7 ms·

Solana Pay

46 points by haberdasher 5y ago

gdsdfe 5y ago
virtual or fabricated scarcity is dumbest notion I've ever came across
drusepth 5y ago
>Before the customer leaves the store, two tokens appear in her digital wallet. The first is an NFT version of her new sneakers, usable in any game or virtual world she chooses. The second is an authenticated NFT receipt, which admits her into your exclusive online community of verified sneaker-lovers. The first is an unobtainable, unrealistic goal that ultimately sours the idea of NFTs in the eyes of anyone that bought into them, thinking it was possible (or even viable to somehow encourage every game/world developer to put in the unpaid work to support arbitrary meshes, textures, mappings, animations, etc). The second could have been an email, or even just a URL/code on the receipt.
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  > The first is an unobtainable, unrealistic goal that ultimately sours the idea of NFTs in the eyes of anyone that bought into them, thinking it was possible (or even viable to somehow encourage every game/world developer to put in the unpaid work to support arbitrary meshes, textures, mappings, animations, etc). While "any" is doing a lot of work, there will be a gigantic secondary market for certain brands that will certainly warrant the time to have designers create assets for certain games. Supreme / Gucci / Louis Vuitton / etc. Buy the apparel and own it for free by selling the NFT to a perpetually-online goofball with a credit card.
  - drusepth 5y ago
    I'm still dubious behind the economics of even high-value NFTs finding their way into _some_ games. Assume I own a game studio and someone (say, Louis Vuitton) wants to convince me to add a purse NFT to one of my games. Unless they pay me to do so, I'm not going to dedicate the several-person workload (between artists, shader techs, QA, and production) necessary to implement that asset into the game for a single user unless they pay me to do so. This seems like a reasonable requirement on my end (and although there may be a company or two that might warrant the "free" work, the vast majority will not). Therefore, Louis Vuitton now has a "cost" for their otherwise-free value-add NFT -- which can now be multiplied by the number of game studios they need to convince to add their NFT(s) to their game(s). Obviously, this can't scale to "any" game in the current industry (e.g. literally thousands of incompatible engines in use during any year's new releases) and also increases in cost over time as more games come out and/or older games would get updated. This is also also for Louis Vutton -- I'm even less incentivized to spend more and more manhours implementing NFTs for smaller and smaller brands, and every brand that requests their NFT(s) added to my game(s) is competing in a zero-sum game against eng resources being put towards, well, real work that generates ongoing revenue for the company. In the current industry, there would be literally hundreds of thousands of manhours required (if not more) to add a single NFT to "any" game, and still a significant amount of that to add a single NFT to "some" games. The primary beneficiary of adding NFTs to a game is Louis Vutton (with a value-add on purse sales) -- not the studio that actually has to do the hard work to implement it. So... why would they?
    - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      Companies are already paying millions of dollars for advertising in games. You don't think there's value in Supreme selling a sweater and giving people an NFT with any purchase that they can redeem for a set of gear in Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto Online that they can then resell to anyone they want? You can create a smart contract that remits a portion of any sale to any address you want, meaning that all of their participating partners can get a cut of any NFT resale going forward too. And the best part is that unlike in-game merch which is meant to be consumer-grade and affordable, there's no reason to do this with NFTs. There are TONS of people with huge bank accounts who game and just need a reason to spend money. Gaming is the perfect market for this because there are SO MANY people willing to spend money on non-functional items. How much money has Fortnite alone made for Epic despite the fact that everything they sell in that game is purely aesthetic? I wouldn't be surprised if The Elder Scrolls Online is making as much from their Crown Store purchases for people to decorate their online houses as they do from selling their monthly subscription. Randoms on the internet became multimillionaires simply for selling and renting out CS:GO skins. It won't take "hundreds of thousands of hours" to add an NFT to a game. You check the blockchain when you load up the game to validate ownership of the asset type (or even just periodically) and you're done. The rest of the time is on art and production. You're talking maybe $10-15K worth of investments that will easily make 2-3 times that for the company when the NFTs change hands the first time. Eventually there will just be standard libraries created by a third party that gets slapped onto the loading screen just like all the different bits and pieces of the engines running the games people play.
joelp 5y ago
I don't see anything good about this or Solana, it is still a centralised ponzi scheme like the rest of all the crypto coins. How can Solana be the next Visa if it keeps going down every time. If this system is going down now, it certainly cannot scale when more people use it.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  While I agree with you, I like the improvement in Solana of verifying transactions on the GPU. I wish Bitcoin would do the same at least for signatures. We’ve reached the frequency scaling limit of CPUs, and the protocols we use should reflect the direction hardware improvements have taken.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  All of these fintechs (Solana, Paypal/Venmo, etc) are racing for relevance before the Federal Reserve's instant payment system goes live next year. Transactions will settle almost immediately, and each transfer costs a penny. Initially, the transfer limit will be $100k, with the eventual goal of $500k (with FedWire remaining as the product for transfers above those limits). With regards to international transfers, [Transfer]Wise and OFX have shown the way forward (not just cost of course, but also UX), and from there it should be a race to commoditization of that model. https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_faq.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_faq.htm https://www.frbservices.org/binaries/content/assets/crsocms/financial-services/fednow/fednow-product-sheet.pdf https://www.frbservices.org/binaries/content/assets/crsocms/... https://explore.fednow.org/explore-the-city?id=3&building=news-center&postId=3&postTitle=fednow-service-pricing-approach https://explore.fednow.org/explore-the-city?id=3&building=ne...
  - donclark 5y ago
    What does this mean for credit card companies (no longer charging per transaction), checking accounts (does this help to further kill checks), Western Union (how does their business survive), Gemini/Coinbase (what is the impact of their marketplace), MetaMask (niche coins only), etc?
meepmorp 5y ago
> Before the customer leaves the store, two tokens appear in her digital wallet. The first is an NFT version of her new sneakers, usable in any game or virtual world she chooses. The second is an authenticated NFT receipt, which admits her into your exclusive online community of verified sneaker-lovers. She’s now a customer for life. What comes after jumping the shark?
vorpalhex 5y ago
> Nine months later, the next version of her favorite sneaker drops. Her digital wallet has a new offer reminding her of their availability at your store, along with a personalized offer on new laces she can’t find anywhere else. Oh good, that's what I want - a currency that includes spam as a feature. That was really missing from cash. > We believe this will pave the way for a future where digital currencies are prevalent and digital money moves through the internet like data – uncensored and without intermediaries taxing every transaction. Chargebacks and anti-money laundering rules are features. "crypto is a tax avoidance scheme" is not a sales pitch, it's conspiracy to commit a crime. > settling immediately with costs measured in fractions of a penny So like an intermediary party charging a tax? > this is about a vision where all currencies – including U.S. dollars – are on-chain Convenient for tracking people! Also terrible for the environment. > When a customer buys something, it’s a vote of support. A merchant should reward that support with personalized offers, on-chain loyalty programs, and unique virtual goods to accompany physical purchases I'd really settle for just getting the widget I bought and not being spammed. Really. I promise. Please stop spamming me. > Merchants should benefit from all of the advantages that on-chain decentralized payments can provide, such as network cost savings, DeFi yield generation, zero fraud liability, instant settlement, and ownership of the customer relationship. Merchants should have fraud liability. If you are enabling fraud and money laundering, you need to pay for that - potentially with jail time. > Help us bring to life a decentralized payments network that will define this next era of payments. Another clueless middleman who wants a piece of the pie by helping others commit crime and avoid liability for their actions. Adding funny new words does not make your thing not a security. Ignoring regulations does not make you immune to punishment. Lofty ideas do not make you a hero.
- lawrenceyan 5y ago
  Sometimes I forget that the Gell-Mann amnesia effect exists, which is concerning given how much weight I give to HN's comment section. I implore you to read the article for yourself at least if you haven't yet.
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    I literally quoted the article as I responded to it. What part of it do you think I missed? Are you sure you read the article?
chrismatic 5y ago
Seems like I get to be the first to post the standards meme: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ Except that this standard comes free of charge with the Pandora's box of crypto applications. Lovely.
jawns 5y ago
> Before the customer leaves the store, two tokens appear in her digital wallet. The first is an NFT version of her new sneakers, usable in any game or virtual world she chooses. The second is an authenticated NFT receipt, which admits her into your exclusive online community of verified sneaker-lovers. She’s now a customer for life. This leads me to wonder: Why would I want an NFT of my sneakers in a game or virtual world, rather than just, say, a representation of the sneakers themselves, minus the NFT? I suspect it's because this introduces scarcity into the virtual world. There's no technical reason why every character in the game couldn't have the same pair of sneakers modeled on a real-life sneaker. But if you need an NFT tied to a physical purchase, now that virtual pair of sneakers costs you $99, and you can walk around that virtual world knowing that your fashion can't be easily (or inexpensively) replicated. This definitely has classist implications. As for the exclusive online community of verified sneaker-lovers, note the words "exclusive" and "verified." It's a gatekeeping method so you don't have to associate with the hoi palloi who might love sneakers just as much as you, but don't have the cash to buy enough to get into the exclusive community. And who's going to build or maintain this community? Solana is enticing you with visions of an ecosystem, but it's not actually going to build that ecosystem.
- MikeDelta 5y ago
  > Solana is enticing you with visions of an ecosystem, but it's not actually going to build that ecosystem. Indeed, it will only make sure to get a cut of the profits.
endominus 5y ago
>Nine months later, the next version of her favorite sneaker drops. Her digital wallet has a new offer reminding her of their availability at your store, along with a personalized offer on new laces she can’t find anywhere else. They're seriously pitching "ads get sent directly to your wallet" as a positive feature. This is so comically, tragically misguided I don't know whether to laugh or cry. This is future indeed. Because, after all, a major weakness in mere credit card transactions is you don't have a relationship with your customer. In our crypto-future, they won't have a choice! Isn't that what you want? Comforting your customer every time they have a bad breakup with an algorithmically optimized offer for some ice cream and emotional shopping? Maybe try to associate your brand with their good feelings by sending a couple messages about the smooth, refreshing taste of your soft drink at their child's football game? Without your customer offering you a contact method, how could you possibly target them so effectively and personally? The more I learn about crypto the ickier it gets.
- pxue 5y ago
  They're pitching the entire human existence will be nothing more than perpetual "waiting for the next sneaker drop"
TimJRobinson 5y ago
Why Solana over a zkSync / Starkware based solution? Payment networks cannot go down and Solana is going to continue to buckle under high load (or now just drop your transaction in QoS). I guess this project was started before discovering Solana has massive stability problems.
KyleBrandt 5y ago
Seems pretty hard to connect those claims to the docs https://docs.solanapay.com/spec https://docs.solanapay.com/spec "A standard protocol to encode Solana transaction requests within URLs to enable payments and other use cases"
omeze 5y ago
I feel like launching this comes with a really fundamental misunderstanding around the role of a platform. If Solana is just going to launch products why would developers build on top of it knowing the platform owner (de-facto) controls the roadmap? This works for existing systems like Visa only because Visa is already large and the most accepted network (and in fact, Visa was initially a consortium of banks, as was Mastercard) -- and even then, Visa faces pressure on all fronts from ACH, p2p, and crypto networks which developers will flock to if integration is easier and user-accepted. I would be just as shocked/skeptical if Visa believed it could build an enduring supply of Visa-specific apps and developers in a way that mimics e.g. iOS/Windows. When a platform has a hard supply-side to build out (in this case, developers and apps) making the platform owner a competitor seems incredibly short-sighted. IIRC, Intel famously refused to get into end-user devices like calculators because of this exact dynamic.
- magicjosh 5y ago
  Appreciate the insightful comment. I also wonder why this is a Solana-developed product. Imagine if Ethereum launched EtherPay, or Bitcoin launched Bitcoin Pay. Seems strange to compete with your own developers like that. I'm not familiar with the details of Solana. Anyone more familiar with the project who can explain?
jitl 5y ago
I can’t wait for this future nightmare cyberpunk world straight our dystopian sci-fi warned us of.
mawadev 5y ago
This fan fiction was hard to read, but it really catches the atmosphere of dystopia, 7.5/10

Solana Pay

46 points by haberdasher 5y ago

gdsdfe 5y ago

virtual or fabricated scarcity is dumbest notion I've ever came across

drusepth 5y ago

MisterBastahrd 5y ago
> The first is an unobtainable, unrealistic goal that ultimately sours the idea of NFTs in the eyes of anyone that bought into them, thinking it was possible (or even viable to somehow encourage every game/world developer to put in the unpaid work to support arbitrary meshes, textures, mappings, animations, etc). While "any" is doing a lot of work, there will be a gigantic secondary market for certain brands that will certainly warrant the time to have designers create assets for certain games. Supreme / Gucci / Louis Vuitton / etc. Buy the apparel and own it for free by selling the NFT to a perpetually-online goofball with a credit card.
- drusepth 5y ago
  I'm still dubious behind the economics of even high-value NFTs finding their way into _some_ games. Assume I own a game studio and someone (say, Louis Vuitton) wants to convince me to add a purse NFT to one of my games. Unless they pay me to do so, I'm not going to dedicate the several-person workload (between artists, shader techs, QA, and production) necessary to implement that asset into the game for a single user unless they pay me to do so. This seems like a reasonable requirement on my end (and although there may be a company or two that might warrant the "free" work, the vast majority will not). Therefore, Louis Vuitton now has a "cost" for their otherwise-free value-add NFT -- which can now be multiplied by the number of game studios they need to convince to add their NFT(s) to their game(s). Obviously, this can't scale to "any" game in the current industry (e.g. literally thousands of incompatible engines in use during any year's new releases) and also increases in cost over time as more games come out and/or older games would get updated. This is also also for Louis Vutton -- I'm even less incentivized to spend more and more manhours implementing NFTs for smaller and smaller brands, and every brand that requests their NFT(s) added to my game(s) is competing in a zero-sum game against eng resources being put towards, well, real work that generates ongoing revenue for the company. In the current industry, there would be literally hundreds of thousands of manhours required (if not more) to add a single NFT to "any" game, and still a significant amount of that to add a single NFT to "some" games. The primary beneficiary of adding NFTs to a game is Louis Vutton (with a value-add on purse sales) -- not the studio that actually has to do the hard work to implement it. So... why would they?
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    Companies are already paying millions of dollars for advertising in games. You don't think there's value in Supreme selling a sweater and giving people an NFT with any purchase that they can redeem for a set of gear in Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto Online that they can then resell to anyone they want? You can create a smart contract that remits a portion of any sale to any address you want, meaning that all of their participating partners can get a cut of any NFT resale going forward too. And the best part is that unlike in-game merch which is meant to be consumer-grade and affordable, there's no reason to do this with NFTs. There are TONS of people with huge bank accounts who game and just need a reason to spend money. Gaming is the perfect market for this because there are SO MANY people willing to spend money on non-functional items. How much money has Fortnite alone made for Epic despite the fact that everything they sell in that game is purely aesthetic? I wouldn't be surprised if The Elder Scrolls Online is making as much from their Crown Store purchases for people to decorate their online houses as they do from selling their monthly subscription. Randoms on the internet became multimillionaires simply for selling and renting out CS:GO skins. It won't take "hundreds of thousands of hours" to add an NFT to a game. You check the blockchain when you load up the game to validate ownership of the asset type (or even just periodically) and you're done. The rest of the time is on art and production. You're talking maybe $10-15K worth of investments that will easily make 2-3 times that for the company when the NFTs change hands the first time. Eventually there will just be standard libraries created by a third party that gets slapped onto the loading screen just like all the different bits and pieces of the engines running the games people play.

joelp 5y ago

I don't see anything good about this or Solana, it is still a centralised ponzi scheme like the rest of all the crypto coins. How can Solana be the next Visa if it keeps going down every time. If this system is going down now, it certainly cannot scale when more people use it.

xiphias2 5y ago
While I agree with you, I like the improvement in Solana of verifying transactions on the GPU. I wish Bitcoin would do the same at least for signatures. We’ve reached the frequency scaling limit of CPUs, and the protocols we use should reflect the direction hardware improvements have taken.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
All of these fintechs (Solana, Paypal/Venmo, etc) are racing for relevance before the Federal Reserve's instant payment system goes live next year. Transactions will settle almost immediately, and each transfer costs a penny. Initially, the transfer limit will be $100k, with the eventual goal of $500k (with FedWire remaining as the product for transfers above those limits). With regards to international transfers, [Transfer]Wise and OFX have shown the way forward (not just cost of course, but also UX), and from there it should be a race to commoditization of that model. https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_faq.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_faq.htm https://www.frbservices.org/binaries/content/assets/crsocms/financial-services/fednow/fednow-product-sheet.pdf https://www.frbservices.org/binaries/content/assets/crsocms/... https://explore.fednow.org/explore-the-city?id=3&building=news-center&postId=3&postTitle=fednow-service-pricing-approach https://explore.fednow.org/explore-the-city?id=3&building=ne...
- donclark 5y ago
  What does this mean for credit card companies (no longer charging per transaction), checking accounts (does this help to further kill checks), Western Union (how does their business survive), Gemini/Coinbase (what is the impact of their marketplace), MetaMask (niche coins only), etc?

meepmorp 5y ago

vorpalhex 5y ago

> Nine months later, the next version of her favorite sneaker drops. Her digital wallet has a new offer reminding her of their availability at your store, along with a personalized offer on new laces she can’t find anywhere else. Oh good, that's what I want - a currency that includes spam as a feature. That was really missing from cash. > We believe this will pave the way for a future where digital currencies are prevalent and digital money moves through the internet like data – uncensored and without intermediaries taxing every transaction. Chargebacks and anti-money laundering rules are features. "crypto is a tax avoidance scheme" is not a sales pitch, it's conspiracy to commit a crime. > settling immediately with costs measured in fractions of a penny So like an intermediary party charging a tax? > this is about a vision where all currencies – including U.S. dollars – are on-chain Convenient for tracking people! Also terrible for the environment. > When a customer buys something, it’s a vote of support. A merchant should reward that support with personalized offers, on-chain loyalty programs, and unique virtual goods to accompany physical purchases I'd really settle for just getting the widget I bought and not being spammed. Really. I promise. Please stop spamming me. > Merchants should benefit from all of the advantages that on-chain decentralized payments can provide, such as network cost savings, DeFi yield generation, zero fraud liability, instant settlement, and ownership of the customer relationship. Merchants should have fraud liability. If you are enabling fraud and money laundering, you need to pay for that - potentially with jail time. > Help us bring to life a decentralized payments network that will define this next era of payments. Another clueless middleman who wants a piece of the pie by helping others commit crime and avoid liability for their actions. Adding funny new words does not make your thing not a security. Ignoring regulations does not make you immune to punishment. Lofty ideas do not make you a hero.

lawrenceyan 5y ago
Sometimes I forget that the Gell-Mann amnesia effect exists, which is concerning given how much weight I give to HN's comment section. I implore you to read the article for yourself at least if you haven't yet.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  I literally quoted the article as I responded to it. What part of it do you think I missed? Are you sure you read the article?

chrismatic 5y ago

Seems like I get to be the first to post the standards meme: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ Except that this standard comes free of charge with the Pandora's box of crypto applications. Lovely.

jawns 5y ago

> Before the customer leaves the store, two tokens appear in her digital wallet. The first is an NFT version of her new sneakers, usable in any game or virtual world she chooses. The second is an authenticated NFT receipt, which admits her into your exclusive online community of verified sneaker-lovers. She’s now a customer for life. This leads me to wonder: Why would I want an NFT of my sneakers in a game or virtual world, rather than just, say, a representation of the sneakers themselves, minus the NFT? I suspect it's because this introduces scarcity into the virtual world. There's no technical reason why every character in the game couldn't have the same pair of sneakers modeled on a real-life sneaker. But if you need an NFT tied to a physical purchase, now that virtual pair of sneakers costs you $99, and you can walk around that virtual world knowing that your fashion can't be easily (or inexpensively) replicated. This definitely has classist implications. As for the exclusive online community of verified sneaker-lovers, note the words "exclusive" and "verified." It's a gatekeeping method so you don't have to associate with the hoi palloi who might love sneakers just as much as you, but don't have the cash to buy enough to get into the exclusive community. And who's going to build or maintain this community? Solana is enticing you with visions of an ecosystem, but it's not actually going to build that ecosystem.

MikeDelta 5y ago
> Solana is enticing you with visions of an ecosystem, but it's not actually going to build that ecosystem. Indeed, it will only make sure to get a cut of the profits.

endominus 5y ago

>Nine months later, the next version of her favorite sneaker drops. Her digital wallet has a new offer reminding her of their availability at your store, along with a personalized offer on new laces she can’t find anywhere else. They're seriously pitching "ads get sent directly to your wallet" as a positive feature. This is so comically, tragically misguided I don't know whether to laugh or cry. This is future indeed. Because, after all, a major weakness in mere credit card transactions is you don't have a relationship with your customer. In our crypto-future, they won't have a choice! Isn't that what you want? Comforting your customer every time they have a bad breakup with an algorithmically optimized offer for some ice cream and emotional shopping? Maybe try to associate your brand with their good feelings by sending a couple messages about the smooth, refreshing taste of your soft drink at their child's football game? Without your customer offering you a contact method, how could you possibly target them so effectively and personally? The more I learn about crypto the ickier it gets.

pxue 5y ago
They're pitching the entire human existence will be nothing more than perpetual "waiting for the next sneaker drop"

TimJRobinson 5y ago

Why Solana over a zkSync / Starkware based solution? Payment networks cannot go down and Solana is going to continue to buckle under high load (or now just drop your transaction in QoS). I guess this project was started before discovering Solana has massive stability problems.

KyleBrandt 5y ago

Seems pretty hard to connect those claims to the docs https://docs.solanapay.com/spec https://docs.solanapay.com/spec "A standard protocol to encode Solana transaction requests within URLs to enable payments and other use cases"

omeze 5y ago

I feel like launching this comes with a really fundamental misunderstanding around the role of a platform. If Solana is just going to launch products why would developers build on top of it knowing the platform owner (de-facto) controls the roadmap? This works for existing systems like Visa only because Visa is already large and the most accepted network (and in fact, Visa was initially a consortium of banks, as was Mastercard) -- and even then, Visa faces pressure on all fronts from ACH, p2p, and crypto networks which developers will flock to if integration is easier and user-accepted. I would be just as shocked/skeptical if Visa believed it could build an enduring supply of Visa-specific apps and developers in a way that mimics e.g. iOS/Windows. When a platform has a hard supply-side to build out (in this case, developers and apps) making the platform owner a competitor seems incredibly short-sighted. IIRC, Intel famously refused to get into end-user devices like calculators because of this exact dynamic.

magicjosh 5y ago
Appreciate the insightful comment. I also wonder why this is a Solana-developed product. Imagine if Ethereum launched EtherPay, or Bitcoin launched Bitcoin Pay. Seems strange to compete with your own developers like that. I'm not familiar with the details of Solana. Anyone more familiar with the project who can explain?

jitl 5y ago

I can’t wait for this future nightmare cyberpunk world straight our dystopian sci-fi warned us of.

mawadev 5y ago

This fan fiction was hard to read, but it really catches the atmosphere of dystopia, 7.5/10