alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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 Your opinion may be slightly outdated, I wouldn't consider a single digit number of cents a large fee
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.
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.
Check out Lightning Network, Nostr, and Zaps.
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").
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.