Fantastic talk with CoinBase CEO Brian Armstrong and A16Z partner Chris Dixon about the future of crypto when it moves far beyond just currency:
Some interesting talk about how in the beginning of the web ads took off because micropayments were simply impossible.
I remember in early internet days people trying to invent ways you can “Pay Per View” of each website you visited, or “tip” an author. However transactions that small and between countries were impossible due to fees and regulations.
However, current crypto technology lets you transfer super-small amounts (with BitCoin you can pay 0.00000001 unit of value). Imagine if you visited 1,000 websites and watched 200 videos this month, and you want to send ALL those sites just $5, but split up among those 1,200 pieces of content.
With a cryptocurrency you could do that since the fees would be almost zero, and transferring value across borders wouldn’t be an issue. Your computer could automatically divvy up that 5 bucks into 1,200 different payments depending on how long you used their content. Each content creator would get something like 0.004 units of value from you.
These small payments could really add up!
It could breathe life to a whole new set of content creators that would make content or software for “free” and rely on micro-payments instead of ads and product sales.