Its main purpose is internet currency. The only serious uses surround that via smart contracts, like decentralized exchanges or provably fair gambling (unsavory as that is). Any time someone says "the currency aspect is separate from blockchain," I'd be wary, seeing how the entire point of blockchain is decentralization via proof of work or stake.
NFTs can make sense in theory as an alternative to the already-popular video game collectibles, as silly as that premise is, but they never really got traction, and again that's related to currency. There's been a lot of vaporware around things like corporate blockchains to track assets, which don't even make sense in theory.
Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security risk. Because of this insane system of credit cards, where you give the other party a "secret" which enables them to take the money from you.
If you could just send the money, the barrier to pay would be 100x lower.
Most websites pay the bills via ads. And make less than $0.001 per visitor. If they could sell a monthly membership for a one-time payment of $1, they would have a way better business model.
There are traditional ways to send money without giving out a secret, like Apple Pay. But there's plenty of fraud in the other direction, people accepting charges with stolen payment info that end up being reversed. It's always a little the merchant's job to decide whose "money is no good here," and that's because of laws.
No, that's not how it works at all. Apple is neither in the authorization nor the transaction clearing/settlement flow.
> How do you pay Apple without giving them a secret?
Credit cards being effectively unrestricted bearer tokens isn't nearly the only way to do payments. For example you could send a signed message to your bank instructing them to pay Apple (in a world in which you'd be paying them; again, Apple Pay is not that).
I think Apple has some special relationship with banks, so it's not this simple. But yeah, one way or another you're trusting Apple Pay, which presumably is more trustworthy than a gas station sale terminal.
And if you were signing your own payments, you'd still have to trust your computing device and the bank.
With crypto, you would not have to trust your computing device nor your bank.
You would send $100 to your computing device every now and then. And use that for day to day spendings. If the device turns out to be malicious, you lost only the $100 and stay away from the brand that made the device.
But you're sending that $100 from another computing device, and if you're not trusting a bank-like entity to hold the cryptocurrency for you, you're responsible for securing all your money on that device without locking yourself out.
On the other hand, having some money outside a bank is nice. I've had them freeze my assets before just cuz they felt like it, until I spent a whole day telling them to fix it.
Having a couple hardware wallets in different places + a paper backup split in a couple pieces gives you enough redundancy not to worry about this. Source: my own experience of close to 10 years now.
Unfortunately I will never be willing to entrust my financial safety solely to an algorithm.
An algorithm cannot be reasoned with, it cannot understand that your house burned down and destroyed your ID. It cannot accept liability for it's actions.
If I lose my bank card I go to a branch, verify my ID, and get a replacement. The bank is liable if they allow somebody other then me access to my accounts, regardless of how convincing the fraudster might have been.
Exactly. I've held large amounts of Bitcoin for years but always been too intimidated by hardware wallets or the fancier security schemes. It takes time to learn and try that stuff to the point of 100% trusting it, and I'd rather be called obtuse than overconfident like this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/TREZOR/comments/s9lgyy/5eth_bounty_...
My solution in the end hinged on a paper recovery phrase, stored in... a bank.
Yes, the barrier is high because paying is a high-friction activity whenever cards are involved. That's why the various quick checkouts are all the rage the past 10 years or so.
This has very little to do with the original claim of "Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security risk". Users have no issues paying for stuff online.
> If you could just send the money, the barrier to pay would be 100x lower.
We can already do that here in Brazil: the web site displays a QR code (plus its contents in text form), the user scans the QR code (or copies the text) into their banking app, and confirms it on the app to send the money.
I hasn't AFAIK made any meaningful difference for websites. What people dislike isn't the inconvenience of credit cards, it's the inconvenience of having any paywall at all.
That was possible 30 years ago. There have been probably been a dozen schemes that tried something like that over the decades, starting with DigiCash from before the WWW existed.
They all failed not because of fees, not because of security concerns, but because even having to think about whether you want to pay for something and how much incurs a mental cost that people avoid.
Free beets cheap by a margin that has nothing to do with how cheap or how easy.
> The day a network exists where you can reliably send like $0.001 of value with little/no fees is the day the internet changes forever.
It will change absolutely nothing whatsoever.
> So many ideas are infeasible right now because CC fees are high, and making any payment is extremely high friction.
Making payments will always be, is inherently high friction, and reducing the amount does nothing below a threshold that is much, much higher than $0.001.
There have been lots and lots of micropayment schemes, and they have all failed because the very fact that there is a payment already introduces mental friction that's effectively higher than current CC fees.
Any idea that is infeasible because there is no way to reliably send $0.001 is in fact easily feasible today by monetizing it some other way, usually via ads.
Lower fees are only relevant for high-volume fully automated transactions with a substantial financial incentive behind them, and those can already be done basically for zero marginal cost, see HFT. The only micropayments that people are willing to engage in individually is when they involve addiction, and that as well can and is already done in gambling apps masquerading as games.
This is something that feels pretty lost in most modern crypto discussion.
It's evident in literally the first line of the bitcoin whitepaper:
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution"
If paying a random person online was as easy as dropping a quarter in a cup the internet could be a very different place.
I think the part about not going through a financial institution is brought up pretty often, but that line doesn't mention the payment being especially small or quick.
> The day a network exists where you can reliably send like $0.001 of value with little/no fees is the day the internet changes forever.
Why do you set the bar at $0.001? Even sending $1 reliably and with low fees (which has been doable with crypto since its inception) would be revolutionary in my opinion.
Then it could be way shittier because every GET request will be monetized. Also your whole browsing history will be public if you're ever tied to a wallet address.
Are you talking about SCT Inst? It seems like there are no fees built into the protocol itself, but your bank can still charge you to use the service, and it seems many banks charge between 1 and 7 euros:
I didn’t mean a specific protocol, just based on my experience. But where do you see 7€ in this document? I see lot of banks offering zero or below 1€ fees. The highest I see is Novo Banco at 5.20€ (page 18).
Besides SEPA which mandated the upper ceiling and an upcoming regulation which forbids banks from de-prioritising payments to/from other banks (can't remember what it's called now) many European countries have had instant bank transfers locally. For example, Swish in Sweden: https://www.swish.nu/about-swish
NFTs make absolutely no sense for video games collectables. As it is, video game collectables work just fine, NFTs add nothing except cost and complexity.
It took work by a large parent company. And I don't know how third-party websites can trade those, but it must mean either Valve is managing an API or people are doing something hacky to work around that.
It's what I said above, it's a lot of work for a new game to create/maintain its own collectibles marketplace that people can trust, and even a well-established game like Counterstrike doesn't properly support third-party trades. Ethereum provides all that out of the box with NFTs.
There's also the issue that Valve controls all the assets, but that's mostly a moot point because they control the game anyway. I guess someone could honor NFT skins in a separate game if they really wanted, but that's getting theoretical.
They can't. There are third party websites but there is no way for them to initiate trades. They work around this bysome crazy peer-to-peer trust-me-bro scheme.
I’ve been paying multiple people and teams remotely via btc in the past years. Even if you can send a wire, sometimes it can be cheaper/easier to send crypto. But in many cases it’s not even possible to send large amounts of money without incurring massive fees (international paypal, western union, etc). Moved hundeds of thousands of dollars this way by now for purely legal economical reasons, helping a bunch of people make money they would not make otherwise.
Edit: relatedly, not everybody wants to pay their local taxes (and who am I to judge people in various life situations?). This itself is a _massive_ saver for the folks. Send somebody $5k usd a couple times and their bank will start asking complicated questions.
Seems pretty easy. My country's tax forms dont distinguish between how you got paid, just that you got paid. Gov doesn't care if it was through a bank, in gold bars, bitcoin, etc (capital gains they care more about of course)
Reading through the page, that sounds super complicated though.
Couldn't the podcasts simply put a lightning invoice (Which is just a string of text I guess?) on their website with a text like "Support us via Lightning: 1f73ac220b9..."?
A lot of the work with Podcasting 2.0 is moving things into apps like Fountain or Castamatic. By all accounts, people are way way more likely to engage if they don't have to leave their app.
There's crypto-less features that Podcasting 2.0 adds like livestream notifications and transcriptions. Apple actually just added transcriptions to their app officially!
What's wrong about the web for listening to podcasts? Why do I need an app?
And couldn't the "Support us via lightning: 1f73ac220b9..." link have a protocol like "lightning://" prefixed, so when the users clicks it, their preferred payment method pops up?
With a regular cryptocurrency they could just post an address or QR code and anyone can send it using a wallet at any time (no need for them to be online or anything).
Lightning allows single sats worth of micro-payments in real-time, perfect for tossing a few bucks someone's way vs. paying much higher fees and waiting for blocks.
The Podcasting 2.0 spec also includes the "Boostgrams" feature allowing you to send messages to the creator with your payment.
Speaking of offline support the recently announced Hedgehog protocol builds off of lightning and is much more asynchronous.
I use it everywhere where it's an option (so not very often, let's say once a month). I also only use privacy services (vpn for example) where you can pay using cryptocurrency, otherwise what's the point
There was a sketchy looking file sharing website where someone had posted some incredibly hard to find audio tracks that I really wanted, but the website required a subscription. Paying with a cc meant automatically-recurring payments, but I paid with bitcoin, got my files, and knew the website couldn’t get any money from me after that.
NFTs can make sense in theory as an alternative to the already-popular video game collectibles, as silly as that premise is, but they never really got traction, and again that's related to currency. There's been a lot of vaporware around things like corporate blockchains to track assets, which don't even make sense in theory.