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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

Never mind all this NFT waffle. It’s 2021 and I still can’t pay someone 50 cents from my browser with one click. Why not?

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Because there is no widespread electronic equivalent to cash for any currency that does not expose the receiver to expensive issues such chargebacks, disputes, and the legal systems in various countries.

Maybe the Fed’s new system will allow for it:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...

Money laundering regulations, middlemen, legacy banking and general idiocy.

BAT (the cryptoccurrency used in the Brave browser) allows you to do exactly that.

No it doesn't. Pay me 50 cents right now with your BAT. You can't. There is no inlet on my end for this BAT without the cruft of me setting up whatever is required. Yet you should be able to, considering we both have computers capable of connecting to each other over the internet. We both have bank accounts or money someplace. I can send you a file with scp trivially right now. Why can't I send you 50 cents over the command line? It remains an unsolved problem.

>There is no inlet on my end for this BAT without the cruft of me setting up whatever is required

>I can send you a file with scp trivially right now.

You'd still have to set up "cruft" for that as well. Generating private keys, enabling port forwarding, configuring sshd, configuring firewall rules. I don't see how setting up some crypto wallet is unreasonable in comparison.

What I was getting at with scp is that every personal computer there is today has some standardized tool along with all needed documentation already built into the device that lets you send a file from point A to point B over the internet. The same isn't true for this BAT, or any other method to send money via the internet.

Right, and while we're on the topic: it's 2020, and I still can't send a file from computer to computer without going via gmail. Why not?

The exception is Airdrop. But with a Windows computer or Android phone on either end, there's (at best) Bluetooth file transfer which is slow, unreliable and painful. Or there's scp (you get the joke, right?)

The point is, the technical infrastructure exists, but nobody has bothered to implement this simple stuff for ordinary users. A testament to the power of the public goods problem to block even simple, long-overdue improvements?

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