On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 10:36 PM, Amir Taaki <genjix@???> wrote:
> Importantly, fees are low for digital currency payments despite
> the fact that, as currently designed, the marginal cost of
> verifying transactions by miners is generally higher than that
> for centralised payment systems. These higher marginal costs

Marginal cost of verifying transactions != price. Especially not so
for the kinds of entities that the central bank is used to dealing
with: banks. Because they're highly regulated, banking has high
barriers to entry which manifest as "compliance" [1] costs.
Cryptocurrency mining, OTOH, is about as perfectly competitive as
anything can be, and the price of processing transactions can approach
the cost of verifying them much more closely.

Asserting that bitcoin must necessarily ultimately become more
expensive than centralized money just because *one* component cost is
higher, *network-wide* [2], is like derping about how rooftop solar
power "can't work" because you first have to spend thousands of
dollars on equipment whilst your city power connection is already
there.

And lastly, it insinuates a false equivalence between transactions
(but we can veto those we don't like) and transactions (I own my
bitcoin, I can send them where I damn well please). Bitcoin
transactions have a different utility value, at least for me they do.
Even if Bitcoin transactions are ultimately more expensive in some
sense, maybe that's okay if we feel that we have something better for
it?

[1] Ugh, I hate that nouned verb.

[2] Only miners get paid for verifying transactions, but they aren't
the only ones who do that. Let's admit that the cost of transactions
*is* higher than just running some miner chips.