[SJC_Hacker]

All the setup is no worse than setting up a bank account

And technically it can be avoided through back channels if you know someone who already has it - can just pay them cash or whatever and they can send crypto to you

Crypto is very easy to transfer once you have a wallet

Its the exchange to/from real world currency where the friction is.

[Dylan16807]

> All the setup is no worse than setting up a bank account

Which is a huge pain in the butt. If someone invented a new lower-spam email ecosystem that required everyone to make a new bank account, very few people would join.

I would say something about a combined account but many countries have already figured out free bank transfers without needing crypto so maybe do that?

[nobody9999]

Sorry for the late reply.

You're correct, as far as it goes.

However, we weren't talking about using cryptocurrency in general, but in a very specific way: Making micropayments to devs as a mechanism to limit AI slop PRs to open source projects.

Doing that effectively would require broad implementation of some sort of payment scheme.

Given the current (as I documented) hoops one needs to jump through to obtain cryptocurrency if one doesn't have any, especially just for a random user to get crypto to send $1 to a github repo with their PR makes exactly zero sense.

Yes. Buying drugs and other stuff outside of the mainstream economy is definitely worth the effort. To send $1/PR for escrow to limit spam? Not so much.