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Just imagine how different the Internet would look like today if receiving payments would’ve been as easy as receiving email from the beginning. That it is not
by leobg 2y ago
Just imagine how different the Internet would look like today if receiving payments would’ve been as easy as receiving email from the beginning.
That it is not trivial for a single person on the Internet to receive payments without a third-party involved, in my mind, leads directly to an Internet that is based on ads and on monopolies:
You can’t make a living posting stuff online on your own private website. Because since you cannot receive money, any value that you add online can never be translated into value offline. So you need to post on someone else’s site, which then acts as a publisher, and has the economies of scale necessary to make taking payments viable. Or otherwise, you need to monetize your content by placing ads, again, using some middleman, who is big enough to be able to afford access to payments.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- godzillabrennus 2y agoI agree. These middlemen take our work and monetize it never cutting us in (Google, Facebook, X, etc…)
- mgraczyk 2y agoThere's a reason Facebook is printing money and X is not making any (and essentially never has). It's actually not the user generated content that primarily matters for ad revenue. Time spent on the site is necessary but not sufficient
- fragmede 2y ago> essentially never has Twitter generated $3.4 billion in revenue in 2023. That's a helluva money printing machine. About a fourth the size of Facebook's. I don't know how big yours is, but thats bigger than mine. The problem is that, even with such a big money printing machine, if it costs more to operate than it spits out, you don't make money. Twitters problem wasn't getting money, they were getting huge piles of it. It's that they spent more than was coming in. Paying people to make the service happen, especially people to deal with the people who want to give them money to run advertisements, on top of with everything else, was expensive.
- jahabrewer 2y agoYou're saying meta had ~$14 billion in revenue in 2023? I think you're missing a zero...
- mgraczyk 2y agoBy "making money" I mean profit. If you add up only Twitter's good quarters prior to Musk, it's less in total than Meta made in a single quarter in 2016, or roughly 1 month in 2024. Put another way, Meta makes more profit in a week than Twitter was making per quarter at its best
- fragmede 2y agoit's not just not trivial, it's quite cumbersome. but micropayments exist. assume I made some content and users wanted to give me 10 cents for it. if they didn't want to pay the 30 cent visa tax, they'd have to: create a Coinbase account, fund it, buy some crypto, install a wallet, move the crypto to the wallet, and connect the wallet to my website, before finally sending 10 cents my way. even if we handwave that the server side exists, how many users are going to bounce off of that?
- adamtaylor_13 2y agoThere are solutions to this problem that don’t involve crypto.
- TimJRobinson 2y agoOnly needs to be done once though. I tip and buy things all the time with my crypto wallet now, and it's less than a cent per transaction. Just waiting on more sites and stores to support it. Credit cards were also a PITA when they first came out.
- FabHK 2y ago> if receiving payments would’ve been as easy as receiving email from the beginning. In Germany, every business (and some individuals) has published their account number for ages (on the letterhead, website, etc.), typically right next to their address and email address (or fax number, for that matter). And with that account number, you can just transfer money to the recipient. It really is as easy as email.
- Lionga 2y agoIt really is not, and I would assume less 1% of consumer purchases are done using a bank tranfer / account number.
- FabHK 2y agoIn Germany (2021), online purchases were paid by: 33% Bill & bank transfer 20% Direct debit 20% PayPal 11% Credit card 16% various others https://www.handelsblatt.com/finanzen/banken-versicherungen/banken/online-bezahlen-das-sind-die-vor-und-nachteile-von-sofortueberweisungen/26293754.html https://www.handelsblatt.com/finanzen/banken-versicherungen/...
- mcntsh 2y agoImagine you are an sized e-commerce merchant. Someone checks out on your website and sends you a bank transfer. Then what? You go through your ledger (bank account), find the transaction with an order ID as a memo (hopefully the buyer added it and correctly), and then you look up that order in your system and submit the order form to your warehouse?
- bgnn 2y agoIt works like: customer gets an order number and puts this on the description of the bank transfer. This is parsed by the accounting SW coupled to this bank account, and voila! Most banks charge some amount per transaction on commercial accounts though.
- 2y ago
- jahabrewer 2y ago> You can’t make a living posting stuff online on your own private website. There are many counterexamples to this.
- Loughla 2y agoI'm not trying to be stupid but can you name some?
- voiceblue 2y agohttps://www.themarginalian.org/ https://www.themarginalian.org/ has a Bitcoin address for donations on the page, and has received significant donations through that.
- jahabrewer 2y agoBen Thompson and the Air Current guy are two that come to mind
- null0pointer 2y agoThis use case is the entire point of cryptocurrencies. It’s just a shame that there wasn’t more effort spent on improving the UX rather than running the VC playbook on the ecosystem to seize control over it.
- dmalik 2y agoIn Canada we've had email money transfer since 2003. It used to cost $1 if you had a different bank then the person you were sending to but now it's free. Generally only good for friends and marketplace items though. Can't use it for ecommerce.
- bgnn 2y agoWhy isn't it not possible for e-commerce?