There's a lot of hype but there's also a lot of potential to revolutionize commerce. imagine if you could pay 10 cents to read an article or tip a web site. How badly does this torpedo googles ad biz?
1) nobody actually wants to pay this, though; the whole set of pre-existing arguments against micropayments apply, too many to list here. My fave one is "micropayments enable microfraud", though. And if you think cookie banners are annoying wait until you see the cryptobanners.
2) you definitely can't scale this on a blockchain, and any scalable system you build to do it will be Not A Blockchain. How many web pages does the world view in the time of a single bitcoin block? Would you say it was more or less than ten million?
2) That true. but it doesn't have to be a blockchain in fact there is already proposed protocols to do micropayment on global scale its called Interledger Protocol (ILP). Its a protocol like TCP/IP it scales the same way. And as the name suggest it can be used with multiple ledgers including blockchains but it doesn't have to be one.
The "pro" app equivalent is existing paywalls, NYT-style.
> micropayment is far move fraud resistant because all the bots pretending to be humans and clicking ads do not work anymore
But different sorts of fraud are imaginable, especially if you don't confirm every single payment. If you do confirm every single payment that's probably unacceptable user friction. Or the copyright problem already seen with NFTs and content farms: copy someone else's pages, charge for access to them.
Micropayment make it possible that I can pay without subscription without giving my personal data and without some absurd premium price that is justified by the fact that I could consume other stuff for the rest of the month/year which I likely dont want.
>But different sorts of fraud are imaginable
Sure and we find solutions for these. Unlike with ads everyone should be onboard blocking and fighting the fraud. with ads however thous who dont commit it can still profit from it.
>If you do confirm every single payment that's probably unacceptable
But there are solutions for these problems. Lets say you want to watch a youtube video, it could be free for the first 10% and then ask you to confirm payment. Then it steams payment as you watch so if you stop halfway trough you only paid half the price.
>Or the copyright problem already seen with NFTs
There is no such NFT copyright problem its made up nonsense. People just dont understand what they buy usually a public price of art. So its already released when sold and people can copy or store it however they want. Its worthless just like an MP3 file of a radio hit is worthless the rights on that track however may not be worthless if the owner know how to make money from it.
>copy someone else's pages, charge for access to them.
Already possible now. Micropayments does not change anything here. People steal stuff and "sell" it. There is no technical solution for this problem.
1) Most people do not value written content and news the same as other forms of entertainment. 2) There's too much decision friction and it gets worse when you have to decide per article. 3) Ads subsidize far more than most people could afford to pay for directly.
Crypto doesn't solve any of these human behavior or budget problems.
Also who said content has to be written? If the demand for written paid content is low there is no way to fix this. Demand for stuff changes over time and certain business go obsolete. This has nothing to do with the topic, those who dont adapt die out. No one claims that somehow crypto would magically make people earn money with stuff no one want to pay for.
>3) Ads subsidize far more than most people could afford to pay for directly.
That is mathematically impossible every ad is paid by thous who buy the product. Thous who just see ads but never buy factually dont pay and dont ad any value at all they just force thous who buy to pay more.
There are many people who dont use ad-blockers because they think its the morally right thing to do, to support the content creators through ads. They make this logic mistake all the time. There is nothing morally right about raising the product pirce for others so ad companies get more revenue and a tiny but also goes to the content creator. Its a best Robin Hood like moral gymnastics, it does not ad value to the system and you dont pay for the content you consumes.
If its implemented trough internet mega corps instead of banks they get even more power than they already have + they will take a cut too + they will fight it to ever become a thing because it directly destroys their business model. On top of that comes privacy concerts and all that. It would be horrible. We dont know anything other than crypto that would globally work and isn't controlled by a single authority.
Also within 10 years they will all be bought up by the largest 2-3 players creating another mega corp oligopoly that makes everything worse for everyone. Wait until they exchange their "no-fly lists" and a AI gets to ruin peoples life because of statistically anomalies or something.
If you dont want that you should root for crypto even if today crypto is mostly garbage and scams the tech can be used to do better.
The countries are next to each other and are similar in many ways. But one difference is that Guatemala, has their own stable local currency (Quetzal/GTQ), and the exchange rate margins charged by banks are the highest from any Central American Country. And also unofficial USD currency exchange can easily cost about 25% of the transaction.
WhatsApp is so widespread in Central America that FB has a big potential of doing what El Salvador has attempted to do with Chivo/Bitcoin.
This reminds me of the old stories of how Facebook choose which universities to allow sign up from. It was by choosing the universities close to others that had Facebook competitors.
wrote this up here: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/11/02/facebooks-no...
I'd be amazed if the new Novi-in-WhatsApp thing didn't work the same way.
It's the best possible way to use the blockchain: say "blockchain" in the press release, absolutely do not touch the thing with your system.
Thank you for sharing that link. I'm a reader of yours and never imagined you replying one of my comments.
By the way thank you for the coverage in English you do about my country which summarizes many of the things that are happening here. And specially for reporting about the political context in which all of these is happening. As this is something not covered much by other news outlets.
I was curious about Novi/WhatsApp because the potential it has for becoming a new widespread payment method due to the market share of WhatsApp in these countries. Not much about the underlying technology.
So many transactions here involve sharing screenshots of bank payments confirmations or photos of bank deposit slips via WhatsApp messages. From small stuff to even loans, that Whatsapp could easily move from sending screenshots to sending payments by adding a "pay" button on their app.
If they get the end user experience right, and regulatory approvals which is a bigger challenge by itself. I don't think the end users will think much about the underlying technology.
This doesn't need crypto. This can be done with something like Paypal.
> How badly does this torpedo googles ad biz?
A solution based on spite is a bad solution.
There was also a product called TipJar that they similarly launched and killed that solve the first and second opportunity.
In both cases, Google had a huge structural advantage of already having so many cards on file and publishers with their banks hooked up and still couldn’t cross the chasm.
Somebody would need to solve these issues — not sure it’s a question of centralization
I’ve heard that various cryptocurrencies are going to revolutionize the web economy and even replace AWS. Maybe I’m dumb. But it sounds like profound nonsense.
And I mined Bitcoin when you could still do it profitably with a GPU. I bought a new computer in March 2021 for $1,900 and used it to mine over $2,300 in ETH so far. I understand cryptocurrency fairly well but I just don’t get it.
Most of us aren't trading millions at a time, and these spreads seem fairly insignificant compared to fees extracted by banks, credit card networks, etc, so is this really an issue?
While you might claim that BUSD isn't real money, you can just immediately withdraw it as fiat in your bank account, as long as Binance remains solvent.
Or if you're still uncomfortable with BUSD for whatever reason, just trade e.g. SOL/USD on Coinbase.
What is the depth of SOL against USD? Not against USDT, not against BUSD, but against actual-money dollars?
Again, there's hundreds of thousands in orders within a $0.25 spread - plenty of liquidity if you're not moving millions.
ScamCoin maybe?
Google itself offered this very product. A system for micropayments that would eliminate all of the ads. Nobody used it.