There is but it isn't pretty and the utility was found years ago. It is amazing for online black markets and monetizing organization's weak security through ransomware. Cryptocurrencies are extremely well made for moving value online without limit opportunities for government intervention. People have been trying to jam that square peg in endless number of more socially acceptable round holes and, unsurprisingly, it doesn't work out well.

It reminds me of white elephants:

> It was a blessing because the animal was sacred and a sign of the monarch's favour, and a curse because the recipient now had an expensive-to-maintain animal he could not give away and could not put to much practical use.

Crypto is a blessing because it allows people to move value freely, but a curse in that it forces us to really come to terms with the fact that selective oppression (i.e. you can't use a credit card to pay for a hitman) actually helps us live higher quality lives.

I think the GP meant "still waiting" in the sense that they don't believe it will ever happen, not in the sense that they're optimistic.

I feel that part of that is attributable to the idea that, people know very well that it is a scam, but they're hoping that they can get in on the next iteration early enough to be the ones pulling the rug.

It's because crypto has never been anything more than an investment vehicle. Bitcoin was briefly used as a real currency until people realized that it was inflationary in nature and then the mantra became "HODL".

Allow me to make the case for cryptocurrency as a payment system.

There are still systems like Monero, Firo, and others which are heavily used as payment networks on the DN due to their ability to obfuscate the source/destination/amount of transactions.

Even then, many micro-transactions have little need for anonymity/security and might happily make a tradeoff for lower anonymity and/or higher centralization in exchange for lower fees. There are systems like Nano and GNU Taler which try to address this.

There's a lot of BS surrounding "web3", but the dream is really this: Imagine you could have a spam-prevention system that requires a small fee for users to access a scarce and easily DoS-able service or resource - all without the vendor lock-in, tracking, insecurity, fraud, proprietary software or fees associated with middlemen like PayPal.

I might pay to read a news article for 0.2 cents if I didn't have to give them my credit card. I might pay youtube a cent for every video I watch without ads, in fact I might even pay a cent for a third-party service to strip youtube of ads even if they didn't offer that service. Such a hyper-competitive system would discourage easily-bypassed advertisements and tracking in favor of an online economy that makes it easy to securely spend or donate a minuscule amount of money.

I think the largest reason why we don't see bitcoin taking this role as a payment processor goes back to the 2017 XT dispute wherein bitcoin users decided not to increase the block size limit and the users who wanted to decrease payment fees forked off into "bitcoin cash", which happened to coincide with the 2017 bull market. In this sense, bitcoin is a bad example of a cryptocurrency because of its disproportionately high fees and it's use of extra measures like LN. An example of a more "normal" cryptocurrency would be something like litecoin or bitcoin cash.

I'll bite! Why does it have to be crypto currency? Why couldn't I load ten dollars credit into YouTube, in exchange for 1000 credits - one of which I'd use for every video I watch? Google has my card on file already, I'd trust them to deduct one credit per video properly.

I'm pretty sure some startups have already attempted a micropayment content gate. You pay them 5 bucks, they portion out the money to the content creators every month based on the articles you choose to read.

Other than an immediate payment (in the case where you're not running it yourself), why does it need cryptocurrency?

Not for or against btw!

>I'll bite! Why does it have to be crypto currency?

It doesn't. It could just be some secure, open cryptographic payment system like Digicash or GNU Taler, but financial institutions refuse to implement those types of systems because they benefit from the vendor-lock-in, surveilance, insecurity, and ambiguity of the existing system.

>Why couldn't I load ten dollars credit into YouTube, in exchange for 1000 credits - one of which I'd use for every video I watch? Google has my card on file already

Because that requires you to set up a pre-existing buisness relationship with every service you interact with. "Works great" for big companies like youtube, netflix, not so much for news websites, blogs, forums, etc. that rely on surveilance and easily blockable ads. The friction associated with that is what makes the current system uncompetitive. You couldn't just do a microtransaction with a random self-hosted website- there's too much risk on both sides: they could steal your identity, you could hit them with chargebacks, etc.

>I'm pretty sure some startups have already attempted a micropayment content gate. You pay them 5 bucks, they portion out the money to the content creators every month based on the articles you choose to read.

I would congratulate them on reinventing paypal. Watch as they re-invent vendor lock-in and hike up the fees once they gain signifigant market share. The purpose of cryptocurrency is to eliminate these middlemen so users can exchange peer to peer using FOSS, and we are not beholden to the whims of a single company like Patreon.

>Other than an immediate payment (in the case where you're not running it yourself), why does it need cryptocurrency?

It doesn't need to be cryptocurrency. It needs to be secure, private, cheap, reliable and competitive. All things which the current payment systems are not, and will never be so long as they are run by rent-seeking intermediaries like SWIFT, PayPal, Apple, Google, etc.

The "dream" of web3 sounds horrifying--monetizing absolutely everything--even without 95+% of it being a scam.

The internet is already monetized (services have real costs, and someone has to pay for them at the end of the day)- you can pay for services directly, or you can accept the consequences of intrusive advertising, surveilance and manipulation on the "free" internet.