[Aurornis]

> Senders pay a small fee to send a message. • Relaying devices earn a micro-payment (could be tokens, sats, etc.) for carrying the message one hop further.

The Helium Network tried something like this, but with a fixed infrastructure: People were incentivized to run Helium network nodes and could earn micropayments for running nodes and handling traffic.

It revealed a lot of problems with structures like this, such as the incentive to cheat through various loopholes that were discovered.

It also became apparent that the monetization/tokenization aspect overtook the network functionality as the primary motivator for the project. After a while, people started looking at the traffic and payouts and realized that almost nobody was using it for real communication, it had become one big shell game for collecting the payments designed to incentivize nodes to come online and relay traffic. Then the token itself had become a speculative commodity that people used for trading more than anything.

I think it would be interesting if someone could invent a stable coin cryptocurrency with low overhead that enabled some of these use cases, but it seems the allure of generating a new token that the founders can sell into a speculative market to raise funds for the project is always too alluring, so every project goes from having good intentions to becoming a veiled pump and dump. Maybe some day there will be a stable coin that escapes these issues, but I haven’t seen it yet.

[repeekad]

> I think it would be interesting if someone could invent a stable coin cryptocurrency with low overhead

Like the US dollar and Postgres?

For like $200 anyone can start a business entity in the US with a tax ID and a bank, I’m still yet to understand how crypto is better other than for circumventing regulators

[deweller]

Cryptocurrency transfers are irreversible, publicly verifiable and pseudonymous. For a privacy focused application, these attributes make crypto a better choice than USD and the traditional banking system.

[rtkwe]

Only pseudonymous so far as you never accidentally link yourself to a wallet then everyone can know your entire transfer/spending history. It gets people all the time just look at the investigations into various alt coin rug pulls or other fraud.

Irreversible is also not a good thing just ask anyone who had their NFTs stolen during that craze. If someone hacks my bank account or skims my card and transfers the money out the bank can reverse a lot of those transactions. Irreversibility wipes out decades of consumer protection advances.

[_lvbh]

> Only pseudonymous so far as you never accidentally link yourself to a wallet then everyone can know your entire transfer/spending history

See Monero

[rtkwe]

That's not enough to get people to actually use Monero though given it's got 1/10th the transaction volume of BTC and that's just counting the directly on chain transactions for BTC not those happening on the lightning network. Being off most of the exchanges also makes it difficult for most people to consider using since it's disconnected from the normal market precisely because it's impossible to do KYC to the satisfaction of regulators.

[dylan604]

> For a privacy focused application, these attributes make crypto a better choice than USD and the traditional banking system.

So is cash. What we really need are ways of scanning a piece of fiat currency that instantly transfers that money to an account while then disabling the physical copy from the registry as valid. That's how silly I see crypto for anything other than illicit transactions

[pabs3]

Cash is tracked via serial numbers in a lot of places, here is a recent article from Germany.

https://netzpolitik.org/2025/bargeld-tracking-du-hast-ueberw...

[repeekad]

USPS will happily exchange your cash for a money order without an ID as long as it’s under a certain amount, if you’re willing to take the risk you can mail the money order and transfer reasonably sized checks fully anonymously, there are good reasons large transfers of cash probably shouldn’t be anonymous

[dylan604]

If you’re really paranoid, you can mail cash directly if you’re willing that risk. I’m guessing the number of grandparents sending $5 for birthdays is getting smaller, but I’ve seen first hand the number of people willing to send cash to avoid having checks/credit card charges for specific places. There is no more anonymous method of payment than cash regardless of what cryptoBros tell you. This isn’t X-files where wanting to believe is enough

[akimbostrawman]

>There is no more anonymous method of payment than cash

Very much depends. Cameras, fingerprints, banknote ids, cell tower/GPS or just people seeing you.

[pizzafeelsright]

How?

Irreversible is bad because mistakes happen. I lost ~$1,000 in a bad transfer because of a typo.

Publicly verifiable -- not good because I don't want the public knowing what I buy.

Pseudonymous is the worst of both. Is it or is it not me? them?

I am thinking digital cash using pub keys on a network run from space on something like starlink sats.

[dylan604]

> I lost ~$1,000 in a bad transfer because of a typo.

Was the option of doing a much smaller amount available to validate the account before following up with the full transfer? I've never understood not doing a test transfer first.

[MangoToupe]

You can still make a mistake after the test transfer.

[tshaddox]

Or you can mistakenly think the test transfer worked as intended.

[johnisgood]

Advice: next time pay attention before sending, all wallets ask for confirmation prior to sending, for what is it worth. Always double check, or triple check.

[pizzafeelsright]

and then what?

I just got sent real estate documents because the sender used my uncommon firstNameLastName@ gmail, but because they had a typo of the last name it landed in my inbox.

[johnisgood]

Are we talking about cryptocurrencies? Because they are not based on e-mail.

In fact, I have no idea how your comment is relevant to losing money.

You accidentally got someone else's document. How is that relevant to losing money?

As a reminder, you said: "I lost ~$1,000 in a bad transfer because of a typo.". How can you lose ~$1,000 because of someone else's typo in which an e-mail landed in your inbox?

[strangattractor]

Handing someone a $1 is irreversible if they won't give it back. All transactions are anonymous and private when using a physical dollar. Crypto has the primary advantage of allowing you to launder money by converting the "Coin" in criminal friendly countries to a fiat currency (dollars) that actually buys stuff. Especially useful when hackers hold your data ransom. Usually what people mean by not like "traditional banking system" is unregulated/lawless.

[throwaway290]

People who don't like traditional banking system just want a system where they have more money. If they actually wanted to fix fairness etc creating a new system is not a way, you can make the old system fairer like you can make a new unfair one

[immibis]

The old system is a centralized one where there is one entity in charge which gets to set the level of fairness, unless you mean the meta-system whereby anyone can create a new system where they will be the dictator.

[strangattractor]

Nobody ever addresses the money laundering issue or wash trading that goes on that gives Bitcoin the illusion of liquidity.

>".... one entity in charge which gets to set the level of fairness"

Exactly what is unfair about the current system? The way we insure fairness is with laws and regulation. A system without those will suffer - well - lawlessness.

How is it centralized? The vast majority of dollars only exist as bits in computers in multiple banks all over the world. Doesn't get more distributed than that. Not only that - if you don't like dollars trade it for Euro's or Yen - you can pay your rent, mortgage and buy things with them also.

Other benefits of the current system. If someone steals my credit card I'm only on the hook for $50. My transactions are confirmed in a matter seconds pretty much anywhere in the world. I AutoPay many of my bills. If I set up automatic payments with Bitcoin I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.

There are problems that Bitcoin could help solve - it just isn't replacing currencies. I see a technology in search of a problem.

[altruios]

Most crypto, no.

The one to look at for that is Monero: the closest thing to private(anonymous) digital cash that I've found (so far).

[immibis]

Circumventing regulations is like half the point of crypto... either you use it to circumvent regulators, or you hold it while the price goes up because of the people who are circumventing regulators.

I think Bitcoin has become a typical fiat asset ouroboros now, because the people who actually want to circumvent regulators are using Monero (which is why Monero is banned in most countries), while the Bitcoin price is supported almost entirely by speculation and a little bit by people doing only-slightly-shady things with crypto who haven't noticed everyone else moved to Monero.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Where's the API for sending and receiving USD?

[greyface-]

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/wires

https://achdevguide.nacha.org/

[clarkmoody]

Many such cases with crypto. Moderately good idea powered by a token becomes a Ponzi.

[PovilasID]

Cheating may not have helped but it was doomed to start with. I did the math for my local city and to have full coverage you needed 5 nodes there were thousands. Also the main customer: utilities companies would risk getting rates of transfer hiked. While startup cost would be around 500-600 to keep the control.

[beAbU]

I legit did not know helium was intended for communication. I thought it was a way to mine crypto via the airwaves or something.

The OP's idea is an improvement: if you have to use crypto, then the only way a token is generated is when a sender buys one with fiat, so that they can transmit their message on the network.

[wkat4242]

Yes Helium was a terrible net negative for IoT protocols. It only caused a ton of very wasteful useless traffic that interfered with real purposeful networks like The Things Network. I'm glad it's mostly gone now.

Personally I think everything gets perverted when monetisation becomes the primary goal.

[miketery]

In helium there was no input revenue. OP mentions payment to send. This is a very different scheme.

[rtkwe]

It's the same scheme. You had to purchase Data Credits to send on Helium too, there was no input revenue because no one was choosing to use it but it's largely the same as the scheme behind the Helium network. 1 DC/24 Bytes sent and successfully delivered.

[0xOsprey]

>>I think it would be interesting if someone could invent a stable coin cryptocurrency with low overhead that enabled some of these use cases

We are thinking about this and building in this direction with Paygo.wtf

https://x.com/0x_Osprey/status/1925299005191577921