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Comment by virgilp | Hacker News Reader

For me, the biggest roadblock is actually owning ETH. You may thing that's trivial, but I'm not so sure. Apparently 10m people in the world own SOME form of crypto[1] - so, there's your upper bound on number of users. For a mass-market product, 10m is really not that much .... you don't just need "traction", you need traction that is so significant that it pushes up the entire crypto market! I'm skeptical, but who knows? Good luck.

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-own-at-least-some-cryp...

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The counterpoint is that you could look at it like encrypting your messages.

For years, using PGP for email was possible, but only a few people did, because it was clunky and they didn't care enough. The climate changed, but so did technology. WhatsApp now makes E2E message encryption trivial, due to the work they've put in to make it easy for users.

You could argue that if a cryptocurrency based service made the usage of that cryptocurrency sufficiently easy then it wouldn't matter that there hadn't been much adoption up to that point.

To put it another way - the market size for Peepeth isn't "people who already own some form of crypto", it's "people who don't want their messages censored". The use of crypto may be a barrier to entry for some of those people, but it doesn't necessarily have to be.

You're right but it's not really a counterpoint, it's just supporting/ alternate angle on my original point: for something like Peepeth to be mass-market-popular, it needs the underlying technology (cryptocurrencies) to be mass-market-popular, not just popular-in-some-niche (however large that niche is). So this service seems to be betting its future on the fact that some analogue of "whatsapp" will appear, that will make cryptocurrencies trivial to use. Do you know of any such service? THAT is something I'd be really interested to invest in :)

The point I was trying to make with the WhatsApp examples is that the work to make it easier could be part of Peepeth. I don't think WhatsApp is leveraging much existing work to do what it does, they've just come up with a good flow that fits their model.

Yes, the challenge for Peepeth is probably greater than that faced by WhatsApp, but not impossible.

The implicit assumption being made in the parent is that the current market size is dictated by UX, rather than something else like a compelling use case for the majority of the population. I'm suggesting that with some UX work and a compelling use case (which Peepeth may or may not be), there is nothing preventing large scale adoption of crypto.

Right. And I guess what I'm saying is that if Peepeth can solve the crypto UX problem, I'm already sold - but I've seen nothing in their page that suggests this is even on their radar. They seem to take ETH for granted - which is kinda' like Whatsapp saying that "you need to install bcrypt, create a public-private keypair, configure your identity wallet to keep the private key, and then you're all set to start using Whatsapp!". You can see how that is not a very attractive proposal - for most users, encryption is completely transparent in whatsapp, they don't even know it exists.

Peepeth could do something like Whatsapp, say "it costs you 1USD/month to use Peepeth, but for the first year we'll waive the fees" and transparently purchase ETH on your behalf behind the scenes. But they don't do that. They put all the crypto burden squarely on your shoulders, with no hint that they'd consider making it all seamless/ transparent for the regular user.

I think having a way to overcome the usability problem is a good idea.

Keep in mind that Peepeth is a self-funded effort by one person (Bevan). I'm sure he'd be more than glad to solve the usability problem, but purchasing ETH on your behalf can't be done without funding or a source of revenue.

However you can donate see https://peepeth.com/support

Web3 applications will require users to have tokens so they can interact with the DApp, so either a network token like Ether or a utility token like BAT is needed. The tradeoff is that your data isn't mined and sold for advertisers and your content can't be demonetised or otherwise censored by the platform. In the context of social media, I believe the cost will serve as deterrent to trolling and harassment.

For all the hurrah about Facebook and privacy, it will be interesting to see if users really do care enough about their rights to free speech and privacy to switch platforms and put some of their own resources into making better solutions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERuSGa4UPow

'So if users don't adopt obscure decentralized platforms underpinned by crappy UI and strange, unfamiliar cryptocurrencies en masse, really it's their own fault'

Put some of your own resources into making a better version.

Agreed. Not just that but the overview suggests:

* I have to be using Firefox.

* And I have to install a firefox extension.

* And I have to have ETH.

There is not Firefox requirement.

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