Web3 had better not be Transaction Cost Hell

Micropayments could potentially resolve this friction in a decentralized way, which I would love to see. On the other hand, this is a really hard problem: people have been working on it since at least Digital's Millicent over 25 years ago. There have been many proposals and startups, but nothing has really worked out.

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

Browsers could have implemented digital wallets to manage subscriptions and one-click payments, but consumers had to wait for Amazon and Apple to launch proprietary solutions to public platform problems. Payments were difficult, so nobody paid for things. Advertising became the default way to sustainably make money; piracy became the default way to... See more