I have recently started a new initiative: a tokenised, bankless, blockchain-based non-profit called OffChain Luxembourg.
As we don't have a bank account, OffChain Luxembourg uses the Hive / Hive-Engine couple as a bank. Members pay their membership fees in the "Treasury", the @ocl-trez account. The accounting currency is the HBD
Thanks to Transak, they can pay in € with SEPA, VISA card, Apple Pay or G Pay. Of course they can also pay in crypto. The idea is that no matter the means of payment, the membership fee ends up as HBD in the @ocl-trez account.
So today we got a new member, @lord.nicolas , who paid in xDAI on the Gnosis chain. How do you get from there to HBD ? Well, it's doable but there's a trick: whatever I do, I have to go through the bloody Ethereum Mainnet. Therefore, I need to have a wallet with some ETH in it to pay the Tx fees.
Step 1. Move xDai from OCL-TREZ wallet to one of my Gnosis wallets which has ETH on the Mainnet.
Step 2. On the Gnosis chain (low fees) swap xDAI to WETH
Step 3. Use Gnosis bridge to move the WETH to the Ethereum Mainnet.
Step 4. Unwrap the WETH to ETH ... and get shafted by the Mainnet's Tx fees
Almost 10€ in fees to unwrap WETH to ETH ...
This made me see a parallel between Ethereum Mainnet and Goldman Sachs. I remembered the famous 2009 description of the Nb. 1 investment bank as
a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
In the cryptoverse, Ethereum Mainnet is that "giant, blood-sucking vampire squid" ...
What are the plans for this non-profit? Just curious...
Thanks for asking. I'll publish a longer article soon but in a nutshell is "bridging" the world of crypto with the world of laws by offering the first MiCA-compliant token in Luxembourg. The articles of association are here:
https://peakd.com/ocl/@offchain-lux/offchain-luxembourg-asbl-status
If the fee goes exorbitant, then it's no different than the traditional systems, ultimately things come down to utility whether centralized or decentralized, things have to be reasonable in the first place.
There is a philosophical split that cleaves the blockchain world in very unequal parts.
On the 99% side, it's a fiercely individualistic view of the world where you find all the blockchains that charge tx fees- pay per use, like toll roads.
On the 1% side you have Steem, Hive, Nano, IOTA where the infrastructure costs are mutualized and paid for from a community budget, and there are no tx fees for use, like most roads.
Imagine what moving around would be like if 99% of roads were toll roads.
Laissez faire individualism is not complementing to public goods!
Both are needed, "everything in moderation" is the key.
In a truly decentrailzed world, the blockchain infrastructure should be a "non-excludable", "non rivalrous" public good.
Transaction fees act as an exclusion device - if you can't pay them, you are excluded from the infrastructure. Imagine someone gifts you a valuable NFT on an address you control: without ETH (or whatever the coin of the respective blockchain is) you cannot move it, you cannot transfer that asset. Or it is the power to transfer that asset that is the principal marker of "owenrship" for digital assets.
The tendency of people to flock around one blockchain combined with limited scalability (which is a defining characteristic of the blockchain design) also make the "pyramidal" spirit of the Ethereum eco-system "rivalrous" - more use from some make it less usable for the rest.
Could not agree anymore.
It helps to think of it as HODLing incentivizing, but that's not foolin' anyone. :)
I smiled, thank you!
Seems like a fair analogy. I do wonder why people still go for it when there are so many viable alternatives, maybe that's why chains like Sol have done so well, people (mistakenly or not, I don't know enough about it) see it as a viable alternative....?
Certainly for me, I've got bits and pieces on ETH, a few coins worth a few hundred dollars but I haven't cashed them out as I can't stand paying the fees!
The best ETH I've got is on Kraken, which I moved from Coinbase following my refund from Celcius. I say it's the best because I can sell bits and bobs of it for a small tx fee, on the exchange!
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This trick seem like a long process but I’d give it a try when I’m ready
Thanks for sharing
The crypto will retain its value much more if people can hold much more