Cheap transactions are necessary for any cryptocurrency.

There are thousands of cryptocurrencies out there. Every one of them is focussing on a different niche. Regardless of the niche, there are few attributes that are very critical to a project's success. Of those attributes, I believe cheap transactions and reliability of transactions are the most important aspects to get right.

How user onboarding works online

Let us face it, the cryptocurrency industry is in its infancy. As of 2020, only less than 1% of the population of the world uses cryptocurrency. It is fair to say we need to onboard about 99% of the world's population because any currency becomes more valuable with more people use it to buy goods and services.

If we were to learn user onboarding best practices from other online services that previously achieved more than a billion users, there are certain non-negotiable criteria a product has to meet to gain mass adoption.

Best practices to make users try a new product

Have you ever signed up for a new online service within 5 minutes by paying $200 with your credit card? Never happens right? Users don't want to be taken for a ride especially in an untrusted environment like the internet. Users are very accustomed to trying before buying online. This is why online services have free signup and free trial without requiring credit card information.

The key to getting users to even think about using a cryptocurrency is to have a low commitment option. There were faucets in the early days of bitcoin where users can get a few bitcoins for free and send them across to get a taste for the product. Faucets are going away fast because of a few users abusing them.

Now, projects like Bitcoin Cash have much more elegant low barrier to entry options like noise.cash where anyone with an email and internet connection can get a few cents or dollars of Bitcoin Cash just for posting a few words or lines of thoughtful content. Without this low barrier to entry option, any project can kiss goodbye to its ambitions of mass adoption. Even after getting the low barrier to entry option right, there are two key properties that a project needs to get absolutely right to achieve mass adoption. They are

1. Reliable transactions

2. Cheap transactions

Reliable transactions

This one doesn't need more explanation. Why would anyone risk using something new to transfer their money when it is unreliable? cough cough lightning network. Every time I go to a bank I become very confident in the future of cryptocurrencies because of how unreliable and error-prone the traditional banking system is. Luckily, most cryptocurrencies got this part right. Most good projects can make a transaction without any error because of the nature of the blockchains.

Cheap transactions

When an online service has nailed the low barrier to entry option and the reliability of the product there is still one very critical component that can ruin everything. That is the transaction cost. Transaction costs add unnecessary friction to a transaction, while transaction fees in cryptocurrencies cannot be eliminated, keeping them to the bare minimum is the only way to make transactions as frictionless as possible.

Cheap transactions are very important for user onboarding because of a very particular pattern of user behavior. When a user feels committed enough to make an online transaction. They do it in increments. First, they do it for a few dollars and see if everything is working as it should and then the user tries with a few slightly higher dollar amounts. Only after a product passes all these different stages in a user acquisition sequence he/she is willing to make a transaction for hundreds or thousands of dollars.

This behavior pattern is possible with projects like Bitcoin cash BCH where the developer teams work hard to make the transactions cheap and reliable and sadly this behavior pattern is completely broken in projects like Bitcoin BTC because of the high fees for on-chain transactions and the unreliability of the lightning network.

Bitcoin Cash passes these important tests

These requirements are absolutely essential to gain the network effects necessary for a cryptocurrency to succeed. As a result of the hard work of the developers and promoters of the Bitcoin Cash network, Bitcoin Cash now has all three critical parts needed to onboard new users. The marketplace is starting to recognize the value of Bitcoin Cash and the importance of cheap transactions. Bitcoin cash recently became the second cryptocurrency in total dollar amount transferred only next to Bitcoin. Change is happening and it is happening fast. The future is going to be very bright for Bitcoin Cash because of its cheap and reliable transactions.