[ericd]

This is one of the major reasons I think that the lightning network backed by bitcoin could actually be useful, vs the totally useless waste of energy that everyone on here seems to believe it is - the fees are basically a tiny fraction of a cent, and so it could make it economically viable to have payments <$1, which currently isn't really the case with the credit card networks.

[ivalm]

Maybe, but really it would just push credit cards to be cheaper. Fundamentally credit card processing tech is cheaper than lightning network (in terms of compute). Pushing CC to be cheaper ofc is a good in and of itself.

[ericd]

My understanding is that a marginal transaction on lightning is pretty lightweight, so it seems like the compute is kind of a non-issue in both cases?

But driving Visa et al to be cheaper sounds like a good outcome. I think it might be hard to get them to give up their current firehose of rent they're extracting by sitting in the middle of so many transactions.