3 ms·

> 0 fee transactions You'd have to check how sustainable this is, Uber was (is?) also very cheap in some areas, just because it's massively subsidized. A solut

by hiq 4y ago

> 0 fee transactions You'd have to check how sustainable this is, Uber was (is?) also very cheap in some areas, just because it's massively subsidized. A solution that works today but not tomorrow and burns cash in between is not necessarily something you want.

koonsolo 4y ago
I get it that you are sceptical. But you probably haven't looked at how Nano works. It's 100% distributed and is battle tested in practice. The biggest challenge they had was protecting against spam. But a few releases back they solved this issue. Technically a very strong project.
- hiq 4y ago
  > you probably haven't looked at how Nano works I have looked at the past n similar products and it was always the same story. At some point, you don't need to look at the implementation details anymore, you can take this from first principles: somebody somewhere is running a ledger. You have to pay this someone one way or another, unless they're just volunteering. > a few releases back they solved this issue How are they getting paid? Regarding the ledger operators, from https://nano.org/faq#nodes https://nano.org/faq#nodes: > Instead, participants on the nano network are driven by external incentives, such as helping maintain an instant payment network they can use without fees. So it does look like volunteering / donating computing resources, and the 0 transaction fee doesn't reflect the actual costs.
  - koonsolo 4y ago
    Lots of Open Source projects rely on volunteering one way or another. I think projects where everything is publicly available, have the least risk to disappear. If you want it, you can just run it. There is of course always a cost for a transaction one way or another, but it still stands that you pay 0 for the transaction itself.
    - hiq 4y ago
      > Lots of Open Source projects rely on volunteering one way or another. How many of them without any corporate backing have the same requirements as a payment processor? > There is of course always a cost for a transaction one way or another, but it still stands that you pay 0 for the transaction itself. Again that's not the full picture, just take the Uber example. If they had made rides free thanks to VC money, would you have said that they solved the taxi problem and made them free so it's a much better alternative? The problem with this kind of accounting is that you can't tell whether it's just running at a loss or whether the technology is actually better than the rest. Visa and others could make transactions free if they didn't care about losses. As a user, I'm also not interested in, say, getting a new credit card transacting in $crypto that will either not work anymore in a while once they've run out of money or start billing me fees when it's clear it's become unsustainable for them to have free transactions.
      - koonsolo 4y ago
        Ah come on, you can run a node for $20 a month, that's way cheaper for an entreprise than sharing revenue with a payment processor. Running a node is dirt cheap, because a transaction is dirt cheap at 0.000112 kWh per transaction. https://blog.nano.org/how-to-run-a-node-and-why-a-full-nano-guide-7dff90fa826e https://blog.nano.org/how-to-run-a-node-and-why-a-full-nano-...
        hiq 4y ago
        > you can run a node for $20 a month So that's one more entry in your accounting, how many more are there? Once you've counted everything and implemented all the missing features (e.g. how much does it cost to do USD -> NANO -> NANO -> USD), do you still have something that costs less to run than a payment processor? My only point is that "0 transaction fee so that's better than traditional solutions" is misleading, because of hidden costs, missing features, unknown regulatory risk, etc. The technical part and its efficiency is interesting, but just one variable in the equation, and not even one that major payment processors couldn't replicate at a whim if it did bring any value.

by hiq 4y ago

koonsolo 4y ago

I get it that you are sceptical. But you probably haven't looked at how Nano works. It's 100% distributed and is battle tested in practice. The biggest challenge they had was protecting against spam. But a few releases back they solved this issue. Technically a very strong project.

hiq 4y ago
> you probably haven't looked at how Nano works I have looked at the past n similar products and it was always the same story. At some point, you don't need to look at the implementation details anymore, you can take this from first principles: somebody somewhere is running a ledger. You have to pay this someone one way or another, unless they're just volunteering. > a few releases back they solved this issue How are they getting paid? Regarding the ledger operators, from https://nano.org/faq#nodes https://nano.org/faq#nodes: > Instead, participants on the nano network are driven by external incentives, such as helping maintain an instant payment network they can use without fees. So it does look like volunteering / donating computing resources, and the 0 transaction fee doesn't reflect the actual costs.
- koonsolo 4y ago
  Lots of Open Source projects rely on volunteering one way or another. I think projects where everything is publicly available, have the least risk to disappear. If you want it, you can just run it. There is of course always a cost for a transaction one way or another, but it still stands that you pay 0 for the transaction itself.
  - hiq 4y ago
    > Lots of Open Source projects rely on volunteering one way or another. How many of them without any corporate backing have the same requirements as a payment processor? > There is of course always a cost for a transaction one way or another, but it still stands that you pay 0 for the transaction itself. Again that's not the full picture, just take the Uber example. If they had made rides free thanks to VC money, would you have said that they solved the taxi problem and made them free so it's a much better alternative? The problem with this kind of accounting is that you can't tell whether it's just running at a loss or whether the technology is actually better than the rest. Visa and others could make transactions free if they didn't care about losses. As a user, I'm also not interested in, say, getting a new credit card transacting in $crypto that will either not work anymore in a while once they've run out of money or start billing me fees when it's clear it's become unsustainable for them to have free transactions.
    - koonsolo 4y ago
      Ah come on, you can run a node for $20 a month, that's way cheaper for an entreprise than sharing revenue with a payment processor. Running a node is dirt cheap, because a transaction is dirt cheap at 0.000112 kWh per transaction. https://blog.nano.org/how-to-run-a-node-and-why-a-full-nano-guide-7dff90fa826e https://blog.nano.org/how-to-run-a-node-and-why-a-full-nano-...
      - hiq 4y ago
        > you can run a node for $20 a month So that's one more entry in your accounting, how many more are there? Once you've counted everything and implemented all the missing features (e.g. how much does it cost to do USD -> NANO -> NANO -> USD), do you still have something that costs less to run than a payment processor? My only point is that "0 transaction fee so that's better than traditional solutions" is misleading, because of hidden costs, missing features, unknown regulatory risk, etc. The technical part and its efficiency is interesting, but just one variable in the equation, and not even one that major payment processors couldn't replicate at a whim if it did bring any value.