I’m not sure I agree with that. People wanna pay as little as possible but they gladly pay for Netflix or whatever. People spend a lot of money on Amazon because they make it really easy to pay. One of the original promises of cryptocurrency is it would make micro transactions easy and painless (with something to do about trust, but… that goes in the opposite direction than consumers would like as it’s the provider that doesn’t have to trust the consumer instead of the other way around like with credit cards which allow you to back charge stuff).
The key is still making stuff easy to pay for. Low transaction fees. Low risk to the consumer. Low friction overall. Ideally we would want to enable that without enabling monopolies like Amazon. Because the low friction is Amazon’s real moat.
Netflix sets up a very obvious dollars-to-value relationship. "Subscribe" and watch "things you already want to watch" - easily.
Most types of online monetization fail that test: subscribe and then you'll use this website for 15 minutes, then the promise is it will do something later that will be worth $10 a month to you. They're the gym-membership of digital services.
They want you to pay to join, but you don't actually know what you're getting and you don't know if you're going to find it usable at even a minimal level. Netflix deals with this too: they sell you access to a movie catalogue, not a specific movie - built into the model is a hedge against local risk for a product which already has very broad appeal.
That's why micropayments are a neat idea. Sure, I'd pay a dime or a quarter to read you crappy news site. A quarter doesn't matter, as long as you don't bug me, I'm not subscribed to anything, and I just click. That's kind of what Bitcoin was promising... Of course for several reasons, that doesn't actually work with Bitcoin.
Steam does amazing because it’s all so easy and well developed. Steam is also very conservative in its development and doesn’t add stuff for the sake of it, like so many other companies fall for (Norton Crypto anyone?)
Also, we think we are there when it comes to UX, but I feel we haven’t even started to make good UX paradigms.
I am fervently anti crypto, and haven’t seen any argument that makes me move an inch, because all of the current alternatives are so much safer and easier. However, the idea of an internet wallet does appeal that’s distributed rather than centralized does appeal on some level. Crypto enthusiasts should focus on that more.
Agreed. There are significant audiences where cognitive load is a much bigger barrier than spending actual money. But people do want privacy, independence, and control, so I think non-centralized services could still work.
I think "virtual server" is the wrong abstraction here. It's like "radio with pictures" or "horseless carriage" in that it's telling us we haven't found the right new way to think about it.
The key is still making stuff easy to pay for. Low transaction fees. Low risk to the consumer. Low friction overall. Ideally we would want to enable that without enabling monopolies like Amazon. Because the low friction is Amazon’s real moat.