Which is a huge pain in the butt. If someone invented a new lower-spam email ecosystem that required everyone to make a new bank account, very few people would join.
I would say something about a combined account but many countries have already figured out free bank transfers without needing crypto so maybe do that?
You're correct, as far as it goes.
However, we weren't talking about using cryptocurrency in general, but in a very specific way: Making micropayments to devs as a mechanism to limit AI slop PRs to open source projects.
Doing that effectively would require broad implementation of some sort of payment scheme.
Given the current (as I documented) hoops one needs to jump through to obtain cryptocurrency if one doesn't have any, especially just for a random user to get crypto to send $1 to a github repo with their PR makes exactly zero sense.
Yes. Buying drugs and other stuff outside of the mainstream economy is definitely worth the effort. To send $1/PR for escrow to limit spam? Not so much.
And technically it can be avoided through back channels if you know someone who already has it - can just pay them cash or whatever and they can send crypto to you
Crypto is very easy to transfer once you have a wallet
Its the exchange to/from real world currency where the friction is.