- Consumers can pay stuff on credit
- Consumers can 'chargeback' if they feel something went wrong
These two mechanisms are the lubricant that provides a +% in online commerce greater than the % charged for processing payments.
To extrapolate the idea some, I’d be comfortable using an irreversible payment method for various B2B SaaS subscriptions. Those can reach perhaps more meaningful amounts to you.
It seems that you’re rather dismissive of this conversation, so I’ll wish you a pleasant day/evening.
Not only is the irreversibility less important, but potentially some of the usability/security issues for users (hacked/stolen wallets etc...) become less important as well (assuming users keep only smallish balances in crypto wallets).
I've been testing out the Lightning Network (Layer 2 of BTC) recently and it seems that the future has arrived. I can accept micropayments in BTC over LN, which get immediately converted to dollars and deposited to a bank account in USD. All for ~$0.01 fee per transaction. Here's how:
1.) Open an account at https://strike.me. This app is very similar to CashApp, but supports getting paid on the Lightning Network. I believe CashApp is also working on this functionality.
2.) Set up your own self-hosted install of https://lnbits.com (or use cloud hosted version at https://voltage.cloud for ~$10 USD/mo).
3.) Connect LNBits to Strike. (Note: there is an open PR for this, if you want to test then check out the PR on Github)
4.) Set up a Point of Sale (or paywall, or event tickets, or tip jar, or line-item invoices, or anything else) on LNBits.
5.) Collect a payment in LNBits.
6.) That BTC is immediately forwarded to Strike, converted to USD and available for withdrawal to your bank account.
Following these steps you can collect micropayments in USD for next-to-nothing fees and have no exposure to the volatility of BTC.
Your potential customers can hold their balance in USD as well, if they don't want to hold any crypto. They just deposit some USD into their Strike account to pay these micropayments.
The bigger point of crypto is that this trust can be parametrized and made transparent in a public ledger with less intermediaries. I see it as getting to feature parity, not as something that undermines trustless-ness - don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The reality is very few people know they can chargeback and most use debt & instant payment option for low ticket high volume transactions.
If something was holding crypto from being used to pay for daily essentials, it is not charge back ability.
And these services do exist and are in use on some tor network marketplaces.
I don't expect fees to be much lower for a third party human-in-the-loop escrow system. And there's nothing wrong with "re-inventing" either. I think it's critical however that you can have strong censorship resistance and opportunity for innovation. So personally I'm more interested in the unknown unknowns, rather than recreating exactly the same.
While possible, this is a claim made without evidence.