Yours

is a social content site like Medium but with a pay wall. In order to support small payments for content worth as little as one cent or less, we have developed a payment channel network similar to the lightning network. For the sake of our business, we estimated the cost of transactions on our network before launch. We demonstrate that payment channels on bitcoin funded with $44 or less are not economically viable if they are used predominantly for payments in one direction. In order to be competitive with Stripe and PayPal, channels on bitcoin need to be funded with more than $150. Payment channels that are used for many back-and-forth payments can be funded with only $44, but we predict channels of that sort will not be common soon. Our computations apply for our payment channel network, not the lightning network, but the differences are subtle and do not significantly alter the on-chain transaction fees, so the conclusions apply to both networks.