pull down to refresh
Appreciate real world story like this!
The old finance system has crazy fees feeding all these middleman. To pay with a credit card, you pay the payment processor, the bank, the card issuer, and many others. Each provides some piece of the puzzle and in reality a system that provides that level of service rebuilt on Bitcoin won’t be that much cheaper. For instance, look at LN liquidity. Nobody is gonna provide that for free.
I agree that bitcoin payment services will need fees too, and the more congested the networks are the higher the fees will have to be.
I do think that the openness of the bitcoin and lightning networks will make the landscape more competitive than traditional banking, which should lead to lower fees in the equilibrium.
Our church pays a lot of fees for financial services. People who donate by credit card are charged a 30 cent + 2.9% processing fee. Same for when we sell tickets to events. In addition, in order to handle reimbursements to volunteers purchasing things on behalf of the church, we use a financial platform that charges $1 per reimbursement transaction.
We willingly pay all these things because the digitization of payments simplifies our financial management enormously. But if we could have natively digital payments at lower fees, that would save us a lot of money. Lightning network would enable that. But because Bitcoin is so niche, it's obviously not a workable solution right now.
But I'm just saying... I do think there is a real use case for Bitcoin and LN... it's just got the whole chicken and egg adoption problem to wrestle with first.