4 ms·

This is the one thing that I actually thought cryptocurrency would help - getting small adhoc payments out from under the bootheel of Mastercard and Visa, and e

This is the one thing that I actually thought cryptocurrency would help - getting small adhoc payments out from under the bootheel of Mastercard and Visa, and especially for international transfers that cross between, say, the MC/Visa duopoly regions into other ones like the Asian ecosystems. But instead it's slow, inconsistent, inconvenient, balkanised, dripping with scams, criminals and bad actors and still involves substantial transfer fees and volatility on top of that. At this point it's a market for lemons: any new cryptocurrency venture is almost entirely indistinguishable from something that already ended up being at best a non-starter, but often just a scam. As a vehicle for speculation, arbitrage and scams, it's a masterpiece. As a currency (you know, like in the name), it's, put lightly, not great, especially if you live in the developed world.

interactivecode 2y ago
Fully agree. We should just settle on a single internet currency thats fast, interoperable and not a market for speculation. Hmm perhaps we don’t need more types of currency? Perhaps it’s better to push deep integration of modern banking changes like psd2, psd3 and others. Across the whole internet. So everyone can just do regular payments with their own bank in a safe and protected way, and hopefully with less intermediaries.
- grues-dinner 2y ago
  Yes, indeed. The thing is MasterCard, Visa and all their foreign counterparts actually do provide a lot of value in keeping the ecosystem relatively safe for normal people. When I see a contactless touch point in a shop, I know it's almost certainly legit. If they didn't, people would just use cash. So there's probably always going to be some kind of transfer or network access fee. It's just that it very much not a competitive market place. Opening up the system to competition, but still within a regulatory framework that prevents it degenerating into a Wild West hotbed of scamming does seem like a good way to achieve some of that. Certainly, the vaunted "free market" should be ensuring that the price of a transaction is pretty close to the cost of providing it, and it clearly is not currently. The problem, or feature, depending on who you ask, is that basically only governments can provide that kind of regulation. Which will always then inject a level of geopolitics into things like which countries you're allowed to buy your blog posts from. And for governments who listen to business over citizens also leads to capture and subversion of the system.
- micropayer 2y ago
  [dead]
- klntsky 2y ago
  Read about chain abstraction and account abstraction for EVM.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > and not a market for speculation. That's the bit I don't know how to solve. I have a feeling it may not be solvable in principle, only mitigated if we could get trading on the thing turned into a crime. You'd still have black market trading, but hopefully much more limited in its impact on ordinary use.
  - radicalriddler 2y ago
    Even modern currency isn't free of being a market for speculation. It's not as extreme as cryptocurrency, but forex trading is a thing, and honestly the sways of USD to other currencies are meaninful enough to take into consideration when moving money internationally.
- noch 2y ago
  > We should just settle on a single internet currency that's fast, interoperable and not a market for speculation. With respect to crypto, a "single currency" shouldn't be a prerequisite because, with a $3T mcap, crypto has plenty of liquidity across centralized and decentralized exchanges to allow anyone to convert between any currencies they have on-chain. (Uniswap for instance has $1B - $6B volume transacted daily.) Declaring a single currency would also be antithetical to free market competition for currencies. > interoperable If "interoperable" means you can use the currency anywhere, then I think liquidity for currency conversion is sufficient. That said, we already have dollar (USD) stablecoins[^0] on all major L1, L2, rollup blockchains. Because they are pegged to the U.S. dollar, they also meet your requirement that the currency not be speculative (Strictly speaking, the U.S. dollar is inflationary and therefore is subject to speculation, but perhaps I'm being pedantic.). > fast Rollups[^3] provide fast transactions. These use various cryptographic protocols to verifiably and quickly batch and compress user operations on-chain. > deep integration of modern banking changes "Deep integration of modern banking" sounds good but modern banking creates a choke point[^1] where users can be targeted and denied services. Ultimately we would want to be able to stay on-chain for all payments and not need off-ramps which leave users open to debanking[^2] or surveillance. Crypto is permissionless and, with little effort from the user, censorship resistant. --- [^0]: https://castleisland.vc/writing/stablecoins-the-emerging-market-story/ https://castleisland.vc/writing/stablecoins-the-emerging-mar... "Stablecoins – tokenized representations of fiat currencies circulating on blockchains 1 – are unambiguously the “killer app” of crypto so far. There are over $160 billion worth of stablecoins in circulation today, up from single digit billions as recently as 2020. Over 20 million addresses make a stablecoin transaction on public blockchains every month. And in the first half of 2024, stablecoins settled (according to our adjusted estimates) over $2.6 trillion dollars worth of value. Stablecoins offer considerable advantages relative to existing payment systems, including native programmability, strong auditability properties, fast settlement, the ability to self-custody, and native interoperability" [^1]: https://www.piratewires.com/p/2023-banking-crisis https://www.piratewires.com/p/2023-banking-crisis "Beginning in 2013, Choke Point was a scheme which sought to marginalize specific industries operating legally — not through lawmaking, but by applying pressure via the banking sector." [^2]: https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1862950205252874552 https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1862950205252874552 "[T]he FDIC and other financial regulators had secretly imposed a 15 percent cap on deposits at banks for crypto-related firms." [^3]: https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >Fully agree. We should just settle on a single internet currency thats fast, interoperable and not a market for speculation. I wish we would all agree to just go back to mostly using paypal (or venmo, zelle, etc) for online shit and leave crypto out of it. The only advantage to crypto is anonymity, and possibly the ability to send smaller fractional payments, but honestly the existing non-crypto solutions could come up with solutions to those things.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
cxr 2y ago
Keybase's integration with XLM was pretty great. It's too bad the community revolted for reasons that amounted to a form of begging the question about the things you list here.
havnagiggle 2y ago
There are options, however just saying anything is going to get you labeled as a shill heh. You're right that any new crypto is indistinguishable, but that is part of the risk in trying to outlast the rest. Some crypto that have survived should be worth more for hitting some of these milestones, but unfortunately that still isn't reflected in the top 10/20/100 because people are so desperate they throw cash at anything that moves. The convenience of the scamming is partly why it _is_ a solution to this problem: people can transfer value as fast as they desire, and it works. There is also just a problem off on and off-boarding where you get hit by Visa/Mastercard level of fees. So is it really solving the problem at that point? One area I would like to see is some kind of governed/regulated profit sharing. Basically giving your votes to content/production and this puts it on the books for some fraction of payment. You get X shares to distribute to content regularly. It would also be helpful if our government would provide support for independent producers where there's a clear trackable benefit (e.g. open source libraries that a ton of people rely on and a business can say "yes I need this, help them keep doing it").
echelon 2y ago
I have a friend claiming bitcoin is a "store of value, tool for the de-banked (politically right), hedge against the rapidly inflating dollar, more valuable than gold" (paraphrasing). He further claims that "bitcoin can't be faked like 'uninspected' gold reserves" that are supposedly just "painted iron ingots". I want to scream. This is a speculative investment with more bad actors involved than the SEC has investigated throughout its entire history. I hate these bitcoin boom cycles. It's like all the lessons learned immediately get forgotten. Him: "But this time is different. Last time the Democrats were holding it back. Trump is going to make a strategic crypto reserve. Trump and his allies are all pro-crypto. The Democratic party was trying to regulate it away." I guess this will be the next lesson.
- jeremyjh 2y ago
  Notice he isn't claiming its a currency, even if we take all the claims at face value. Apparently he is not alone though as the value has climbed 33% since the election. I had not even heard of this fantasy of a TrUmP crypto boom.
  - jarsin 2y ago
    Trump just promoted David Sacks to the position of Crypto/AI Czar. You can't make this up. I will give Trump credit for putting AI and Crypto in the same department though.
- m348e912 2y ago
  He might be right in some ways about Bitcoin but he fails to take into account that the price of Bitcoin may be inflated by Tether, a stable coin traded in large numbers for Bitcoin. New tether is minted by the billions, and has questionable auditing and oversight, and is used to buy Bitcoin on the open market. There a couple of ways that the price of Bitcoin could drop precipitously and the unraveling of Tether is one of them.
hugs 2y ago
I think this is a good application for the Lightning Network, specifically if people use a Lightning Address where the address uses the same domain as the URL of the webpage. There are a lot of people in Lightning world who also hate scams (and any other crypto coin for that matter) and just want to make this work as money (and already have). A real-world example where Lightning Network is already working is Nostr. It's not hard to get a Nostr client with built-in Lightning functionality (like Primal) and start "zapping" tiny payments to others. I'm not affiliated with Primal, just a fan, and a developer who wants to see a system like this work.
- kordlessagain 2y ago
  Don’t forget the l402 stuff!
atoav 2y ago
I am not sure if people are aware, but with SEPA you can transfer money to other peoples account without any fee (depending on where you live of course). Only downside is that you have to reveal your account data online. I know a guy who runs an online shop with a single product and it is a static website saying "Transfer 12 € to the following bank account with the following subject and your name/address" — apparently this works quite well since the mid 90s. The website still uses frames for its layout and has animated gif flags.
- unilynx 2y ago
  SEPA is not free - it's just often free for consumers (and likely until your bank considers your usage patterns to be 'too business like') and it can't be free.. even though the systems might have no further marginal cost per transaction, banks still need to do anti-money laundering checks, and someone's gotta pay for that
klntsky 2y ago
Have you seen the fees on ethereum L2s? Your opinion may be slightly outdated, I wouldn't consider a single digit number of cents a large fee
- michaelt 2y ago
  I buy a magazine where $3 gets you 114 short articles, each about 1/3rd of a page. So I'm paying 2.6¢ per article, if I read every single one. Some people dream of 'micropayments' at a similar price point. Being able to buy a single article for about 2.6¢.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    And that's probably around the price point that people mean by micropayments. It's not $1 per article. And that's probably an exhausting amount of mental transaction costs as Clay Shirky observed ages ago and probably not a sustainable revenue stream for producers. For consumers, a subscription model seems to fit the bill for most people but some media are apparently better suited than others.
  - cadamsau 2y ago
    True, but that’s made possible by the aggregator (the publisher who’s printed the magazine) This dream of eliminating that middle-person is still a dream.
  - Retric 2y ago
    My dream is for ~5c micropayments, where the money goes either goes to the publisher or a charity depending on if I liked it after the fact. Basically fighting low quality clickbait without the publisher being able to tell which I specifically did.
- daveguy 2y ago
  Single digit cents is not a large fee, but blockchain fees are dynamic. And the more traffic, the more expensive. I would not appreciate if that 2.6 cents suddenly became $2.60. Also the maximum number of transactions for Bitcoin (not sure etherium) is about 10/s. Processors like Visa and MasterCard process thousands of transactions per second. And if every article read is another transaction that would need at least 1-2 orders of magnitude more transactions. The way I see it, blockchain is a broken model for micro payments. If I am missing something, please let me know.
ghaff 2y ago
There were probably some useful concepts and possibilities in the blockchain space but they became so intermixed with the crypto-scum that the whole area became toxic.
- ghaff 2y ago
  And one effect of that is that the energy/investment level of legit promoters of blockchain has gone down while other promoters have stayed the same or increased.
shark_laser 2y ago
Check out Lightning Network, Nostr, and Zaps.

interactivecode 2y ago

Fully agree. We should just settle on a single internet currency thats fast, interoperable and not a market for speculation. Hmm perhaps we don’t need more types of currency? Perhaps it’s better to push deep integration of modern banking changes like psd2, psd3 and others. Across the whole internet. So everyone can just do regular payments with their own bank in a safe and protected way, and hopefully with less intermediaries.

grues-dinner 2y ago
Yes, indeed. The thing is MasterCard, Visa and all their foreign counterparts actually do provide a lot of value in keeping the ecosystem relatively safe for normal people. When I see a contactless touch point in a shop, I know it's almost certainly legit. If they didn't, people would just use cash. So there's probably always going to be some kind of transfer or network access fee. It's just that it very much not a competitive market place. Opening up the system to competition, but still within a regulatory framework that prevents it degenerating into a Wild West hotbed of scamming does seem like a good way to achieve some of that. Certainly, the vaunted "free market" should be ensuring that the price of a transaction is pretty close to the cost of providing it, and it clearly is not currently. The problem, or feature, depending on who you ask, is that basically only governments can provide that kind of regulation. Which will always then inject a level of geopolitics into things like which countries you're allowed to buy your blog posts from. And for governments who listen to business over citizens also leads to capture and subversion of the system.
micropayer 2y ago
[dead]
klntsky 2y ago
Read about chain abstraction and account abstraction for EVM.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> and not a market for speculation. That's the bit I don't know how to solve. I have a feeling it may not be solvable in principle, only mitigated if we could get trading on the thing turned into a crime. You'd still have black market trading, but hopefully much more limited in its impact on ordinary use.
- radicalriddler 2y ago
  Even modern currency isn't free of being a market for speculation. It's not as extreme as cryptocurrency, but forex trading is a thing, and honestly the sways of USD to other currencies are meaninful enough to take into consideration when moving money internationally.
noch 2y ago
> We should just settle on a single internet currency that's fast, interoperable and not a market for speculation. With respect to crypto, a "single currency" shouldn't be a prerequisite because, with a $3T mcap, crypto has plenty of liquidity across centralized and decentralized exchanges to allow anyone to convert between any currencies they have on-chain. (Uniswap for instance has $1B - $6B volume transacted daily.) Declaring a single currency would also be antithetical to free market competition for currencies. > interoperable If "interoperable" means you can use the currency anywhere, then I think liquidity for currency conversion is sufficient. That said, we already have dollar (USD) stablecoins[^0] on all major L1, L2, rollup blockchains. Because they are pegged to the U.S. dollar, they also meet your requirement that the currency not be speculative (Strictly speaking, the U.S. dollar is inflationary and therefore is subject to speculation, but perhaps I'm being pedantic.). > fast Rollups[^3] provide fast transactions. These use various cryptographic protocols to verifiably and quickly batch and compress user operations on-chain. > deep integration of modern banking changes "Deep integration of modern banking" sounds good but modern banking creates a choke point[^1] where users can be targeted and denied services. Ultimately we would want to be able to stay on-chain for all payments and not need off-ramps which leave users open to debanking[^2] or surveillance. Crypto is permissionless and, with little effort from the user, censorship resistant. --- [^0]: https://castleisland.vc/writing/stablecoins-the-emerging-market-story/ https://castleisland.vc/writing/stablecoins-the-emerging-mar... "Stablecoins – tokenized representations of fiat currencies circulating on blockchains 1 – are unambiguously the “killer app” of crypto so far. There are over $160 billion worth of stablecoins in circulation today, up from single digit billions as recently as 2020. Over 20 million addresses make a stablecoin transaction on public blockchains every month. And in the first half of 2024, stablecoins settled (according to our adjusted estimates) over $2.6 trillion dollars worth of value. Stablecoins offer considerable advantages relative to existing payment systems, including native programmability, strong auditability properties, fast settlement, the ability to self-custody, and native interoperability" [^1]: https://www.piratewires.com/p/2023-banking-crisis https://www.piratewires.com/p/2023-banking-crisis "Beginning in 2013, Choke Point was a scheme which sought to marginalize specific industries operating legally — not through lawmaking, but by applying pressure via the banking sector." [^2]: https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1862950205252874552 https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1862950205252874552 "[T]he FDIC and other financial regulators had secretly imposed a 15 percent cap on deposits at banks for crypto-related firms." [^3]: https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary
Suppafly 2y ago
>Fully agree. We should just settle on a single internet currency thats fast, interoperable and not a market for speculation. I wish we would all agree to just go back to mostly using paypal (or venmo, zelle, etc) for online shit and leave crypto out of it. The only advantage to crypto is anonymity, and possibly the ability to send smaller fractional payments, but honestly the existing non-crypto solutions could come up with solutions to those things.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

cxr 2y ago

Keybase's integration with XLM was pretty great. It's too bad the community revolted for reasons that amounted to a form of begging the question about the things you list here.

havnagiggle 2y ago

There are options, however just saying anything is going to get you labeled as a shill heh. You're right that any new crypto is indistinguishable, but that is part of the risk in trying to outlast the rest. Some crypto that have survived should be worth more for hitting some of these milestones, but unfortunately that still isn't reflected in the top 10/20/100 because people are so desperate they throw cash at anything that moves. The convenience of the scamming is partly why it _is_ a solution to this problem: people can transfer value as fast as they desire, and it works. There is also just a problem off on and off-boarding where you get hit by Visa/Mastercard level of fees. So is it really solving the problem at that point? One area I would like to see is some kind of governed/regulated profit sharing. Basically giving your votes to content/production and this puts it on the books for some fraction of payment. You get X shares to distribute to content regularly. It would also be helpful if our government would provide support for independent producers where there's a clear trackable benefit (e.g. open source libraries that a ton of people rely on and a business can say "yes I need this, help them keep doing it").

echelon 2y ago

I have a friend claiming bitcoin is a "store of value, tool for the de-banked (politically right), hedge against the rapidly inflating dollar, more valuable than gold" (paraphrasing). He further claims that "bitcoin can't be faked like 'uninspected' gold reserves" that are supposedly just "painted iron ingots". I want to scream. This is a speculative investment with more bad actors involved than the SEC has investigated throughout its entire history. I hate these bitcoin boom cycles. It's like all the lessons learned immediately get forgotten. Him: "But this time is different. Last time the Democrats were holding it back. Trump is going to make a strategic crypto reserve. Trump and his allies are all pro-crypto. The Democratic party was trying to regulate it away." I guess this will be the next lesson.

jeremyjh 2y ago
Notice he isn't claiming its a currency, even if we take all the claims at face value. Apparently he is not alone though as the value has climbed 33% since the election. I had not even heard of this fantasy of a TrUmP crypto boom.
- jarsin 2y ago
  Trump just promoted David Sacks to the position of Crypto/AI Czar. You can't make this up. I will give Trump credit for putting AI and Crypto in the same department though.
m348e912 2y ago
He might be right in some ways about Bitcoin but he fails to take into account that the price of Bitcoin may be inflated by Tether, a stable coin traded in large numbers for Bitcoin. New tether is minted by the billions, and has questionable auditing and oversight, and is used to buy Bitcoin on the open market. There a couple of ways that the price of Bitcoin could drop precipitously and the unraveling of Tether is one of them.

hugs 2y ago

I think this is a good application for the Lightning Network, specifically if people use a Lightning Address where the address uses the same domain as the URL of the webpage. There are a lot of people in Lightning world who also hate scams (and any other crypto coin for that matter) and just want to make this work as money (and already have). A real-world example where Lightning Network is already working is Nostr. It's not hard to get a Nostr client with built-in Lightning functionality (like Primal) and start "zapping" tiny payments to others. I'm not affiliated with Primal, just a fan, and a developer who wants to see a system like this work.

kordlessagain 2y ago
Don’t forget the l402 stuff!

atoav 2y ago

I am not sure if people are aware, but with SEPA you can transfer money to other peoples account without any fee (depending on where you live of course). Only downside is that you have to reveal your account data online. I know a guy who runs an online shop with a single product and it is a static website saying "Transfer 12 € to the following bank account with the following subject and your name/address" — apparently this works quite well since the mid 90s. The website still uses frames for its layout and has animated gif flags.

unilynx 2y ago
SEPA is not free - it's just often free for consumers (and likely until your bank considers your usage patterns to be 'too business like') and it can't be free.. even though the systems might have no further marginal cost per transaction, banks still need to do anti-money laundering checks, and someone's gotta pay for that

klntsky 2y ago

Have you seen the fees on ethereum L2s? Your opinion may be slightly outdated, I wouldn't consider a single digit number of cents a large fee

michaelt 2y ago
I buy a magazine where $3 gets you 114 short articles, each about 1/3rd of a page. So I'm paying 2.6¢ per article, if I read every single one. Some people dream of 'micropayments' at a similar price point. Being able to buy a single article for about 2.6¢.
- ghaff 2y ago
  And that's probably around the price point that people mean by micropayments. It's not $1 per article. And that's probably an exhausting amount of mental transaction costs as Clay Shirky observed ages ago and probably not a sustainable revenue stream for producers. For consumers, a subscription model seems to fit the bill for most people but some media are apparently better suited than others.
- cadamsau 2y ago
  True, but that’s made possible by the aggregator (the publisher who’s printed the magazine) This dream of eliminating that middle-person is still a dream.
- Retric 2y ago
  My dream is for ~5c micropayments, where the money goes either goes to the publisher or a charity depending on if I liked it after the fact. Basically fighting low quality clickbait without the publisher being able to tell which I specifically did.
daveguy 2y ago
Single digit cents is not a large fee, but blockchain fees are dynamic. And the more traffic, the more expensive. I would not appreciate if that 2.6 cents suddenly became $2.60. Also the maximum number of transactions for Bitcoin (not sure etherium) is about 10/s. Processors like Visa and MasterCard process thousands of transactions per second. And if every article read is another transaction that would need at least 1-2 orders of magnitude more transactions. The way I see it, blockchain is a broken model for micro payments. If I am missing something, please let me know.

ghaff 2y ago

There were probably some useful concepts and possibilities in the blockchain space but they became so intermixed with the crypto-scum that the whole area became toxic.

ghaff 2y ago
And one effect of that is that the energy/investment level of legit promoters of blockchain has gone down while other promoters have stayed the same or increased.

shark_laser 2y ago

Check out Lightning Network, Nostr, and Zaps.