Most of the time Ethereum is less than a penny for a simple value transfer, and it does more than twice as many transactions per day as Bitcoin. It's also pretty easy to implement simple payment channels:

http://www.blunderingcode.com/a-lightning-network-in-two-pag...

I was just pulling up avg tx fees. I realize that tx cost on ETH varies highly, do you have a preferred site to tell what contracts are economically viable for what amounts?

For instance I would be happy to buy a cryptokitty or two at the ~1 USD price range, but if the tx fees are ~1 USD then it's obviously a no go.

A great place to look is the ETH Gas Station:

https://ethgasstation.info/

It tells the lowest gas price you can use to be reasonably sure your transaction will go through, and how long it's likely to take. Using that gas price it also gives a dollar cost of a simple transfer, which at the moment is higher than I expected at 20 cents for a 20-minute wait, or 33 cents for a 3-minute wait.

For cryptokitties you'll have a higher gas cost; I don't really know how high but I think I've seen people complain about spending six bucks for cryptokitty transaction at a 60 gwei gas price.

It does not make much sense to use avg tx fee to see if a currency is suitable for micropayments. You should be looking at the min tx fee.

Also with various micropayment schemes you don't actually need an on-chain transaction for every payment.

For ETH, https://ethgasstation.info has not let me down.

That site is saying 0.3 USD. I wouldn't call that pennies.

Though, it's on par with credit cards.

The one justification for skyhigh valuations is believing there will be a deus ex machina technology solution that comes out to solve the scalability problems of crypto. Honestly, it could happen (https://lightning.network/ or something else, ideally for on-chain transactions), but in _my_ opinion, betting on that outcome at this time is just not worth it. I believe a more likely scenario is we have a major correction, and then grow from there.

In the worst case (1 tx per channel) LN would actually double the # of tx.

I am really looking forward to LN being really tested, but the thing that worries me is that the security model relies on txing before a certain block. If we see a large amount of the traffic move from on chain to LN then we could get ourselves into a situation where there is a run on the chain to close channels. If there is a large market maker that attempts to steal from a channel that is being used to route many others we could see a mass closing of channels which could push the fees high enough to make it cost prohibitive.

LN isn't a panacea it actually changes the security model.

It's not deus ex machina, because it's not unexpected. Lightning has a working alpha on Bitcoin, and Ethereum has something similar with Raiden, plus the Plasma paper and early code, a recently-published spec for the first version of sharding with a 100x throughput improvement, various special-purpose off-chain solutions like FunFair's fate channels, TrueBit for verifiable computation off chain, a simple multicore hack, and simulation code for full proof of stake.

I'm not saying there won't be a market correction, since they happen on a regular basis. Just a few months ago Ethereum dropped from $420 to $130.

Yes I am a long term believer in the technology, my gut just says the next correction that comes will be a bloodbath. Accordingly, I'd prefer to wait until that occurs before getting more involved.

If I'm wrong and "lose money" (ie don't get the gains) I'm okay with that too, since I've thought about this a fair amount and I'm confident my position is the most reasonable at this time.

Yeah that's probably a good idea.

Bitshares, STEEM, and the new project EOS all support them (EOS will have free transactions, and STEEM already does). Definitely check them out if you're interested in the space. Alot of people dismiss them because DPoS isn't proof of work, but if you dig into the philosophy behind it I feel like it makes alot of sense.

They've been lagging behind / undervalued for the last couple years IMO but the big money behind EOS is giving STEEM/BTS the attention they deserve.

https://steemit.com/dpos/@dantheman/dpos-consensus-algorithm...

Bitcoin doesn’t HAVE to be used for micropayments to be useful.

At this point the transaction costs are making it unusable for most regular payments as well.

I sent my friends 50 bucks worth of BTC for christmas time. At that point the fees for regular tx were ~5 bucks so I just bundled them and payed less than a dollar per send, making sure to send the change into a segwit address. I missed someone so I went ahead and sent a one off from a segwit address. That was only 1 buck tx fee. Totally doable for a $50 tx.

But if the valuations are anywhere close to proper we need to have significantly higher throughput.

If I can't send someone 10 bucks on bitcoin it loses a lot of value for me. I've previously used it to pay for lunch/poker w/e when I don't have my wallet and someone that I am with is interested in it. Even litecoin is hitting 1 USD avg tx fee.

Absolutely true. However, if crypto doesn't scale one way or another, it's use case is _greatly_ diminished.

And then there's RiaBlocks which looks the most promising currently. I hope it gets a rigorous security review though. IOTA, Byteball, Steem, BitShares etc. don't really cut it IMO. Cardano also has reasonable plans for scalability.

You forgot about Ripple, which I think is about $0.0003 USD or so.