Payments, Payment Rails, and Blockchains, and the Metaverse — MatthewBall.co

The lack of payment infrastructure is the reason why so much of the internet is monetized via advertising. Rather than requiring users to pull out a credit card and type their information into a website, users could be monetized frictionlessly and indirectly, paying not with their money but with a different asset: their attention. That precipitated... See more

Lots of transaction costs aren’t paid in dollars — they’re paid in seconds of effort, in the mental cost of attention-switching, and in the hassle and stress of keeping things in mind. Web3 should focus on stuff that allows people to pay fewer of those costs, rather than stuff that forces them to pay more.

The hard reality is that $ₐ is much much greater than $ᵤ for an enormous number of media experiences. It was never the lack of micro-payment solutions that meant advertising for content had to exist; it’s merely the fact that $ₐ > $ᵤ for most users on many services. Thus, facilitating seamless payment via tokens doesn’t necessarily impact the under... See more