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Comment by xyzzy123 | Hacker News Reader

If you think a bit bigger and imagine a worldwide audience (basically the defining feature of whatsapp), the initial killer apps here are remittances and the ability to build out marketplaces and stores.

Assume the goal is global wechat-like commerce. IMHO this is huge.

The regulatory interactions will be formidable because every country will want to get its fingers into this, money and who gets it is ultimately politics.

The crypto bit lets you work around locally broken financial systems, but a lot of negotiating with governments will still be required.

Privacy will necessarily be nonexistent, to get to global reach all transactions will have to be at least as legible as current bank transfers to involved governments. This is not "WhatsApp's fault" per se, it's just the world we live in.

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What makes it so huge in your opinion? PayPal and Venmo and the like already make this very easy, internationally there are some challenges, but it’s not technical limitations so much as legal/compliance which doesn’t go away with blockchain.

> What makes it so huge in your opinion?

Whatsapp has 2 billion users, PayPal and Venmo probably only small fraction of that.

On Whatsapp you already have your friends in the list, on PayPal I personally have nobody. It's an additional hurdle, I've never actually sent money to friend/family through PayPal.

Sure, but is this any more interesting than a partnership where WhatsApp lets people PayPal money to other WhatsApp users?

From a individual perspective, if you are in the US and all of your friends are in the US and are able to get PayPal accounts, and you don't personally use WhatsApp and see it as just another messaging service, the practical answer to your question, for you, personally, is no.

However, thinking of this only in terms of this this will affect you is short-sighted, and apes other hot takes that went down in Internet history (HN on DropBox, /. on the iPod). The broader context for this (as discussed in other threads here) is what makes it interesting. Similarly, from a product POV, Twitter doesn't look like much - it's the users that are on there that makes it interesting.

You’re missing my point. PayPal doesn’t use crypto and it’s easy to use to send money around. WhatsApp, just like PayPal, requires a user to onboard. What makes PayPal complex is the international law around sending money, not the tech stack.

Looking at cryptocurrency as just the tech stack is an incomplete view of the system. For better or worse, using a cryptocurrency is also a mechanism to sidestep international law. (For now. Regulators will catch up with Facebook sooner or later.)

> PayPal and Venmo and the like already make this very easy

They make it easy because they abstract away the underlying mechanics. Novi for WhatsApp does the same, but for a much, much larger audience, and does so instantly. While it isn't shackled by the baggage of the financial industry born in an era far removed from the current one, the pace of improvements and deployments can be much faster in face of changing regulations, jurisdictions, and technology itself.

Instantly? I’ve come to expect that from Venmo, Zelle, PayPal, etc.

yes, google lightning network.

> Instantly? I’ve come to expect that from Venmo, Zelle, PayPal, etc.

International, fee-less, instant payments? With the amount of ecommerce that happens over WhatsApp and Instagram these days, Meta stands a very good chance with USDP to cut out the middle-men (all of the legacy financial infrastructure) and take the product straight to the consumers. Sure, Meta could partner with PayPal, but Novi is a better, if ambitious, bet.

Considering how many horror stories I've heard about people getting blocked from Paypal with funds in their custody, you can't see any benefit to doing this with crypto?

It's huge because PayPal and Venmo have abstracted away a ton of complexity under the hood. Don't believe me? Try building a PP/Venmo as a mental exercise.

With crypto under the hood, it becomes quite easy for competitors to build a remittance product.

> internationally there are some challenges

"Some challenges" is doing a lot of work there. That's like saying that a hurricane's "a bit of water". If you're in Montana and don't have any family in Florida, you can blindly ignore the hurricane as it won't affect you. But realize that's a position of great privilege. For everyone else that can't get Paypal or Venmo or even US bank account in many case, or anyone who's Internet access is solely WhatsApp and not Venmo (due to Facebook providing free access to their properties and only their properties in certain countries), this is a total game changer.

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