What’s wrong with this picture?

How about this picture?

For now, just ignore the blank receiving address. There is something wrong here. If you look at the bottom right and pay attention to the fee.

In both examples it cost more to send $1 USD than the value itself. BTC cost $3.70 to send $1.00 and ETH cost $1.13 to send 1.00.

For those of us that have been in the crypto space for a few years this doesn’t come as a surprise. But for newcomers this will be something that they probably wouldn’t expect. For those of us in the US of A I can take a physical dollar out of my wallet and hand it over to someone for FREE. Meaning that I will not be charged a single penny for that transaction. However, on the flip side if I decide to use a credit or debit card then it’s going to cost me or someone to make that transaction. The former is all about freedom and the latter is all about convenient use.

I want freedom and convenient use. Let’s keep it simple.

If crypto can provide freedom and convenient then count me in. The idea of bitcoin is revolutionary. There is more to bitcoin than free transactions. Also, Ethereum provides capabilities that are beyond what anyone has even begun to dream of. Still with both of these paradigm shift there is the bottom-line where the rubber meets the road. It’s all about the fees. No one is going to be willing to spend 100% to 300% on fees to make a transaction. Bitcoin will become the store of value and the Ethereum project/experiment will be stalled until POS becomes a reality.

With that said, let’s explore some other crypto projects and see what the impact of sending $1 USD value in their ecosystem.

I took the top 15 cryptos in market cap and looked at the cost to send. I also added a few others outside of the top 15 just for fun. Here is a table for comparisons.

You will notice that the top 5 in Market Cap that only XRP has reasonable fees. ETH, Tether, Chainlink are all Ethereum based cryptos. Bitcoin Cash is near zero but still not FREE. Then you will see the first FREE crypto in the top 15 in market cap is EOS. The interesting thing about EOS is no matter how high the value of EOS goes the transaction fee is always ZERO. Whereas BCH dollar value will continue to get more expensive as the token value goes up in price.

Only EOS, TRON and NANO will always remain FREE to transact. However, there are other things to consider with these projects and in order to take advantage of these always FREE capabilities you need to spend some money upfront to secure some resources. Still, these projects are exploring ways to minimize these upfront costs by providing ideas like resource exchanges and having the DAPP projects pay for the upfront costs.

Here is another view of the chart sorted by % Fee cost

The moral of the story here is watch out for those FEES. They can sneak up on your if you’re not careful.

Be safe out there

~S