Some things to keep in mind from the merchant perspective. A merchant will care about cost per transaction, cost of fraud/chargebacks, acceptance by customers, and integration into their backend systems. Once you have these solved, merchants will flock to you.

I’m a merchant myself, I sell e-paper calendars. Last year I paid about 4% of my revenue for transaction costs in various shapes. That’s very roughly 20% of my margin. (!) Some of these are hidden as very bad, but non-optional, currency conversions.

The hard one here is acceptance by customers. No merchant wants to clutter their checkout page with a button that nobody understands. Or worse, have customers get trapped in a dead-end payment process.

Another way to think about this is in terms of how many marginal customers you get from being able to accept payments over the Web. 4% starts sounding less bad

You can make the same argument for, say, paying protection money to the Mafia or for paying the 30% apple tax.

Just because it’s rational to pay off a monopolistic rent seeker doesn’t mean that the rent seeker generates economic value corresponding to the monopolistic rents they’re extracting.

> It's the ultimate two sided marketplace … The problem is: Getting merchants and customers on board.

OK, but then there's the third side: banks.

> find a way to debit peoples bank account with 0 fees and 0 default risk and <5s latency

Banks.

Banks don't do this well. It isn't always low transaction time, it isn't always 0 default risk, it is usually 0 fees but not internationally and the UX is not great.

> Banks don't do this well.

Exactly!

(And's that speaking as former CTO of one of the largest banks in the world.)

I was responding to:

>> "ultimate two sided marketplace"

Banks' role in anyone's attempt to solve this is why one can't forget there are three sides, not two, to getting this right. Get the right intro and a bank might even want to foot your bootstrapping bill given how challenging things can be internally.

+ 1 for sure.

My personal interest is more aligned with crypto (back in 2008) where I would like to see a transation layer which is independent... feel free to use banks or not, invest or not, but the way you move moeny about is shared and not owned by anyone.