@t0nyyates a good example is @stripe. there were lots of choices in payments before @stripe came to be, they didn’t actually offer anything new, they just dramatically diminished the cost and hassle (more bureaucratic than technical) of trying something out that could accept real money. led
@t0nyyates @stripe to an explosion of experiments, tiny websites and businesses that would never otherwise have come to be trying out non-ad-based real-money businesses online. ex post, you can look at any of those businesses that actually succeeded, and say that the prior payments infrastructure
@t0nyyates @stripe would have supported it. and it would, conditional on knowing which businesses were going to significantly succeed! but that’s survivorship bias. the role and effect of @stripe is to make possible experiments that wouldn’t otherwise be tried, not knowing which businesses will be
@t0nyyates @stripe successful enough to cover a high bureaucratic and regulatory burden ex ante. stanlecoins generalize that model with applications and experiments that go beyond simple one-way payments from customer to business. small scale mutual insurance schemes, savings pools, collaborations
@t0nyyates @stripe with clever financial incentives to align interests. once you know which of these ideas will succeed at some reasonable scale, you can always say “the existing infrastructure could have supported that, you just needed a good lawyer”. but ex ante, you don’t know which will succeed
@t0nyyates @stripe and the high fixed costs associated with accessing the traditional infrastructure for arrangements at all more complicated that standard payments means many interesting experiments don’t get tried. with stablecoins, you can experiment with real-money, multidirectional flow
@t0nyyates @stripe collaborations at a very low cost.
