61 sats \ 2 replies \ @Scoresby OP 19 Sep \ parent \ on: The Mental Transaction Costs of Zaps bitcoin
There's probably also something to the initial hurdle of getting funds into the system. A non-bitcoin forum that wants to introduce zap functionality has to get people's money somehow (probably credit card transactions: so users have to pre load their account with a charge which means the whole internet checkout experience we are so used to and which is a pretty large upfront time sink). Additionally, users would have to figure out how to withdraw their funds which, in the fiat world, is an even more painful experience.
I delayed initially getting on SN because I didn't have a good lightning setup and I kept failing to transfer sats into SN. The fact that sats can come in and go out with such ease is a huge difference between SN and any non-bitcoin account system to achieve the same end.
Microtransactions are already huge in video games. People have no problem preloading an account with tokens using credit card.
The fact that sats can come in and go out with such ease is a huge difference.
Agreed.
However, most payments in the economy tend to go one-way: from consumer to producer. The ability for customers to send money out of their online accounts is more valuable for something like a social platform where some "customers" are the net producers of value. Otherwise, who cares if you have a large balance in your acct, you're going to spend it on the platform eventually anyways.
MMORPGs like Secondlife have players earning millions of fiat by selling digital goods in the game to one-another. They can connect a PayPal acct. and withdraw to their banks once their in-game balance is large enough.
I'd argue it's more painful (for the average person today) to deposit/withdraw a sats balance. You admitted to finding it difficult to deposit LN on SN. Now imagine someone who has no interest in BTC and just wants to watch Netflix...
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You make a good point. I'm not much of a gamer, so I'm pretty ignorant of that world.
I like your distinction between a consumer -> producer model and a social platform model.
Content on the internet might be more like a social platform than the traditional model of producers and consumers. Maybe we've been thinking about it like there are the people who make the content and the people who consume it and they are completely separate, whereas on something like SN or nostr they are less distinct.
Incidentally, this is where I think ecash comes in. Something like boardwalk cash with a stable dollar balance and the ease of exit/entry via lightning would go a long way to letting every platform function like SN. I can imagine a platform that let's you buy ecash tokens with a credit card or with sats and smooths the on boarding process.
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