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Web3 had better not be Transaction Cost Hell | Noah Smithnoahpinion.substack.com/p/web3-had-better-not-be-transaction
142 sats \ 4 comments \ @KenyaCoin 10 Feb 2022 bitcoin
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 10 Feb 2022
The two main insights from the article are:
  1. "Web3" is mostly just introducing excludability to the web
  2. The non-monetary (psychic) transaction costs of micropayments might be too high and while commons in the extreme are a certain kind of hell so is private property in the extreme
I've heard (2) discussed a lot. I think increasing excludability everywhere is bad, but so are commons have problems too. This is one reason why I think keeping post/commenting costs on SN low is the right move.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @thrown 10 Feb 2022
point 2 is why i think something like urbit makes a lot of sense.
these ubiquitous micro transactions are mainly to handle offloaded compute. but most compute actions aren’t even that intensive. you can just do it with your own server and be done with it.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @KenyaCoin OP 10 Feb 2022
This suggests that the main attraction of web3 might not be decentralization, but rather what economists call excludability — it will be stuff people pay for, rather than free stuff.
Imagine if everything you do online required you to decide whether to make a tiny payment. Send an email? Pay a few cents. Read one more paragraph of an article? Pay a few cents. And so on.
It would be an utter nightmare. The psychic cost of having to decide whether to pay a tiny amount for a tiny piece of product, dozens or hundreds of times a day, would be enormous. Some people would just choose not to deal with the hassle, and instead to simply use a ton of paid services and see their bill at the end of the month, like they do when using electricity in their house; but this carefree attitude would naturally lead them to buy far more than they really wanted, and when they saw a few of those monthly bills, they would reconsider.
In the end, most of these users would likely migrate back to either free ad-supported services or to subscription services that only make you think about payments once in a while.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @KenyaCoin OP 10 Feb 2022
In Africa, paywalls are loathed. Visa or MasterCard?
How about m-Pesa, or Airtel? As those are the only pmt methods to which many in Kenya have access.
And now you want us to pay $0.10 worth of #bitcoin in order to read your latest newsletter issue?
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