A lot of crypto projects are ready for implementation right now, but they all have their own unique problems and one rather large shared problem.

I made a peertube plugin a while back that will tip XNO to any creators you watched based on watch time.

The user journey for everyone was as simple as could possibly be imagined. Viewers added a few quid to a browser wallet and forget about it. Creators added an XNO address to the video description and the plugin would automatically pay like 10p a minute or something. Nobody even needed an account to make it work and there was no issues with federation as long as you were watching from the instance with your wallet.

I’ve even been writing my own fedi-first blog engine and been thinking about adding paywalls. It’d be super easy to do technically and the UX would be as good or better than any existing services.

You’d just set a cookie when people look at a post and generate a new wallet on the server. If a reader wants to view a paywalled post, they click a link or scan a QR code to send payment, the payment clears in two seconds and refreshes the page. Server checks the cookie and that the new wallet has the fee in, sees the article is paid for and serves it.

The thing is that this project is targeting a niche within a niche within a niche within a niche.

The deepest niche is why XNO? It has JS wallets, is feeless, actually decentralised, clears within two seconds and the project leader seems to be ideologically driven to create a functional currency above all else. The problems are that it’s not anonymous, it’s premined, and that it’s deflationary.

Already this is a hard niche to get out of. I can already see that people will be arguing to use alternatives like monero because it’s more secure, but it also has fees, is difficult to exchange for real currency and will probably get you on a no fly list. Or SOL because the fees are really low and a lot of people already use it. But I’m wanting to do instant transactions with no fees so sending pennies is feasible, so this makes me a statist spy wants to push my shitcoin because I’m a massive bag holder.

The next niche is that we have a small user base here that’s incredibly sceptical about crypto. The whole crypto sphere is incredibly toxic. It’s mostly environmentally destructive and the vast majority of what it holds up is fraud, organised crime and gambling.

The majority of pro-crypto people here are cypherpunks who put their ideological commitment to monero or bitcoin above usability. The majority of anti-crypto -and overall majority- of people here are jaded by crypto nonsense and won’t give a new project a hearing.

The next niche is marketing. We don’t do that here. It’s uncouth and immoral. A spam campaign would be annoying and get the spammers banned and is just generally bad in everyway. Alternatively if any of the influencers on here decided to sell out to help us reach a critical mass where crypto payments aren’t entirely stagnant, we wouldn’t have the money to pay them. Crypto kind of has to be unprofitable to move on from being another form of gambling.

The last niche is onboarding. The market we want for microtransactions really isn’t the market that centralised exchanges want. A decentralised payments network really should be competing with netflix and substack. We want high churn, low volume for people to be able to feasibly make an income. That’s going to be ruined by the fact that people wanting to pay a tenner a month are going to lose most of that money before they even get it into a wallet, and the people recieving that money might just lose 20% of it at any given moment due to market movements.

So after narrowing it all down this leaves us with maybe a dozen people on here left to support it but they aren’t even going to cross paths enough to make any transactions.