Absolutely they could. There's multiple groups that need to come to the party (Stripe, PayPal, Shopify, CC companies, etc). Whether they will without a viable alternative like crypto remains to be seen. Whether there's enough fat for everybody to make a cut remains to be seen.
Crypto does offer (on the surface) an end to end solution to the problem that's not going through multiple companies.
The other side is identity linking. Again, can have a global account with a payment processor like stripe or PayPal that solves that problem though linking to your wallet does seem like a lower impedance opportunity.
I'm not of the opinion that crypto is going to become the new incumbent, but as a technology it presents as a viable alternative to the existing system that could trigger real change.
Looks very cool. Can see a use-case for it at Sky Ledge (IoT/operational insights platform) [1]. To date, we've been building out data ingest from devices for our customers, and for that it's easy enough for us to spin up a service (for more complex use-cases) or a Lambda (for simpler use-cases) to perform the transformation.
However, we're at a stage where we're focusing on developer experience and allowing anybody to create their own "control rooms". Ingest is a particular pain point (we don't want users having to spin up their own servers/lambdas to handle ingest).
Something like DTL where users can define their own transformation schema would be ideal. The syntax might be a bit esoteric and we'd probably want to support both uploading the transformation schema and also composing it via UI for less technical users.
Probably not today but there's a future where this could be done without crypto (hence my comment re whether web3 is the right tech).
1. Fixed payment processing fees make it unfeasible. Minimum credit card fees are 10s of cents, so anything sub a dollar becomes unpractical.
2. Viability of micropayments is proportional to the fees charged by the payment processor. If the processor charges 1c, then 10c micropayments are feasible. If they charge 30c, it makes much more economic sense to charge larger amounts in bulk (as a business, a 40c microtransaction means I'm giving up 75% revenue to the payment processor). Sure, you could always charge in aggregate at the end of the month but the experience to me as a user is worse.
3. What information? If I'm reading an article on a news website, what more information do they need then my wallet address to identify me (if that)? If they require name, that can be linked my wallet address and I can decide whether I give access to that information (no different to SSO today or app store permissions).
Can it be done without crypto? Absolutely, but it requires a lot of change to make it feasible. It's one application that does seem ideally suited to crypto and web3.
I'm skeptical about the ecosystem as a whole, despite running a project myself, but a distinction needs to be made between web3 as a technology and web3 in its current iteration.
I do believe there's something there around business model innovations (e.g. near fee-less micro-transactions tied to a crypto identity as a low impedance alternative to SSO). Concretely, if I can jump onto a website and consume content without having to go through the hassle of signing up to a monthly subscription and entering my credit card details, that's a step change improvement in my enjoyment of the web. Want to read a particularly interesting paywalled news article? Sure, pay 25c via crypto wallet (2 clicks), read article, move on.
The other interesting application are the technological innovations brought on by smart contracts. Blockchain-based serverless compute powering dApps. Instead of having to write a lambda on AWS, I can just submit a smart contract to the blockchain. Provided it's a read only use case, I pay once and can freely call the contract for as long as the network exists.
This might seem uninteresting but as the contract gives access to the current state of the blockchain, there are interesting applications that you can build on top of this [1], particularly if you combine it with oracles that give access to real world data.
Crypto as a financial revolution seems incredibly contrived but web3 as a tool has potential merit. Whether web3 is the best solution to such problems is a question worth exploring.
[1]. I use it to determine whether crypto tokens are honeypots or not by simulating a buy and sell.
As somebody who's delved into the crypto world and attempted to provide utility in the space by building a token aggregator / scam detector [1], I'm more disillusioned than ever with the state of crypto.
"Legitimate" projects are in between a rock and a hard place - either pay outrageous sums to the shillers or have no avenue to promote your project, as Google/Twitter/Facebook won't touch your crypto ads. Instead of the decentralised utopia we were promised, we've shifted power from traditional marketing channels with a vested interest in providing some ROI to scammers with no accountability, only in it to make a dollar at whatever cost. Scammers and hustlers are the gatekeepers of new tokens - unless you're paying thousands of dollars [2], it's almost impossible to get recognised.
Most projects are scams/get-rich-quick schemes preying on people's ignorance. There are well intentioned tokens out there, but even these have very dubious links between the price of the token and the utility of the project. The buybacks, reflections, stable-coin rewards, promises of guaranteed returns b/c we reinvest into other projects quickly part the ignorant from their hard-earned. Any attempt to dig deeper and understand project economics are met with the same platitudes and flawed arguments.
Of course there's the other side of the ecosystem where smart and talented people are raising VC money and working on interesting problems. I do believe there's something there around business model innovations (e.g. near fee-less micro-transactions tied to a crypto identity as a low impedance alternative to SSO) or technological innovations (blockchain-based serverless compute powering dApps - I do see a whole host of problems to which smart contract based dApps are a viable solution). The end result of this isn't a financial revolution but rather a host of entrepreneurs utilising web3 technologies to build the next generation of software startups.
Author here. It's not a question of not understanding how databases work, but as a startup the focus is on moving quickly, not spending time optimising queries before we've achieved traction.
The table with index was setup 3+ years ago and has served us well until now, where we noticed slowdown for particular types of data.
The article is an exercise in diagnosing an issue with db performance and systemically working through it to the right solution.
In this case, understanding why the index wasn't effective, highlighting that column order matters for multicolumn indexes, and how big an impact having the right column can make.
The reason why I don't have TikTok installed. Facebook is manageable, TikTok is a 2 hour rabbit hole of "oh crap, it's 2am and I've got work in the morning".
FB has recently added Instagram reels to the app. Not quite TikTok but it's getting to a point where I work out how to disable them or I uninstall FB for the first time in a decade.
What was the tool called? We're currently looking to solve a problem for a client to better manage contract negotiation between his lawyers and the purchaser's lawyer (apartment units). ATM it's all done via email but I imagine there'd be heaps of tools out there.
I've been using Angular in production for 5+ years. There was a year where things were confusing, state updating all over the place, and general frustration. But once I grokked pure components, and embraced "data down, actions up", it all clicked and just made sense [0]. I find React obtuse in comparison.
Angular front-end, Nestjs backend has fast become my stack of choice. It greatly minimises context switching by having such similar paradigms across frontend and backend.
I recently went on the journey of creating my token for my utility app. Through it all, I learned a lot about the mechanics of creating and deploying tokens.
Here's some insights on what I learned, and some recommended approaches depending on who you are / what you're trying to achieve.
Didn't get a chance to get into some of the more nuanced points, such as setting price, setting presale price etc, though happy to elaborate if people are interested. Setting tokenomics was one area where I really struggled to find any good information.
Agents of I.N.U. started as a personal project after entering the world of DeFi in May this year.
I was dismayed at the amount of scams and the lack of tooling in general. Hard / impossible to find new tokens without sleuthing through Telegram groups, even harder still to keep track of those tokens.
So I started building out a tool to improve my trading, and after demoing it to friends and families, I decided to turn it into a product.
Features:
- Scam and real-time honeypot detection
- Best-in-class filtering (filter by name, # of trades, volume, token liquidity and token creation date)
- Powerful sorting
- Extremely performant
- Event tracking (new tokens, liquidity added events, ownership changes)
We currently support PancakeSwap / BSC but we'll be expanding support in the near future.
We've got an extensive roadmap planned to take the product even further, including more in-depth token analysis, portfolio and watchlist tracking.
no audit's going to pick up every possible issue or potential exploit, but it does help weed out the obvious scams.
The entry to creating your own token is so low that people with little to no coding experience are attempting to add/modify functionality. Community insistence to get audited is useful to pick up on these.
As someone who's become actively involved in the space, I still struggle to keep up with some of the lingo. I've gone very deep into ERC20 tokens but haven't done much with NFTs. Excellent resource to quickly get up to speed on some of those topics.
Agents of I.N.U. started as a personal project after entering the world of DeFi in May this year.
I was dismayed at the amount of scams and the lack of tooling in general. Hard / impossible to find new tokens without sleuthing through Telegram groups, even harder still to keep track of those tokens.
So I started building out a tool to improve my trading, and after demoing it to friends and families, I decided to turn it into a product.
Features:
- Scam detection
- Best-in-class filtering (filter by name, # of trades, volume, token liquidity and token creation date)
- Powerful sorting
- Extremely performant
- Event tracking (new tokens, liquidity added events, ownership changes)
We currently support PancakeSwap / BSC but we'll be expanding support in the near future.
We've got an extensive roadmap planned to take the product even further, including more in-depth token analysis, portfolio and watchlist tracking.
Crypto does offer (on the surface) an end to end solution to the problem that's not going through multiple companies.
The other side is identity linking. Again, can have a global account with a payment processor like stripe or PayPal that solves that problem though linking to your wallet does seem like a lower impedance opportunity.
I'm not of the opinion that crypto is going to become the new incumbent, but as a technology it presents as a viable alternative to the existing system that could trigger real change.