86ec1275aba60bdd4e50121032328833755deab07f5aeacdd6ee25f5a4c4a864d874197cf5795ed1d9f6eb1dffeffffff02304b8400000000001976a914270a5f4d1e192551ca7dcc2d97242753d54ad39a88ace060bc02000000001976a914871e8e5104fab525293068a1f399defc4a69adb488ac08070600
Expanding the topic a bit into bank transfers: In recent times, I have come across quite a few bank transfer services that are free between customers of the same bank or with minimal efforts to set up sending and/or receiving accounts. However, really, are those services free? Frequently, they can take 1-5 business days to clear, and also banks are rarely paying any meaningful interest rate on the money that they hold for you (as they had in the olden days). In this regard, banks are providing some purportedly "free" services, but they are getting use of trillions (or at least billions) of dollars without paying any interest rates.
True. I would avoid any comparison with American banks because, quite frankly, their services are crap and still rooted in the 50s and 60s of the last century.
My point is that I think that we should really consider whether a transaction is free, such as using our credit cards..... when we are comparing the current and/or upcoming costs of using bitcoin.
Yes. We should not be comparing with legacy services but with the modern, advanced systems of the world we are stepping into.