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Bratmon | 10 days ago

Why? What does adding a slow database to the process help?

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Zaskoda|10 days ago

This sounds like a reflexive "I hate blockchain and cryptocurrency" reaction but I'll give a reply regardless.

You can't do transactions with just a database. You'd have to add a payment processor. Now things are getting wildly complex.

x402 is designed with agentic AIs in mind. AIs make mistakes. Having an immutable record that can't be tampered with is a nice layer of security.

And while I haven't worked with it personally, I understand x402 to be extremely straight forward for devs to implement.

Bratmon|7 days ago

But won't this solution still need:

1. A payment processor for users to turn money into tokens 2. A payment processor for news sites to turn tokens into money 3. A software provider to handle the actual microtransaction part of this (unless they want to learn how to become software developers themselves)?

It seems to me like all the blockchain does here is to make it so this transaction needs 3 software providers instead of just one!

littlecranky67|10 days ago

Implementing lightning (bitcoin layer 2 solution) is probably easier or at least at par. And way more accesible. Look at lnurl, lnaddress.

CobrastanJorji|10 days ago

The argument I had originally heard was "the transaction costs of credit cards is so high, we need a system that works for many tiny payments. But of course, most of the cryptocurrency transaction fees are still pretty high, and a dedicated "tiny transaction" company would presumably be able to offer the same service for less cost than a distributed equivalent.

littlecranky67|10 days ago

Transaction fees for bitcoin sent via the lightning network (which is a layer 2 solution) are in the "less than a cent" category and are settled in a few seconds. This is not fiction, this is i.e. how Trump made his for-the-cameras bitcoin payment during his campaign.