Ford F-150s are successful at being money. If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 Ford F-150s instead of 1,000 USD.
A slightly stronger example might be gold, but people don't use gold as money anymore either.
Gold stopped be used as money because people weren't really using it, they were using tokens pegged to it under a promise. That promise went away. Gold isn't exactly fungible (purity, fake gold etc), and it isn't easy to move in significant quantities. Gold makes for absolutely shit money in the 21st century
The only reason they hold so much is that it still retains value as a currency.
The way things currently stand, if the fiat system falls apart, we’ll revert to gold. It’s the only viable alternative. Crypto might take over that role someday, in some form, but it has a long way to go.
Like I said: sub-second, 0 fee transactions (using Nano). Would love to see any of your traditional systems do better. Can you name one?
You'd have to check how sustainable this is, Uber was (is?) also very cheap in some areas, just because it's massively subsidized. A solution that works today but not tomorrow and burns cash in between is not necessarily something you want.
The biggest challenge they had was protecting against spam. But a few releases back they solved this issue. Technically a very strong project.
I have looked at the past n similar products and it was always the same story. At some point, you don't need to look at the implementation details anymore, you can take this from first principles: somebody somewhere is running a ledger. You have to pay this someone one way or another, unless they're just volunteering.
> a few releases back they solved this issue
How are they getting paid?
Regarding the ledger operators, from https://nano.org/faq#nodes:
> Instead, participants on the nano network are driven by external incentives, such as helping maintain an instant payment network they can use without fees.
So it does look like volunteering / donating computing resources, and the 0 transaction fee doesn't reflect the actual costs.
There is of course always a cost for a transaction one way or another, but it still stands that you pay 0 for the transaction itself.
How many of them without any corporate backing have the same requirements as a payment processor?
> There is of course always a cost for a transaction one way or another, but it still stands that you pay 0 for the transaction itself.
Again that's not the full picture, just take the Uber example. If they had made rides free thanks to VC money, would you have said that they solved the taxi problem and made them free so it's a much better alternative?
The problem with this kind of accounting is that you can't tell whether it's just running at a loss or whether the technology is actually better than the rest. Visa and others could make transactions free if they didn't care about losses.
As a user, I'm also not interested in, say, getting a new credit card transacting in $crypto that will either not work anymore in a while once they've run out of money or start billing me fees when it's clear it's become unsustainable for them to have free transactions.
https://blog.nano.org/how-to-run-a-node-and-why-a-full-nano-...
So that's one more entry in your accounting, how many more are there? Once you've counted everything and implemented all the missing features (e.g. how much does it cost to do USD -> NANO -> NANO -> USD), do you still have something that costs less to run than a payment processor?
My only point is that "0 transaction fee so that's better than traditional solutions" is misleading, because of hidden costs, missing features, unknown regulatory risk, etc. The technical part and its efficiency is interesting, but just one variable in the equation, and not even one that major payment processors couldn't replicate at a whim if it did bring any value.
> Can you name one? A SQL database of a random custom currency like any video game made in the last decade, or Faster Payments, both of which offer more for both the seller and buyer.
You're not paying tx fees for money transfers, you pay them for fraud, kyc, convenice of global networks. Those are features that are either hidden or not Present in cryptocurrencies
Plenty of settlement systems permit arbitrary precisions of dollars. It’s just useless for day to day purposes for most people, so a consumer version never took off.
0 fee solves this issue. I don't see any traditional system that does the same or better than Nano to be honest.
Also frankly, if I'm paying as little as 0.001 Nano, then probably I don't actually care about your article and reading it is pure procrastination on my part, so I'm likely better off not doing so. Thanks for putting up your paywall :)
I’m not sure it is. With a subscription I know what my monthly bill will be and can budget around it. I’m fine with streaming, and very rarely pay for an episode or series of something.
Even if it was very small amounts, my watching habits would likely be curtailed if I knew everything I watch was going to cost me.