I'm a pretty techy guy but in this one sentence alone you said 5 things that I have no idea about nor even heard of ("USDC", "DAI", "sidechain", "Polygon", "Fantom").
The chance of the general population catching onto this stuff anytime soon is slim.
USDC and Dai are both US-dollar stable coins. They’re always worth 1 dollar each, they’re among the most trustworthy USD stablecoins, and they are perfect for storefronts. The problem is that Ethereum transaction (tx) fees are now around $15-$25 because the network is so popular. Everyone wants to use the highway but the highway is only so big. Ethereum 2.0 is supposed to increase the size of that highway by some order of magnitude to make each transaction cost cents to send but we won’t know until it happens in few years. But we need a solution now! — and not in a few years!
That’s where other less popular but still good enough networks [side chains] like Polygon, Stellar, Binance Smart Chain, Tron, and a few others come into play.
Side chain is a term for a non-Ethereum or non-Bitcoin blockchain. Think of it like getting off a tollroad and getting onto a less trafficked, cheaper, and possibly faster side road, with the risk of coming across some new undocumented potholes.
USDC (and probably Dai too) for example, can already run on the Binance(bsc20), Ethereum(ERC20), Polygon, Tron, Stellar, and a few other networks. This can be super confusing and shocking for users because if you send your BSC20 USDC to an ERC20 USDC address you usually lose it. It’s a good thing that many of these networks have different address formats and that helps considerably to have software preventing that goof but some networks like BSC20 and ERC20 share the same address format because ERC20 is a copy of BSC20. Very user unfriendly. Alright I know I might be loosing you here but the solution is next.
Now, here’s what I think a solution to this all is: Rename one existing Stablecoin on one of those networks and let’s call it something idealistic like Freecoin. For example, DAI on the Polygon network or something else. To make it simple, it’s only one coin on one cheap network that is anything but the Ethereum network and then boom, you’ve dropped your terminology down to just “Freecoin” and “where is an easy on-ramp to buy it?” It’s important that there is only 1 kind of Freecoin. Buy them on this Shopify website, these exchanges, or this DeFi exchange. Obviously you can allow people to pay with other cryptocurrencies but you can either give a 1%-2% discount for using a certain cryptocurrency or make the UI button for your cryptocurrency larger than the buttons for the other cryptocurrencies. Both are effective nudges.
If you have a product worth buying, people will beat a path to your doorstep.
What are the guardrails to prevent bankrun like the wild west days of banking?
There's been a lot of talks of regulating stablecoins to ensure backing, which I don't think is a terrible idea.
Do some googling before commenting please.
Much like tether, there is no proof that they have anywhere near the currency they claim and folks that operate in that market are the ones shouting the loudest about the apparent fraud occurring. I've yet to see tether or usdc provide proof otherwise, it always seems to be a "we wouldn't be this big if we didn't have what we say we have" - bernie madoff style. And to get in front of it, an attestation != audit.
And then you quickly realize how useless USDC/DAI is when you want to pay your rent, for milk, etc.
> OnlyFans can then use Coinbase or an off-ramp to go from crypto to fiat.
They can't because then KYC kicks in. This is exactly the problem with crypto at scale...you can't convert large scale amounts of crypto to fiat without someone noticing. Silkroad "worked" because there was no central authority taking money, just lots of a smaller drug dealers. Pablo Escobar wouldn't have been able to run his whole operation on crypto without getting seen.
> They can't because then KYC kicks in. This is exactly the problem with crypto at scale.
Isn't KYC only a problem for people trying to hide their income? Onlyfans (and other legit businesses) would not have this problem as they would not be trying to hide their earnings.
This is essentially how Coinbase is allowed to operate - it doesn't have whales on its platform, just millions of KYC'd minnows who are individually low risk.
Illegal activities are only a problem if law enforcement makes it their problem, I don't think there is a case where law enforcement went after the payment provider for facilitating transactions for illegal activities, it is website/marketplace responsibility usually
> Illegal activities are only a problem if law enforcement makes it their problem
And now this is where AML kicks in. Now you're dealing with banks and not credit card processors as the source of the issue. No US bank is going to work with a company who is converting money from crypto to fiat at the level of billions of dollars.
Exchanges are doing pretty well to convert USD to say BitCount, despite Bitcoin's unsavory reputation for illicit/ illegal transaction like ransomware payments that actually happen on the coin. Even single transactions in the millions barely register these days.
I am not sure porn as an industry earns in billions and even if it did the market is today large enough that it won't be sticking out all that much.
You don't have to sign up for an account or provide any personal info, just use your wallet to send certain tokens to an address, then you can use that wallet as a sign-in.
OnlyFans can then use Coinbase or an off-ramp to go from crypto to fiat.
It's a more seamless user experience and solves the payment processing issue.
In my opinion it's a matter of educating the masses to a very different method of paying for services and using services (both on the business and consumer side).