Mike4 wrote:murraypaul wrote:Urbandreamer wrote:Ok, I just bought a ebook using bitcoin. It was painless, but not instant. This is because the payment was on-chain.
If you have a small amount, here is a link to the book. In £'s it cost me £1.67.
How much was the transaction fee?
You have to pay a fee in order to pay for something with bitcoin?
That alone kills it as a currency, Id suggest. Visa etc figured out really early that people would not use the service if they had to pay a fee to conduct a transaction.
There is a transaction fee. That's why there is a network at all. It's also true of the likes of Visa, and usually even when you withdraw cash from your current account via a ATM. In those cases, you as a user don't see the fee. Instead it is paid by someone else, ie the vendor or your bank (who must get the money from it's customers somehow). Fee's to Visa were recently topical, with Amazon stating that they were going to refuse Visa payments, until Visa reduced the fee.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60022166How much is the fee? Well it depends
Lightning transactions are usually a couple of Sat's, less than 1p. On-chain transactions are usually significantly more expensive. How much depends upon congestion, and to some extent how much you want to pay*. The fees are actually specified in bitcoin.
The wallet that I used "Muun" hid all the complicated stuff, but it cost me a relatively expensive 3121 Sats (61p) to spend 8500 Sats (£1.66).
However I have made other transactions (moved bitcoin or entered it into the whirlpool).
I paid 275 Sat's to transfer 105577 Sats into Whirlpool. I didn't do it today, but if I had that's paying 6p of the £21.17 transferred or 0.26%. For comparison google claims that Visa charges 0.25% though unlike bitcoin, fees are capped in the EU.
So, it's more a case of "who pays" rather than is there a cost. Indeed it can be argued that it's the poor mugs who pay in cash that are overcharged as the vendor must increase the prices for all so that they don't lose money on Visa transactions.
*This is hidden from most users of bitcoin but you can specify a fee rate. As the number of transactions per block is limited, low fee transactions are dropped if they are out competed. Hence if you want to get a transaction through in a given time, you can boost what you are willing to pay. Ie I also paid 3404 Sat's to receive 20743, a very expensive fee that I was willing to pay to prove that I understood the process.