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Comment by shatteredgate

>You can add an escrow system or even use a reputation-based approach as a way to manage fraud, but the idea is that it is optional. If all you want is to buy some cheap and fast content online, you can't do that with credit card but you can with crypto.

I don't understand how this follows at all, the only thing you've added here is that you can't get your money back if the "cheap and fast content" turns out to be a scam. I can't understand why anyone would want this to be optional.

>Please point me to one micropayment solution that does not involve middlemen and/or extraordinarily high fees (in proportion to the value of the transaction).

This would be any virtual currency where you buy it to spend directly with the market operator, the kind you see on prepaid cards in retail stores. That's in the context of a vendor like OnlyFans that runs a marketplace of sorts; if you consider that to be a middleman and you only want some completely peer-to-peer solution then that's a different question with different risks from what we were originally discussing, and most cryptocurrency doesn't fit that definition anyway.

>Find me some non-crypto alternative where she can get that amount with minimal loss. We can compare notes later if you want, but I can tell you a crypto alternative where the cost is less than 0.3%.

I'm not really interested to search around for every exchange I can find and make a comparison, but I would be very skeptical of any crypto-based solution claiming they can lower fees here. The costs of doing bank transfers are the same regardless of whether you use crypto as the medium to move the money. There's probably something else they're doing.

This is getting towards my main problem with these crypto conversations, we're moving away from what the technology actually brings and instead we're getting into only comparing fees without considering any of the other details of what we're actually doing. I find this to be a pointless angle to take; there isn't going to be a period where we use cryptocurrency and we can totally avoid fees, because an explicit goal of every cryptocurrency I've seen is actually to make it so participants can't avoid paying fees. And when you get into smart contracts, every participant can now start acting as a middleman and charging more of their own fees in addition to the transaction and gas costs you pay to the network.

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