Earlier quoted context omitted.
The costs of bitcoin you describe are systemic costs, not transaction fees. At 0 or 1 trillion transactions, the block rewards would be the same, which means they're not marginal costs, i.e. fees per transaction. They're unrelated. They pertain to money supply, a necessary force to get a currency out into the world. That causes inflation, which is not a direct price people pay (the transaction fees are a direct price…
> Bitpesa exist undercutting remittance Bitpesa takes 3%, significantly more than a credit card transaction, and much more than many established low-risk remittance corridors (e.g. Arabian Peninsula -> India/Pakistan, Europe -> Central America, are all under 1%). True, many remittance flows can be 9% or more, but that's because they have significant levels of fraud, and the overhead of KYC regulation. Ignoring fraud…
Here's an example of remitting money to Kenya between various services:
http://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/en/corridor/Canada/Ken...
Bitpesa is a Kenyan remittance company after all.
> Coinbase charges 1% to buy, and another 1% to sell
Coinbase costs 1% to process, period. It's cheaper for a merchant than the 3% of a CC, Stripe, Paypal, Square etc.
If you want to look at the consumer side, that's a different story. You tend to conflate things in your arguments. It's not required to buy from Coinbase to spend at a Coinbase merchant. I've been paid in bitcoin at 0% fees, and I've bought bitcoin at Circle at 0% fees.
> About 0% of Microsoft's revenues are in Bitcoin, this increases Microsoft profits by about 0%. Accepting Bitcoin is a marketing expense, not about increasing profits.
Stupid. First of all, quote my entire sentence. Secondly, it's easy to show you a ton of examples that were once small, but became significant. The internet was 0% of revenue for many companies once, where it's now extremely significant. It's not an argument to say something is small, therefore lacking any potential to be or become meaningful. One of its core characteristics is that it's cheaper. If you can cut costs as a merchant by 3% by using Bitpay (0% Saas) versus say Stripe (3% ish), that's massive when you have 3% profit margins like most supermarkets, airlines, a lot of retail etc. You can double profits on any sale. Does that mean bitcoin is a massive game changer today? Of course not, but again to ridicule it is as silly as to say the Internet is shit in 1995 because barely any calls, mail, ecommerce, education etc ran on it. Fact is, any sale Microsoft makes with Bitcoin is more profitable than otherwise, and that's not an insignificant fact despite the small scale of bitcoin sales.