On: Cryptos can't fix societal, political or economic problems

[0x64]

Maybe not less than a penny, but $0.20–0.35 on the cheapest Ethereum L2 rollups [1]. That'll drop by almost an order of magnitude more in the short-term if/when the calldata gas fee reduction EIP passes (could be medium-term if it doesn't get implemented before the merge).

Long-term, it should drop to fractions of a cent once sharding is implemented. But, that's years away and hardly relevant.

[1] https://l2fees.info/

[user-the-name → 0x64]

You left out many steps there, all of which will charge you fees. Try again.

Go from actual money from the sender, to actual money for the receiver. Sum up the fees.

[0x64 → user-the-name]

What steps did I skip? Some exchanges already allow withdrawals to L2s, and Coinbase is working on it. Once social recovery wallets like Argent start to onboard users directly to L2 (zkSync), L1 might as well not exist for the regular Joe since it's completely abstracted away.

The situation for current L1 users is obviously different, but those people probably aren't the most fee-sensitive users anyway, since sending money with $5+ fees is hardly viable for so-called everyday use.

[anonymoushn → 0x64]

The user you're replying to would like you to include depositing and withdrawing money at crypto exchanges, because they believe database entries at banks and PayPal are money and database entries at crypto exchanges are not.

[user-the-name → anonymoushn]

It is not me not believing that. It is the shop where I buy my dinner that is not believing that. That is what matters.

[user-the-name → 0x64]

Actual money, that you get from a job, and that you pay your living costs in. End to end.

[0x64 → user-the-name]

I don't understand. Is the trick in your question the fact that you're inevitably paid in fiat and you have to buy crypto, thus proving that crypto is useless as a currency?

[user-the-name → 0x64]

The topic is remittances, and the claim is that cryptocurrencies are good at them.

Remittances are when a person in one country sends money to another person in a different country. Usually, the first person works to earn wages, and sends them back home to their family, who use them to pay for living expenses.

To do this, you need to go from money in hand to money in hand. Anything else is useless. Again, the claim is that cryptocurrency is good at this. If you want to claim that it is, you have to actually show how to do that exact thing.

[0x64 → user-the-name]

When did I claim such a thing? I claimed that the transaction fees were getting to fractions of cents.

[user-the-name → 0x64]

The original claim I am responding to is "International remittances in seconds for less than a penny".

That, in any reasonable reading, would mean that the sum of all feels required to do "international remittance" would be less than a penny. This is clearly not true.

The claim that one small part of the fees is actually less than a penny is not really relevant to this.

[anonymoushn → user-the-name]

In what way is it clearly not true? The end-to-end flow I outlined works for many choices of countries.