Many digital artists I know have a Tezos address, and I could send them a donation of any size for a fixed fee of about 0.000544 XTZ or $0.001 USD.

And since you can't exchange Tezos for goods and services, you need to send it to an exchange, sell it for 1-2%, deal with foreign exchange changes over the time you held it, counter-party risk on the exchange, then perform a domestic transfer into your bank account, and add the transaction to your income taxes.

not really. I just checked a CEX - to exchange 1,000 XTZ into 2,268K GBP and have it directly deposited into fiat account, the fee is 3.76 GBP, i.e. 0.17% rather than 1-2%.

you also seem to be taking the opinion that all crypto must eventually be exchanged to fiat. obviously it is wise to exchange enough to fiat for taxes, monthly expenses, and to have a balanced portfolio. but some users may choose to keep some in crypto, for example to stake, continue paying for other crypto-localized goods and services, or exchange into a stablecoin in order to have self-custody of a USD-pegged asset.

fwiw, if more merchants did accept crypto and taxes were payable in crypto (as it is becoming the case in some very specific jurisdictions around the world), there would be less need to exchange to fiat via a CEX.

> not really. I just checked a CEX - to exchange 1,000 XTZ into 2,268K GBP and have it directly deposited into fiat account, the fee is 3.76 GBP, i.e. 0.17% rather than 1-2%.

Cool. So the same as a debit card payment in Europe, which is capped at 0.2%. It's also way more expensive than a Faster Payments UK transaction. In exchange you take on huge counter-party risk, and massive forex risk. This doesn't sound better, in fact, it sounds a lot worse.

> fwiw, if more merchants did accept crypto and taxes were payable in crypto (as it is becoming the case in some very specific jurisdictions around the world), there would be less need to exchange to fiat via a CEX.

Taxes are only 'payable' everywhere on earth for crypto in the sense that some governments offer a gateways that exchange it to fiat. Like Pay1040 does for credit card tax payments in the US. That doesn't make 'taxes payable in credit card.' The issue isn't payable it's denominated in.

You keep mentioning localized EU/UK bank transfer fees when my original post that triggered this discussion is referring to international payment processor APIs (Stripe, PayPal) and the web that builds on top of them (Ko-Fi, Etsy, Bandcamp, Kickstarter, Patreon, Shopify).