Logging at the time was somewhere in the ballpark of 1% of our total common infrastructure spend and widely acknowledged as too expensive relative to the minimal value we got from it with that rudimentary feature set, but it also was nowhere near enough cost to justify doing something about it. We had other observability costs that dwarfed it.

What finally justified the overhaul was that security couldn’t really operate usefully on log data unless we pulled the data out somewhere else like Athena and processed it there. That slowed down security incident response times dramatically.

The migration ultimately benefited the whole engineering organization but it had to be security led to get any traction.

I suspect that in the future, this will be a fairly common case. I suppose I might liken the theory here to defragging a hard drive. An unused hard drive stays in a nice neat, contiguous state. But use it a whole bunch and things get messy. And in BTC's case, you have to pay a bit extra for the miners to come along and tidy everything up.

I could be totally wrong on whether that will ever become common, and the developers could just as easily reduce fees over time as well, but such is the nature of taking guesses at the future.

I opted to focus entirely on the costs of transmitting the money. If we did a full analysis, we'd also have to look at chargebacks, figure out how to set a value on the speed of the transaction, and deal with the fact that sometimes Western Union just 'loses' your money and isn't sure where it is. Not all of these costs would be paid by the same person, but they do all add up to a systemic cost.

But that's not actually the primary point. There's plenty of reason to believe (besides transaction cost) that cryptocurrency and smart contracts have a long future ahead of them. I'm simply trying to point out that there are business models here that aren't yet being explored.

Bitcoin is actually regulated already, however the costs of Bitcoin regulation cannot be reflected in the protocol's transaction fee. An additional fee could be assessed by the service provider, but so far these fees typically happen right now at currency exchange points, rather than as a bonus 'sales tax'. BitPay has chosen to charge a flat rate monthly payment for their non-free plan while Coinbase charges 1% to cash out to USD.

Also I'm well aware of LevelUp. Point was not that other payment mediums cannot do the same but that Bitcoin can potentially provide valuable insight for a much larger set of transactions once you're able to make sense of a big enough chunk of the blockchain.