Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You can simplify this by using a different payment rail (in my case, Lightning over Bitcoin), but now you have a different problem: nobody has Bitcoin. The problem is that Lightning essentially is a subscription service. The user has to lock much more Bitcoin in a channel in order use Lightning for micro transactions, which defeats the purpose. The minimum fee to get a Bitcoin transaction confirmed in a reasonable a…
"often over $20" is a lie. Fee for the priority transaction (to skip the queue) is $7 right now. It rarely exceeds that amount. You don't usually need a priority transaction when funding LN channel, so ~$1 fee will be enough.
To give you an example, the withdraw fee for BTC on Kraken is 0.0005 BTC, which is currently about 17.50 USD.
Here is the current mempool: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h
To get your transaction confirmed in the next few blocks, you have to be in the "yellow" of the chart, and use a fee of around 120 satoshi's per byte.
The average transaction is around 200 bytes, so you need to pay 24000 satoshis, which is 0.00024 BTC.
That's 8.40 USD right now. The problem is that it's a double blind auction, so to have a very high likelihood of getting into the next block, you often have to pay 200-400 satoshi's per byte, which puts you right up at the $20 level. If your transaction is larger, it can be significantly more.
Also, if the mempool gets even more backed up than it is right now, the fees can literally go as high as people are willing to pay when fighting over the restricted block space.
>You don't usually need a priority transaction when funding LN channel, so ~$1 fee will be enough.
If you try sending a Bitcoin transaction with a $1 fee right now it may not confirm for days and might confirm at all! That isn't a user experience that's going to create mass adoption. It needs to be an improvement on the existing options.
How, exactly, is my statement that the fees are often over $20 a lie?
You should stop accusing people of being liars without data to back it up. This forum is supposed to be for intelligent discussion, not trolling. This isn't twitter.