>bitcoin demands friction to run the blockchain

It requires (electrical) power. I don't think this could reasonably be called "friction". When I think "friction", I think of burdens imposed on users. Bitcoin has relatively few of those.

Cost per transaction of $19 is a fair amount of friction - https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction

>Cost per transaction of $19 is a fair amount of friction

Haha, I have no idea what that chart is talking about. It might be in cents. Even then, it seems expensive.

My phone client uses a ~$0.05 fee, I think.

All fees are optional. Your transaction might just take longer without one.

There are about 500 transactions per block; each block contains 25BTC + fees (the fees are negligible at the moment). At the current price of $350/BTC that means that the revenue per transaction is 25*350/500 = $17, which means that the cost per transaction should be around that area. This means that the low transaction fee is actually massively subsidized by the fixed block reward.

Yeah, just thinking about that fee graph. I have no idea of the transaction size it is based on and without that it is pretty useless.