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Comment by cmcaleer | Hacker News Reader

> what exactly is left to keep anyone a “huge believer”?

I don't really engage in the ponzibucks part and don't touch exchanges except to on and off-ramp, and use crypto to pay for things like hosting, seedboxes, or other services I might not necessarily want my debit card directly attached to.

I like sending vendors $100 and spending $0.00005 in transaction fees and knowing that they'll get $100 (or $99 with some 3rd party integration like Coinbase Commerce) versus spending $100, of which Stripe gets $5 of and the vendor only sees ~$95 if I don't feel like I need the protections of a card, which is frequent but not all the time.

Crypto fits a niche in my life well, despite the wider crypto world having dumb controversies. Just like my HSBC bank account fits a niche well, despite HSBC's wikipedia page being ~50% controversy section by word count.

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Your transfer fees are a bit off.

Coinbase is 10,200x more than you stated ($0.51 to send $100) BUT that’s only if I send directly on Coinbase. Coinbase Commerce takes 1% so it would actually be 20,000x more than you listed.

Stripe is 64% of what you stated ($3.20), and that’s with no processing fee discounts like you can get with higher volume.

Now, obviously, $3.20 > $1 but it’s not apples to apples. You can claw back your money with a card for one. there are many cases where I would prefer to pay the extra $2.20.

Solana is the main chain I use for these transfers, and it’s 0.000005 SOL * $170/SOL = $0.00085 to transfer any amount of USDC. so I was a little off there. My apologies for a $0.0008 error.

By the way, I specifically mentioned Coinbase commerce takes about a dollar: > $100 (or $99 with some 3rd party integration like Coinbase Commerce)

Stripe fees vary, but in a frequent case where a user is using an international card in a foreign currency it’ll very easily get close to 5%.

For me, yeah $2.2 is relatively immaterial. For a provider who’s doing $1MM in crypto transactions? Somehow I suspect that a few percentage points are quite meaningful, and I get the benefit of not having to explain what a seedbox is to my bank if they ever call me.

Again, crypto as a payment method is not for everything. But it’s quite nice to have the option.

Credit card interchange fees being ridiculously high is pretty much a US thing:

> In the United States, the fee averages approximately 2% of transaction value. In the EU, interchange fees are capped to 0.3% of the transaction for credit cards and to 0.2% for debit cards, while there is no cap for corporate cards.

Sensible regulation can make a big difference.

FWIW, I can pay bills by initiating a transfer both in HK and the EU instantaneously and for free.

Note also in your comparison of costs that most people still use fiat, and then pay the enormous fees of exchanges like Coinbase or Bybit that (for retail investors) are ridiculously high. So, a fiat-crypto-transfer-crypto-fiat round trip has another 2% or so on top (plus volatility).

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

It's also not even 2% in reality.

It goes to rewards which go straight back to the consumer.

My main credit card gives me 2% back on all purchases. In cash. Zero annual fee. And it's a card anyone with a normal credit score can get. Nothing special about it.

It really only makes sense to compare interchange fees after subtracting the proportion of them that get paid back to consumers.

Sure, smart consumers can claw back some of that. But what you have then is merchants raising average prices, and consumers that use such credit cards being subsidized by those that don't.

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