Stripe and the payment card industry in general are a bunch of parasites. Debiting one account and crediting another in a database is not a value on the order of 2% of the economy.
Good luck competing with the blockchain in five years.
If you understood how banking works you would be surprised, the reason why banks drool over potential technologies like BitCoin is because it can remove most if not all of the risk from those transactions as well as the need to have (the right, and this is very important for concurrent banking ;)) the funds to cover the transaction.
Everytime you process a payment with a credit card, PayPal or what ever they are paying for your transaction which means that not only that they need to be able to cover any potential risk on that debt but also actually have the funds available.
I don't know about Stripe but PayPal works because they offload the fraud and funds availability off the credit card companies that requires quite big financial investment if Stripe works the same (and for the most part it does) the 2% fee isn't that outrageous considering the amount of cash flow they have to maintain.
Its clear the credit card companies have real costs: fraud, credit risk & customer rewards. But does anyone know what those costs are relative to their 2% fee?
Clearly with a bitcoin solution, consumers will demand fraud protection and rewards and perhaps fraud will be less of an issue. But will the bitcoin companies still have to charge roughly 2% or will there be a race to the bottom on those fees?
Well currently banks and clearinghouses are looking into BitCoin like technologies to settle their own debt (consolidation).
With the most basic type of banking systems each bank will have an account with another bank to facilitate the transaction which means they'll debit your account and credit the account of the bank to which the account that you want to transfer too and that bank will do the same thing in reverse.
Since banks can't open corresponding accounts with each other bank in the world or even in the same country (if it's places like the US where everyone can set up a bank) they go through the central bank (or the fed in the case of the US) and more recently through clearing houses which can speed and and simplify certain transactions.
This method requires them to have quite a bit of free funds and to ontake quite a bit of debt and banks don't like owning money to some one especially not to another bank. BitCoin seem to be able to solve it since they can do internal clearing and consolidation on top of the blockchain without having to accumulate debt.
How much of it will translate to the end user's transactions probably not much at first, the blockchain might also have other issues that cannot be currently foreseen or understood that could incur hidden costs, but with how the current BitCoin blockchain works it will not be financially viable for small transactions as it will pollute the blockchain with very low value transactions and delay the big and important ones so you'll either have multiple chains or you'll have again some sort of system that will accumulate debt which will be settled later in one large transaction which means that you again take on similar risks to current credit card transactions which do not guarantee that the funds are available.
As for the costs well you are looking at enormous setup costs, very high operational costs due to needing to manage risk, maintain a very liquid cash flow, insurance, regulation etc, VISA Inc made 12B dollars last year and 30-40% of their income these days come from "Data Processing" and not from fees, if that's too much, too little well you decide :P
Depends on the types of fraud buyer protection which you get with every credit card is covered by PayPal, other types of fraud PayPal has to deal with them also who pays the final fee isn't the issue as most of the cost is in handling the case in the first place to a level that will appease the regulators and your underwriters/insurers.
