> if receiving payments would’ve been as easy as receiving email from the beginning.

In Germany, every business (and some individuals) has published their account number for ages (on the letterhead, website, etc.), typically right next to their address and email address (or fax number, for that matter).

And with that account number, you can just transfer money to the recipient. It really is as easy as email.

It really is not, and I would assume less 1% of consumer purchases are done using a bank tranfer / account number.

In Germany (2021), online purchases were paid by:

   33% Bill & bank transfer
   20% Direct debit
   20% PayPal
   11% Credit card
   16% various others

https://www.handelsblatt.com/finanzen/banken-versicherungen/...

Imagine you are an sized e-commerce merchant. Someone checks out on your website and sends you a bank transfer. Then what?

You go through your ledger (bank account), find the transaction with an order ID as a memo (hopefully the buyer added it and correctly), and then you look up that order in your system and submit the order form to your warehouse?

It works like: customer gets an order number and puts this on the description of the bank transfer. This is parsed by the accounting SW coupled to this bank account, and voila!

Most banks charge some amount per transaction on commercial accounts though.

The problem is that it's extremely failure prone and not instant.

Gotta wait for the buyer to make the transfer, you gotta wait for the transfer to go through, you gotta hope that the buyer put in the order number in the description.

Well, it really doesn’t suit itself for automation, much less for real-time transactions. Say, you want to sell access to an article on your website. It would be cumbersome for the customer to have to switch over to their online banking and typing in all details (ok, today we have QR codes, but you still need to jump through many hoops, much more than with, say, a credit card or PayPal payment). Then it takes time until the money shows up in your account - sometimes several days. And, finally, there was no API access available from the banks for small sellers that would have allowed them to build an integration, even if they had the resources to write custom software.

> You can’t make a living posting stuff online on your own private website.

There are many counterexamples to this.

I'm not trying to be stupid but can you name some?

https://www.themarginalian.org/ has a Bitcoin address for donations on the page, and has received significant donations through that.

Ben Thompson and the Air Current guy are two that come to mind

This use case is the entire point of cryptocurrencies. It’s just a shame that there wasn’t more effort spent on improving the UX rather than running the VC playbook on the ecosystem to seize control over it.

I agree. These middlemen take our work and monetize it never cutting us in (Google, Facebook, X, etc…)

There's a reason Facebook is printing money and X is not making any (and essentially never has). It's actually not the user generated content that primarily matters for ad revenue. Time spent on the site is necessary but not sufficient

> essentially never has

Twitter generated $3.4 billion in revenue in 2023. That's a helluva money printing machine. About a fourth the size of Facebook's. I don't know how big yours is, but thats bigger than mine. The problem is that, even with such a big money printing machine, if it costs more to operate than it spits out, you don't make money. Twitters problem wasn't getting money, they were getting huge piles of it. It's that they spent more than was coming in. Paying people to make the service happen, especially people to deal with the people who want to give them money to run advertisements, on top of with everything else, was expensive.

You're saying meta had ~$14 billion in revenue in 2023? I think you're missing a zero...

By "making money" I mean profit. If you add up only Twitter's good quarters prior to Musk, it's less in total than Meta made in a single quarter in 2016, or roughly 1 month in 2024.

Put another way, Meta makes more profit in a week than Twitter was making per quarter at its best

it's not just not trivial, it's quite cumbersome. but micropayments exist. assume I made some content and users wanted to give me 10 cents for it. if they didn't want to pay the 30 cent visa tax, they'd have to: create a Coinbase account, fund it, buy some crypto, install a wallet, move the crypto to the wallet, and connect the wallet to my website, before finally sending 10 cents my way. even if we handwave that the server side exists, how many users are going to bounce off of that?

There are solutions to this problem that don’t involve crypto.

they all have their own problems, which leaves us in the same place. there's no practical way for the masses to give me 10 cents.

In many countries you can send 10 cents fee-free and real-time.

Only needs to be done once though. I tip and buy things all the time with my crypto wallet now, and it's less than a cent per transaction. Just waiting on more sites and stores to support it.

Credit cards were also a PITA when they first came out.

In Canada we've had email money transfer since 2003. It used to cost $1 if you had a different bank then the person you were sending to but now it's free. Generally only good for friends and marketplace items though. Can't use it for ecommerce.

Why isn't it not possible for e-commerce?