Only downside is that you have to reveal your account data online.
I know a guy who runs an online shop with a single product and it is a static website saying "Transfer 12 € to the following bank account with the following subject and your name/address" — apparently this works quite well since the mid 90s. The website still uses frames for its layout and has animated gif flags.
and it can't be free.. even though the systems might have no further marginal cost per transaction, banks still need to do anti-money laundering checks, and someone's gotta pay for that
A real-world example where Lightning Network is already working is Nostr. It's not hard to get a Nostr client with built-in Lightning functionality (like Primal) and start "zapping" tiny payments to others.
I'm not affiliated with Primal, just a fan, and a developer who wants to see a system like this work.
Hmm perhaps we don’t need more types of currency? Perhaps it’s better to push deep integration of modern banking changes like psd2, psd3 and others. Across the whole internet. So everyone can just do regular payments with their own bank in a safe and protected way, and hopefully with less intermediaries.
So there's probably always going to be some kind of transfer or network access fee. It's just that it very much not a competitive market place.
Opening up the system to competition, but still within a regulatory framework that prevents it degenerating into a Wild West hotbed of scamming does seem like a good way to achieve some of that. Certainly, the vaunted "free market" should be ensuring that the price of a transaction is pretty close to the cost of providing it, and it clearly is not currently.
The problem, or feature, depending on who you ask, is that basically only governments can provide that kind of regulation. Which will always then inject a level of geopolitics into things like which countries you're allowed to buy your blog posts from. And for governments who listen to business over citizens also leads to capture and subversion of the system.
It's currently a horribly complex setup, but the rails exist, it just needs a shitton of dev work to make the UX better, and then adoption.
That's the bit I don't know how to solve. I have a feeling it may not be solvable in principle, only mitigated if we could get trading on the thing turned into a crime. You'd still have black market trading, but hopefully much more limited in its impact on ordinary use.
It's not as extreme as cryptocurrency, but forex trading is a thing, and honestly the sways of USD to other currencies are meaninful enough to take into consideration when moving money internationally.
With respect to crypto, a "single currency" shouldn't be a prerequisite because, with a $3T mcap, crypto has plenty of liquidity across centralized and decentralized exchanges to allow anyone to convert between any currencies they have on-chain. (Uniswap for instance has $1B - $6B volume transacted daily.)
Declaring a single currency would also be antithetical to free market competition for currencies.
> interoperable
If "interoperable" means you can use the currency anywhere, then I think liquidity for currency conversion is sufficient.
That said, we already have dollar (USD) stablecoins[^0] on all major L1, L2, rollup blockchains. Because they are pegged to the U.S. dollar, they also meet your requirement that the currency not be speculative (Strictly speaking, the U.S. dollar is inflationary and therefore is subject to speculation, but perhaps I'm being pedantic.).
> fast
Rollups[^3] provide fast transactions. These use various cryptographic protocols to verifiably and quickly batch and compress user operations on-chain.
> deep integration of modern banking changes
"Deep integration of modern banking" sounds good but modern banking creates a choke point[^1] where users can be targeted and denied services. Ultimately we would want to be able to stay on-chain for all payments and not need off-ramps which leave users open to debanking[^2] or surveillance. Crypto is permissionless and, with little effort from the user, censorship resistant.
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[^0]: https://castleisland.vc/writing/stablecoins-the-emerging-mar... "Stablecoins – tokenized representations of fiat currencies circulating on blockchains 1 – are unambiguously the “killer app” of crypto so far. There are over $160 billion worth of stablecoins in circulation today, up from single digit billions as recently as 2020. Over 20 million addresses make a stablecoin transaction on public blockchains every month. And in the first half of 2024, stablecoins settled (according to our adjusted estimates) over $2.6 trillion dollars worth of value. Stablecoins offer considerable advantages relative to existing payment systems, including native programmability, strong auditability properties, fast settlement, the ability to self-custody, and native interoperability"
[^1]: https://www.piratewires.com/p/2023-banking-crisis "Beginning in 2013, Choke Point was a scheme which sought to marginalize specific industries operating legally — not through lawmaking, but by applying pressure via the banking sector."
[^2]: https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1862950205252874552 "[T]he FDIC and other financial regulators had secretly imposed a 15 percent cap on deposits at banks for crypto-related firms."
Yes, all real world payments, from credit cards, to bank transfers have transaction fees. Depending on where you are in the world, even cash payments can include taxes per transaction.
> Every swap costs money.
Yes, currency conversion in real life includes fees.
> I now have to choose which L2 provider to trust implicitly, with no recourse on failure.
No, the whole point of a rollup is that your transactions are posted to L1 in a provable manner. Optimistic rollups and ZK rollups all allow you to transact without having to trust the L2. (There are caveats for those L2s that are in various stages of implementation and that's all public information.)
> And at the end of it, I still have internet points, instead of something that can pay rent or buy food.
The question was how to pay the publisher of a web page and this is a technology forum. So we discuss technological solutions. Paying rent and buying food is a solved problem.
In reality, there are billions of Dollars, Euros, Pounds, AUD, and other currencies moving in and out of crypto daily via on/off-ramps. Bitcoin and Ether ETFs exist and are well capitalized and widely used. You claim "Binance is closed" yet I'm quite sure I used it this week. I also use Kraken quite happily to send money to my bank account. Coinbase of course is thriving.
If you transact in size, simply hold USDC[^1] and open an account with Circle[^2].
> Stripe stopped accepting
Your information is outdated: https://docs.stripe.com/crypto/onramp
> Mtgox is closed
Have you used or looked into crypto since MtGox? It's been quite some time since that affair. You'd probably be surprised to find how much utility there is if that was the last time you actually investigated crypto. There are also P2P options like Paxful, Telegram, or Binance P2P if you prefer.
Anyway, if you're fixated with the old guard of finance then any advancement in technology will necessarily have to meet incumbent institutions requirements, with all the problems I listed earlier in the thread. With a bit of effort, you could instead imagine an entirely digital internet economy with so-called crypto points. Even that alone would be step forward and a mere generation of users away from your landlord, a crypto user, accepting them as payment.
Reality, however is such that right now you can fund a debit card with crypto and buy coffee with no problems. [^0]
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[^0]: https://gnosispay.com/, https://www.coinbase.com/card
I wish we would all agree to just go back to mostly using paypal (or venmo, zelle, etc) for online shit and leave crypto out of it. The only advantage to crypto is anonymity, and possibly the ability to send smaller fractional payments, but honestly the existing non-crypto solutions could come up with solutions to those things.
The convenience of the scamming is partly why it _is_ a solution to this problem: people can transfer value as fast as they desire, and it works. There is also just a problem off on and off-boarding where you get hit by Visa/Mastercard level of fees. So is it really solving the problem at that point?
One area I would like to see is some kind of governed/regulated profit sharing. Basically giving your votes to content/production and this puts it on the books for some fraction of payment. You get X shares to distribute to content regularly. It would also be helpful if our government would provide support for independent producers where there's a clear trackable benefit (e.g. open source libraries that a ton of people rely on and a business can say "yes I need this, help them keep doing it").
I want to scream. This is a speculative investment with more bad actors involved than the SEC has investigated throughout its entire history.
I hate these bitcoin boom cycles. It's like all the lessons learned immediately get forgotten.
Him: "But this time is different. Last time the Democrats were holding it back. Trump is going to make a strategic crypto reserve. Trump and his allies are all pro-crypto. The Democratic party was trying to regulate it away."
I guess this will be the next lesson.
I will give Trump credit for putting AI and Crypto in the same department though.
There a couple of ways that the price of Bitcoin could drop precipitously and the unraveling of Tether is one of them.
Some people dream of 'micropayments' at a similar price point. Being able to buy a single article for about 2.6¢.
For consumers, a subscription model seems to fit the bill for most people but some media are apparently better suited than others.
This dream of eliminating that middle-person is still a dream.
For example for Bitcoin there's the Lightning network as L2, where you do one transaction to open the channel, and one to close it, and channels can remain open for months. Payments are routed through a network of channels, so you only need one or a few channels to other nodes and can reach all nodes in the network.
The transactions are much cheaper in this network precisely because they're not on chain, but it's still secure because each L2 transaction leads to a signed (but not published) blockchain transaction that each party of the channel can choose to publish at any time (and close the channel).
There's a bit more to it, and I recommend anyone who isn't aware of L2 networks to look into it.
But instead it's slow, inconsistent, inconvenient, balkanised, dripping with scams, criminals and bad actors and still involves substantial transfer fees and volatility on top of that. At this point it's a market for lemons: any new cryptocurrency venture is almost entirely indistinguishable from something that already ended up being at best a non-starter, but often just a scam.
As a vehicle for speculation, arbitrage and scams, it's a masterpiece. As a currency (you know, like in the name), it's, put lightly, not great, especially if you live in the developed world.