Banks aren't costly. They earn money on their deposits by using them as the reserve store for creating new money, and generally pay their users, not the other way around.
Granted, they're costly if you're poor, but I've yet to see a blockchain application that seems likely to be useful for poor people who may not even have consistent network access.
Payment processors, on other hand, certainly charge vendors and result in some level of markup to the sale price of goods and services. But blockchains as payment processors add cost as well. This just happens to be hidden right now by the fact miners can earn so much profit from the value of their holdings skyrocketing that they don't charge anything. Crypto values have to stabilize at some point to ever be usable for transactions, so this cannot continue forever, and users will eventually need to pay the cost of the transaction processing directly, just as they do with non-blockchain payment processors.
Decentralizing something doesn't make it costless. Some work is being done somewhere by some machine or person.
My jaw drops for you. Banks are indeed costly. They take your money, earn >5% interest on it and pay you 0.02% interest back. It doesn't even get close to beating inflation. They nickle and dime you on overdraft fees, minimum balance fees, other BS. You're paying them just as much as you're paying credit card companies, if not substantially more. You just don't know it.
> poor people who may not even have consistent network access.
There are plenty of poor unbanked people whoe have enough network access to use bitcoin, especially with the lightning network. You only need network access when paying (or receiving). You don't need consistent network access.
>This just happens to be hidden right now by the fact miners can earn so much profit from the value of their holdings skyrocketing that they don't charge anything
That's not true man. Miners are not empowered to charge anything. Miners can only accept transaction fees that users place on their own transactions. Its a market and miners choose the highest fee transactions. That's how it works. You're implying that coinbase rewards subsidize low fees, but you're very wrong about that. When the coinbase rewards go away, fees don't consequently go up - rather miner revenue goes down in such a case.
> Decentralizing something doesn't make it costless
But it can make it orders of magnitude cheaper. Paying someone on the bitcoin lightning network costs less than a tenth of a cent. Tell me that isn't cheaper than any other traditional payment mechanism.
Granted, they're costly if you're poor, but I've yet to see a blockchain application that seems likely to be useful for poor people who may not even have consistent network access.
Payment processors, on other hand, certainly charge vendors and result in some level of markup to the sale price of goods and services. But blockchains as payment processors add cost as well. This just happens to be hidden right now by the fact miners can earn so much profit from the value of their holdings skyrocketing that they don't charge anything. Crypto values have to stabilize at some point to ever be usable for transactions, so this cannot continue forever, and users will eventually need to pay the cost of the transaction processing directly, just as they do with non-blockchain payment processors.
Decentralizing something doesn't make it costless. Some work is being done somewhere by some machine or person.