{"id":459,"date":"2017-08-27T12:37:50","date_gmt":"2017-08-27T12:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/?p=459"},"modified":"2017-09-28T14:07:53","modified_gmt":"2017-09-28T14:07:53","slug":"bitcoin-versus-american-express-a-normal-persons-reaction-to-7-transaction-fees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2017\/08\/27\/bitcoin-versus-american-express-a-normal-persons-reaction-to-7-transaction-fees\/","title":{"rendered":"Bitcoin versus American Express: a normal person’s reaction to $7 transaction fees"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bitcoin is clogging again<\/a>, and transaction fees are going up<\/a> again. I tweeted<\/a> about this and a normal person I know, to whom this was news, worked out what this meant:<\/p>\n

\n

Since I have a bit of spare time and this piqued my interest a bit, I’ve done some rough maths comparing this to a real world use case.<\/p>\n

My Amex card, which I’ve run exactly 101 transactions through since this time last month, has an annual fee of \u00a325. Thus a bit of simple maths means that I have a fee of roughly 2p per transaction over the course of a year. And I get that back and then some in cashback so long as I spend at least \u00a32 per transaction. Looking at the merchant side, even being somewhat generous and saying that the \u00a317k I put through the card over the last year was charged at 5% card processing fees across the entire breadth of them, from local restaurants to Tesco and Amazon, all of the merchants I’ve spent money at collectively would have paid roughly $1,105 in transaction fees. That being the absolute worst case scenario I can think of.<\/p>\n

Conversely the same level of transactions put through via Bitcoin would cost me personally<\/i> $8,484 a year, of which I would get back precisely f\u2014 all. And it would take longer too, as opposed to using chip and PIN, NFC, Apple Pay etc to pay for things near-instantly. Also I can’t use it anywhere near as many places and there’s always the risk that my computer gets rooted and all of my money disappears irreversibly, because I am my own bank. Nor do I get nice meaningful statements and transaction lists or chargebacks or any kind of customer service whatsoever. Even if I was to assume that every penny of the transaction fees of using my card was passed on to me directly in the form of higher prices, it’s still<\/i> not more expensive, risky or painful than using Bitcoin.<\/p>\n

Bitcoin \u2014 the money of the future, so long as you don’t compare it to the money of the present.<\/p>\n

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Bitcoin is clogging again, and transaction fees are going up again. I tweeted about this and a normal person I know, to whom this was news, worked out what this meant …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,21,23],"class_list":["post-459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-american-express","tag-bitcoin","tag-transaction-fees"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1162,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions\/1162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}