I know a lot of people who get involved in crypto as a way to make money.
This is the primary reason they get in, looking to get in early and get huge returns on the money that they invest in.
The reason I have gotten into crypto is not likely to be the same as most people. This is why what I list is likely to be different from what most people would like to see.
I think it is also important for the work and research I do, for me to understand why I am doing this.
What I am trying to achieve
I had considered at one point looking at creating a course teaching people how to make a living developing and maintaining websites.
For this example, let’s assume I have all the course content and the website set up for it.
I now need a way for people to buy the course, I would have most likely looked at using paypal, maybe stripe to accept payments.
While this generally works there are still issues around using these platforms and these issues are what made me start to look at crypto, to see if it does not have to use these other payment platforms that can ban me at their own desire with no recourse for it.
At a very basic level I would like a service that works similar to paypal, but uses crypto so that it would work similarly.
That is open and any one can easily get started without having to provide lots of details about yourself.
I like the idea that if someone is upset with you or trying to sabotage you, they can not just get you cancelled as current payment gateways can do to shut down your business.
So what does it need to do:
Easy to get started: I can just run some software and I will have an account, no need to register, no need to provide information about who I am or what I do. I do not want to have to wait till I get approved. I want to just be able to start as soon as I hear about it.
Works everywhere: When I look at sending payments via traditional methods, often you will find you can send payments to certain countries, but it is not all countries.
There are possible other restrictions that were added to stop people being able to send and receive money, all in the name of protecting its users.
With crypto I want it to be able to send and receive from any with a device that is connected to the internet.
That is all that should be needed.
Easy Integration: While as an end user it is all good to install an app on my device or register through a website, it also needs to be integratable into software that is being created, things like shopping carts. A website should be able to receive payments for donations or selling something, maybe inside a game to be able to buy items there.
Censorship Resistant: If I build a product or service that I would like to get paid for, then I want the security to know I still will be able to continue to earn money. Not having my payment process decide for some reason, maybe good, maybe a bad reason that they can just shut me down.
Yes there are bad actors who should be shut down, but that should be via legal methods that the government has, not being added to the financial system.
If someone does something wrong, or even perceived to do something wrong even though they might not have, in the current system if enough or the right people complain then you can be shut down and often have no way to understand what happened and be able to rectify the situation. Your business can effectively be shut down by the gateway provider even if you have a perfectly legitimate business.
Anonymous: If i am offering coaching session off my website and run them through zoom, then the person buying them needs the zoom information to be able to do the coaching sessions, but there is no good reason I have to give out my own my person address or phone number, a person’s privacy should be respected and enforced.
Private: Following on from being Anonymous, if you do know my wallet you should not then be able to see what I do. Cryptocurrencies are generally pseudonymous rather than anonymous, you can eventually put a name to a wallet and from there know what wallets have given them money and what wallets you have sent them money.
In my example of a coaching session maybe I do a price test and make the offer at different prices to see what the customers respond best with. This information should not be available to any one that looks.
Something like bitcoin fails terribly here, how monero works to keep details private might be a lot better.
Secure: I want to know the money I am receiving is valid and I can use it. I do not want the person to be able to spend their money twice, or that it can be hacked and I lose everything.
Nothing is ever 100% foolproof, the Titanic was meant to be unsinkable, as much as we would like to think it is protected we need to go above that to make sure users money is taken care of.
Fast: If I want to buy a coffee using crypto, I want to be able to pay and have it confirmed and done within a few seconds. The person selling the coffee should now have my crypto and should feel free to walk out knowing that I have paid them for my coffee. While something like Bitcoin you can see unconfirmed events quickly, to actually verify it is committed to the block chain and finial, this can take a long time and lead to a situation where I can just accept that I can see an unconfirmed transaction and it is all good or does the person have to wait till it is confirmed. What if it was not a coffee but a high end smartphone, is just being an unconfirmed transaction be good enough.
Low/Fixed fee structure: When I am selling something, I need to know how much it is going to cost me to use that payment method so I can decide if I want to accept it or not.
The common method in crypto at the moment is charging fees based on how busy the network is.
This is an understandable method as the network wants to balance things out and not have all the events around the same time. So a price structure that tries to flatten the curve. This is highly beneficial to the network, but the end user does not care about the network and just wants to use it when they need it and for it to always cost the same amount.
For crypto I believe there should be some type of fee in using it, but I feel like it should be fixed (relative to the payment size) and low.
Stable price: Fiat currency is not stable either, but since you’re not changing into other foreign currency regularly or you’re paid in one currency and spend it in a different currency, you will see that it is not stable.
In the past 10 years 1 USD has been 1 to 0.6 AUD, that is a swing of up to 40%. But that is over a 10 year period, with crypto it could be a 20% swing in a week.
For the consumer this makes pricing and selling things in a crypto currency hard to use as the prices would fluctuate too much.
Something like a stable coin where you use the value of the fiat currency to trade would make it feel more stable and could lead to a greater adoption.
Recurring payments: For a lot of businesses recurring payments is key to them being able to continue to work and make life a lot easier on the consumer.
None of the current crypto currencies currently have a method to handle this. This might be some type of invoice/bill being sent out and the user or their wallet can automatically approve it, making it function very similarly to how a business can bill a visa card regularly.
Notification of changes: When I am selling a coffee or a coaching call, then I need to be notified when a payment has successfully been made so me or the website running the software can take action when this occurs.
This needs an easy way for the website/shopping cart for this integration.
Low power usage: Proof of work that was introduced in bitcoin to verify that the blocks created are valid. It seems like a good idea and while it does protect the network, but as the value of bitcoin has increased more people have seen that mining is a good way to make money.
The more people who mine it makes the difficulty harder so requiring more computers and needing more computer power.
Other methods have come that should protect the network without the need of so much computer power.
Comparing to the visa network
The visa net has become the dominant network to transfer fiat money in our current system. This has a lot of the features I am looking for, it works fast, it is secure, fixed fees at a fairly reasonable price, but fails on some of the other ones like easy to get started or integrate with.
When it comes to using it on the merchant side you can not directly just plug it in and start to use it, you need to go through a gateway provider like paypal or stripe. For consumption you often need a credit card or signed up to a bank with a debit card that can use the card that can use the visa network.
if a crypto was to become a replacement for the current financial system, then it would need to handle the level of transaction that the visa network currently handles and more as the usebase increased.
The network is reported to have handled 232.5 billion transactions in a year, $13 trillion in that same period. The dollar amount, while interesting, is not that important, it is the amount of transaction that needs to be handled.
at 233.5 billion, that works out to be about 7,500 transactions per second, but the transaction will not be hitting uniformly over that time you will have peak times where a larger amount of transactions need to be processed. I have seen reports that the visa network can handle 24,000 transactions per second, this is a long way from bitcoin’s 4.6 transactions per second.