> With that said, I do think crypto has a chance of offering things that the current financial institutions will find very difficult to compete with. I’d love to see Visa reduce their fees to a flat $0.01 per transaction but that that would massively reduce their profits.
That's 60 times lower than Ethereum's transaction fee. Now, an L2 service could go lower but then they're taking on more risk which they'll want to be paid for and it's basically reinventing Venmo or Square Cash.
> Also, with a standardized financial API it opens the door to more competition in other areas. For example, a fairer and more transparent alternative to credit scores. Current credit score providers rely on the fact that their system is opaque. Competing with a transparent credit score would be very difficult.
There are two problems here. The most obvious is that it's at cross-purposes with privacy but the more subtle one is that as people build layers on top of the Ethereum network to compensate for design deficiencies, that transparency evaporates and you're left with the same need for individual companies to share data with each other and near-certainty that in the absence of regulation they will do so even when it's not in their customers' best interest.
I think it's important to understand that L2 is considered the future of Ethereum. So when we are talking about fees it's important to use the numbers that people will actually be paying in the future. Right now those are hovering around $0.10 and it's expected that danksharding will reduce those by a couple orders of magnitude in the near/mid term future.
IMO L2's are fundamentally better than Venmo and Square Cash. Firstly, they are much more transparent to the user. Switching to a different L2 is usually as simple as selecting an option from a dropdown in your wallet app. There are also protocols for allowing users to buy crypto straight on L2 without paying L1 fees and transferring from one L2 to another (for a small fee). Additionally, if an L2 goes down there are escape hatches that allow users to pull money out onto L1. The same cannot be said for Venmo or Square. This transparency also means users are less tied to a single provider. If I want to accept money on Venmo I have to sign up for a whole new app, vs selecting an L2 from a dropdown like I mentioned before.
Regarding credit scores and privacy, there is strong reason to believe that zero-knowledge proofs will be very useful here. These are much more cutting edge but zk-proofs allow people to prove things about themselves without giving away their private info. This could allow a privacy-respecting credit score where users can prove certain things about their financial history without giving everything away.
I will admit privacy is still very much a concern. The recent controversy over Tornado Cash proves that governments are not comfortable with total privacy. However, I will say that this isn't the first time the government has tried to stop cryptography. Originally, there were legal battles over public-key encryption when it was first invented but now we use it every day.
> Now, an L2 service could go lower but then they're taking on more risk which they'll want to be paid for and it's basically reinventing Venmo or Square Cash.
It feels like there is a subtle misunderstanding here: Credit cards are at least L2 systems, not L1. Physical cash, the foundational raw-unit-of-account layer most comparable to Bitcoin or Etherium, is the L1. Something like Venmo or Square Cash would be L3, built on top of the credit networks or electronic bank transfers which are themselves a layer of abstraction over transacting in cash.
That's 60 times lower than Ethereum's transaction fee. Now, an L2 service could go lower but then they're taking on more risk which they'll want to be paid for and it's basically reinventing Venmo or Square Cash.
> Also, with a standardized financial API it opens the door to more competition in other areas. For example, a fairer and more transparent alternative to credit scores. Current credit score providers rely on the fact that their system is opaque. Competing with a transparent credit score would be very difficult.
There are two problems here. The most obvious is that it's at cross-purposes with privacy but the more subtle one is that as people build layers on top of the Ethereum network to compensate for design deficiencies, that transparency evaporates and you're left with the same need for individual companies to share data with each other and near-certainty that in the absence of regulation they will do so even when it's not in their customers' best interest.