[Mahn]

Key quote from the article:

> Many have argued that the lack of large-scale applications for the past ten years proves that crypto is useless. I have always argued against this: pretty much every crypto application that is not financial speculation depends on low fees - and so while we have high fees, we should not be surprised that we mainly see financial speculation!

> Now that we have blobs, this key constraint that has been holding us back all this time is starting to melt away. Fees are finally much lower; my statement from seven years ago that the internet of money should not cost more than five cents per transaction is finally coming true.

---

All of this depends on so called "Layer 2s", which adds a great deal of UX complexity to the end user. I'm skeptical that this is best way to solve the scalability issues that plague cryptocurrency, but I will say that this looks to me like it has a much better shot of succeeding that anything Bitcoin has ever attempted to do on this front.

[danpalmer]

5 cents per transaction is high for many parts of the world, and exceptionally high if every interaction in normal life is turned into a financial transaction.

[bawolff]

If their vision is "applications" it feels like any price is too high. Would you sign up for hn if it cost 5 cents? Even though that is nothing in terms of money (for most of us), the friction of money actually being involved in and of itself probably makes it not worth it. Especially when its just a silly internet thing.

[chrisco255]

It's really not, especially if you want to transact in USD and your native currency is not USD, you regularly will pay a 5-10% or more conversion fee.

[kinakomochidayo]

It'll come down even more as blobs are increased, and PeerDAS is implemented

[mindcandy]

Perfect is the enemy of the great.

Credit card users pay $1+ fees per transaction all the time. They don’t complain only because vendors usually eat the fees on their behalf to obscure the issue.

I have a “2% cash back on everything” card which I know is actually a “we charged your vendor 4% and shared half of that with people like you who clicked the right button” card. I don’t like it. But, that’s the game.

People complain about the impossibility of crypto having fees of pennies with settlement times of minutes while constantly using credit cards that have fees of dollars with a settlement time of days.

[medo-bear]

What parts of the world? In non developed countries bank fees are actually higher than in the West.

In Bosnia a most basic bank account costs about $3 per month, or 60 Ethereum transactions (most people usually have 10 - 20 transaction per month). For paying bills banks usually charge a commission fee of 1%. And if you want to send money to someone 50 kms away but across the border the fee is $20 with few days wait for money to be received.

[dylkil]

> which adds a great deal of UX complexity to the end user

Not exactly, L2s are being abstracted away, end users eventually wont even be aware what chain they are interacting with without tracing the tx

[ASinclair]

If you don’t know which chain you’re interacting with how can you trust your transactions are secured by a chain at all?

[AlienRobot]

>adds a great deal of UX complexity to the end user

Considering there are people who don't understand the bitcoins aren't INSIDE a physical wallet, that ship has sailed and made a revolution or two already.

[mteam88]

L2s do not fundamentally add any significant UX complexity.

There are some wallets that make this a pain (Metamask) but newer wallets like Rabby (https://rabby.io) and Rainbow are huge improvements.

[tootie]

In the many, many years they have spent building a pile of gibberish tech, traditional finance has begun transitioning to T-0 settlement on centralized platforms. FedNow is going to replace ACH and wires and allow 24/7 real-time transactions.

[chrisco255]

It hasn't at all. If you try to transfer money internationally, you will still pay huge fees and it will take sometimes days to settle. Crypto is truly international, and ERC20s like USDC remain fully programmable in a way that cash will never be. It makes things like permissionless 24/7 exchanges (see Uniswap) possible. Which is more than just point to point or account to account transfers. It's an exchange from one asset to another controlled completely by an automated market making algorithm. You cannot find that in trad fi.

[DennisP]

Let me know when FedNow allows me to deploy a smart contract that moves dollars around according to whatever business rules I like.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> FedNow is going to allow 24/7 real-time transactions.

Following in the steps of what EU and UK did few years ago. (1)

And which always made this cryptocurrency fast settlement stuff sound laughable - like they're describing just what a regular bank account does, and it's supposedly their special magic, so what?

People need to look outside of the USA to understand the state of the art.

You can even find these systems in Africa already (2)

1) https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_pa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments

2) https://www.mfw4a.org/news/instant-payment-transactions-afri...