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Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

I thought that the sentiment at Square was hostile to cryptocurrencies . They stopped accepting bitcoin and also patio11 was skeptical about cryptocurrencies but those views could have been his.

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patio11 works for Stripe not Square

They stopped accepting bitcoin for good reason, not hostility. Why would anyone ever want to pay in bitcoin with the massive transaction fees.

It has gotten better (I actually am of the impression that the transaction volume has gone down, and that's largely to credit for the fact that fees are back down, perhaps because of Lightning and/or Segwit; but regardless of the reason why, there is nobody left who is paying $15-30 in fees for each BTC transaction on the chain today)

This great visualization[1] showed up on my feed yesterday, you can see that most of the BTC transactions' fees are being measured in single-digit USD cents again. It compares BTC to BCH, and you have to wait a while to see what's happening, but I think it's a fairly unbiased and basically informative view of how the two on-chain transaction scaling strategies actually work.

(Spoiler: the number of BTC transactions is still massively outpacing the number of BCH transactions, in case you didn't guess that.)

[1]: https://bitcoinsubway.cash/

[edit: http_s_]

What has changed in the past 3 months? A co-worker of mine decided to throw a few bucks into the crypto craze and the fees were about the same as what he wanted to buy.

The TX (on-chain transaction) fees have absolutely changed in the last 3-6 months. Before Jan 1, the average TX fee had peaked at about $55USD. In February you could get a transaction on the chain for about $2. Since that time, they've implemented the Lightning network, which is a way to transact over a channel rather than putting every transaction on the chain. I don't know enough about that feature to explain how it works, but that should be easy enough to find information about if you're asking what technologically has changed... but in terms of raw numbers and actual prices, you can find that information too:

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

At the present time, a transaction can be reasonably assured to be mined in the next 1-6 blocks by adding a fee of $0.20 for next block (or down to $0.10 for within ~6 blocks.)

https://bitcoinfees.info/

This is not the only fee you pay when buying and selling, but it can be... exchanges like GDAX permit you to pay a fee to place a market order (buy/sell from the current limit ceiling or floor), or pay no fee to place a limit order (wait for the market price to cross your own preferred price), and those different kinds of exchanges will all have different fee structures, but most markets supporting limit orders I think should not charge fees. This kind of buy/sell fee is basically always a percent, maybe with a flat fee floor (eg. $1 min fee.)

The market order fee is really probably pretty insignificant unless you're actively trading all the time, in which case you'll definitely want to avoid paying them. On Coinbase, for example, you only buy and sell at the market price with a roughly percent-based fee structure, and the fees are low.

Ostensibly you can understand what's changed to be that, now that there are no-fee options available for high-volume traders, all of the high-volume traders are using those options so there is more room on the chain for small-time simple consumers to pay a low fee and keep things simple, doing their transaction in the traditional way. I don't want to run a Lightning node, but I can still benefit from the existence of that protocol through lower fees, because it means there's simply a lot less traffic on the chain.

I don't have numbers to back any of these assertions up about how it happened, other than the actual links I provided regarding the average fee value paid... but all of this reasoning about 'how' is hypothetical and I'm probably wrong about something.

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