Trust me, people sending $1 million to Switzerland don't care about the fees. Or the lag. It's a Hoppian "low time preference".
I have a hard time imagining a low time preference person, someone who's generated their wealth diligently over time, sneering at saving thousands of dollars to move that wealth around the world. Nobody understands better the effort that went into creating that wealth or the drag fees exert on their net worth over the long haul.
Expense and lag hurt when you're buying milk on the way home from work or stuck at the pharmacy with a screaming kid. That's where the rubber meets the road.
Base-level Bitcoin transactions can't compete with credit cards or cash at an acceptable level of network security, that's the price you pay for eliminating a "trusted third party" in between the buyer and seller. But another layer running on top, like the Lightning network, could potentially provide that level of service at some point in the future.
Bitcoin Cash says that's what their mission is, but in the process optimizing their chain for Starbucks purchases they've broken the decentralization model that protects against censorship, confiscation, and inflation. They're also now mired in a costly civil war with SV, who believe they have the purist model or Satoshi's Vision, and that whole mess is already spilling over into a legal war between the big money and personalities behind those two chains.
Also, remember that since BTC is designed as a deflationary asset, a low time preference HODLer isn't inclined to spend it to buy diapers if they've got inflationary fiat money.
In the case of low cost long lag transfers... Do you trust the stability of pricing to use them? I'd sweat that one.
The fiat price volatility in cryptocurrency at this early stage of development is overwhelming, so you can't trust it will be worth the same amount of dollars at the other end of a transaction that clears even within an hour. But low time preference HODLers don't sweat the fiat price, they're more concerned with hanging on to as much BTC as possible for the long term.
So, since today was a planned sell day for me, I decided to experiment with an extremely lowball fee on a transfer to Gemini from a Ledger hardware wallet. I specified a 1 satoshi per byte fee in the Ledger Live software interface and expected it might sit (or get trapped) in the mempool for hours or days.
Amazingly, the first confirmation was within 14 minutes, and twenty minutes later Gemini allowed me to trade after just 3 confirmations (Coinbase makes you wait for 6). Since my wallet utilized two addresses on the input side of the transaction it had a larger than average byte size but still I only paid a fee of 330 satoshis, which at current prices is $0.011.
