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Comment by TheJoeMan | Hacker News Reader

I think it would be neat if I could pay 1 penny to read a single HN-linked NYT or WSJ article. But the entrenched payment processors refuse to give up their 5%+25cent cut or whatever.

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The fees are closer to 3% or a bit under these days. And that's for a very robust and mature infrastructure, not just on the merchant side, but the buyer side. Credit cards do a lot more than just send payments, you get all the benefits of things like dispute resolution, rewards points and the bug/feature of spending money you don't have in hand. If you go to a fully-baked crypto payment provider like Coinbase, they still charge 1% for a far less sophisticated product. The cost of all the things that crypto doesn't do get shifted to consumers and merchants indirectly.

The mental effort to click a button to pay a penny is too high.

that would be great

It's even more expensive to use crypto. You would spend almost as much on gas/transaction fees as you would on a year's subscription.

You can check current prices here: https://l2fees.info/

Sending any amount of ETH it costs between $0.01 (on the Loopring network) and $0.46 on the Ethereum mainnet (with the most popular layer 2 network, Arbitrum, costing $0.02).

So not quite there to send 1c micropayments, especially since sending USDC would instead cost something like 2x-3x more, but not inconceivable that it might get there on newer layer 2 networks which do more aggressive batching (using proof techniques called STARKs and SNARKs).

There are some other networks, such as Solana where transactions are effectively free (though even very small fractions of a cent add up for an algorithm): https://solanabeach.io/transactions

So the defense to crypto being expensive to transact in is to...use another network on top of the crypto instead of the crypto I actually want to use.

THIS IS WHY CRYPTO DID NOT TAKE OFF. It's too complicated and expensive to use for all of the supposed use case; it's objectively worse than comparable fiat options.

I send USDC on eth pretty frequently and for larger amounts find it more convenient than Venmo or Zelle. For smaller amounts it would only make sense if other people are already using L2s, which might happen through website integrations (or not).

I agree with you that it should be solved at the protocol-level, as the BTC whitepaper describes, "for coffee" etc.

There are plenty of cryptos with focus on scaling and cheap on-chain transactions, like E-cash.

Don't forget to include the conversion fees. In the example shown in the blog post, it looks like using ETH to pay that $10 bill costs $1.63 vs. the $0.59 it would cost to use a credit card for the same transaction.

I think that's why USDC on an L2 is a better payment layer, especially if it's integrated into a payment app or a social site like Twitter

Xanadu is starting to sound more and more attractive these days

Xanadu was never real. The micropayment part was never even designed AFAIK let alone implemented.

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