> That's why I said a few transactions every day on average, as in 2 or 3, which seems a conservative estimate.
Lightning network has virtually no fees. You were replying to someone who managed to get a "real" Bitcoin blockchain transaction through for less than a dollar.
> I certainly don't know anyone who pays $20 a month to have their cash "managed"
I was thinking of the people managing cash registers.
If fees are less than 1/10th of a cent, it means they make less than $1 for every 1000 transactions. So how many transactions are they processing? In 2019, ~5000 transactions per month [1], so the entire lightning network was generating less than $5 per month in revenue. Something doesn't add up.
It's up to the nodes how much they want to charge, which is a competitive thing. They might as well charge 1000x more, that's just the figure the market arrived at.
So, why do they charge so little? Running Lightning could be done for other reasons than just collecting fees, similar to why you might run a full Bitcoin node, even though it only costs you money: You are invested in the network as a whole.
It's also worth noting that Lightning is not actually that well-adopted yet, it's more of a solution "in principle". Just because some place accepts Bitcoin doesn't mean you can use Lightning. In that case, you can usually just use Dash, Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin, which all have very low fees. Hence, the pressure to actually adopt Lightning isn't that high - yet.
Yes, it's probably heavily subsidised so I expect fees to grow substantially if it becomes more popular. And the thing is the small fee is not the only fee that there is to pay. Apparently in order to open a "channel" the user needs to pay one BTC confirmation fee and another one to close it, but bitcoin enthusiasts somehow never mention this detail.
> Yes, it's probably heavily subsidised so I expect fees to grow substantially if it becomes more popular.
Transactions on the lightning network aren't scarce like space on a new block, so there's no reason for increased demand to substantially increase prices.
> Apparently in order to open a "channel" the user needs to pay one BTC confirmation fee and another one to close it, but bitcoin enthusiasts somehow never mention this detail.
That isn't true. You can open channels larger or smaller than 1BTC and the Bitcoin aren't really "paid", but rather "staked".
Lightning network has virtually no fees. You were replying to someone who managed to get a "real" Bitcoin blockchain transaction through for less than a dollar.
> I certainly don't know anyone who pays $20 a month to have their cash "managed"
I was thinking of the people managing cash registers.