[awr]

I'm skeptical about the ecosystem as a whole, despite running a project myself, but a distinction needs to be made between web3 as a technology and web3 in its current iteration.

I do believe there's something there around business model innovations (e.g. near fee-less micro-transactions tied to a crypto identity as a low impedance alternative to SSO). Concretely, if I can jump onto a website and consume content without having to go through the hassle of signing up to a monthly subscription and entering my credit card details, that's a step change improvement in my enjoyment of the web. Want to read a particularly interesting paywalled news article? Sure, pay 25c via crypto wallet (2 clicks), read article, move on.

The other interesting application are the technological innovations brought on by smart contracts. Blockchain-based serverless compute powering dApps. Instead of having to write a lambda on AWS, I can just submit a smart contract to the blockchain. Provided it's a read only use case, I pay once and can freely call the contract for as long as the network exists.

This might seem uninteresting but as the contract gives access to the current state of the blockchain, there are interesting applications that you can build on top of this [1], particularly if you combine it with oracles that give access to real world data.

Crypto as a financial revolution seems incredibly contrived but web3 as a tool has potential merit. Whether web3 is the best solution to such problems is a question worth exploring.

[1]. I use it to determine whether crypto tokens are honeypots or not by simulating a buy and sell.

[Loughla]

>Sure, pay 25c via crypto wallet (2 clicks), read article, move on.

1. Couldn't this be done with just a credit card if companies took micro payments? My browser will save my cc details, so if they accepted micro payments, I could just click one button to get it.

2. Why would companies, who do not accept micropayments now, suddenly accept them just because crypto?

3. Wouldn't I still have to enter information into the system (more than 2 clicks)? Or would everyone just have access to my information all the time?

I don't get why crypto needs to be involved here, or how it forces companies to accept micro-payments.

[awr]

Probably not today but there's a future where this could be done without crypto (hence my comment re whether web3 is the right tech).

1. Fixed payment processing fees make it unfeasible. Minimum credit card fees are 10s of cents, so anything sub a dollar becomes unpractical.

2. Viability of micropayments is proportional to the fees charged by the payment processor. If the processor charges 1c, then 10c micropayments are feasible. If they charge 30c, it makes much more economic sense to charge larger amounts in bulk (as a business, a 40c microtransaction means I'm giving up 75% revenue to the payment processor). Sure, you could always charge in aggregate at the end of the month but the experience to me as a user is worse.

3. What information? If I'm reading an article on a news website, what more information do they need then my wallet address to identify me (if that)? If they require name, that can be linked my wallet address and I can decide whether I give access to that information (no different to SSO today or app store permissions).

Can it be done without crypto? Absolutely, but it requires a lot of change to make it feasible. It's one application that does seem ideally suited to crypto and web3.

[moistly]

> Fixed payment processing fees make it unfeasible. Minimum credit card fees are 10s of cents, so anything sub a dollar becomes unpractical.

VISA could waive those fees tomorrow. And then the rubber would meet the road: who will be more efficient at processing transactions on a global scale, hundreds or thousands of millions of transactions? VISA or a crypto coin?

I’d lay my bet on VISA.

[awr]

Absolutely they could. There's multiple groups that need to come to the party (Stripe, PayPal, Shopify, CC companies, etc). Whether they will without a viable alternative like crypto remains to be seen. Whether there's enough fat for everybody to make a cut remains to be seen.

Crypto does offer (on the surface) an end to end solution to the problem that's not going through multiple companies.

The other side is identity linking. Again, can have a global account with a payment processor like stripe or PayPal that solves that problem though linking to your wallet does seem like a lower impedance opportunity.

I'm not of the opinion that crypto is going to become the new incumbent, but as a technology it presents as a viable alternative to the existing system that could trigger real change.