>Nine months later, the next version of her favorite sneaker drops. Her digital wallet has a new offer reminding her of their availability at your store, along with a personalized offer on new laces she can’t find anywhere else.<p>They're seriously pitching "ads get sent directly to your wallet" as a positive feature. This is so comically, tragically misguided I don't know whether to laugh or cry. This is future indeed. Because, after all, a major weakness in mere credit card transactions is you don't have a <i>relationship</i> with your customer. In our crypto-future, they won't have a choice! Isn't that what you want? Comforting your customer every time they have a bad breakup with an algorithmically optimized offer for some ice cream and emotional shopping? Maybe try to associate your brand with their good feelings by sending a couple messages about the smooth, refreshing taste of your soft drink at their child's football game? Without your customer offering you a contact method, how could you possibly target them so effectively and personally?<p>The more I learn about crypto the ickier it gets.
>Before the customer leaves the store, two tokens appear in her digital wallet. The first is an NFT version of her new sneakers, usable in any game or virtual world she chooses. The second is an authenticated NFT receipt, which admits her into your exclusive online community of verified sneaker-lovers.<p>The first is an unobtainable, unrealistic goal that ultimately sours the idea of NFTs in the eyes of anyone that bought into them, thinking it was possible (or even viable to somehow encourage every game/world developer to put in the unpaid work to support arbitrary meshes, textures, mappings, animations, etc).<p>The second could have been an email, or even just a URL/code on the receipt.
I don't see anything good about this or Solana, it is still a centralised ponzi scheme like the rest of all the crypto coins.<p>How can Solana be the next Visa if it keeps going down every time. If this system is going down now, it certainly cannot scale when more people use it.
> Nine months later, the next version of her favorite sneaker drops. Her digital wallet has a new offer reminding her of their availability at your store, along with a personalized offer on new laces she can’t find anywhere else.<p>Oh good, that's what I want - a currency that includes spam as a feature. That was really missing from cash.<p>> We believe this will pave the way for a future where digital currencies are prevalent and digital money moves through the internet like data – uncensored and without intermediaries taxing every transaction.<p>Chargebacks and anti-money laundering rules are features. "crypto is a tax avoidance scheme" is not a sales pitch, it's conspiracy to commit a crime.<p>> settling immediately with costs measured in fractions of a penny<p>So like an intermediary party charging a tax?<p>> this is about a vision where all currencies – including U.S. dollars – are on-chain<p>Convenient for tracking people! Also terrible for the environment.<p>> When a customer buys something, it’s a vote of support. A merchant should reward that support with personalized offers, on-chain loyalty programs, and unique virtual goods to accompany physical purchases<p>I'd really settle for just getting the widget I bought and not being spammed. Really. I promise. Please stop spamming me.<p>> Merchants should benefit from all of the advantages that on-chain decentralized payments can provide, such as network cost savings, DeFi yield generation, zero fraud liability, instant settlement, and ownership of the customer relationship.<p>Merchants should have fraud liability. If you are enabling fraud and money laundering, you need to pay for that - potentially with jail time.<p>> Help us bring to life a decentralized payments network that will define this next era of payments.<p>Another clueless middleman who wants a piece of the pie by helping others commit crime and avoid liability for their actions. Adding funny new words does not make your thing not a security. Ignoring regulations does not make you immune to punishment. Lofty ideas do not make you a hero.
I feel like launching this comes with a really fundamental misunderstanding around the role of a platform. If Solana is just going to launch products why would developers build on top of it knowing the platform owner (de-facto) controls the roadmap? This works for existing systems like Visa only because Visa is already large and the most accepted network (and in fact, Visa was initially a consortium of banks, as was Mastercard) -- and even then, Visa faces pressure on all fronts from ACH, p2p, and crypto networks which developers will flock to if integration is easier and user-accepted. I would be just as shocked/skeptical if Visa believed it could build an enduring supply of Visa-specific apps and developers in a way that mimics e.g. iOS/Windows.<p>When a platform has a hard supply-side to build out (in this case, developers and apps) making the platform owner a competitor seems incredibly short-sighted. IIRC, Intel famously refused to get into end-user devices like calculators because of this exact dynamic.
Why Solana over a zkSync / Starkware based solution? Payment networks <i>cannot</i> go down and Solana is going to continue to buckle under high load (or now just drop your transaction in QoS).<p>I guess this project was started before discovering Solana has massive stability problems.
> Before the customer leaves the store, two tokens appear in her digital wallet. The first is an NFT version of her new sneakers, usable in any game or virtual world she chooses. The second is an authenticated NFT receipt, which admits her into your exclusive online community of verified sneaker-lovers. She’s now a customer for life.<p>What comes after jumping the shark?
> Before the customer leaves the store, two tokens appear in her digital wallet. The first is an NFT version of her new sneakers, usable in any game or virtual world she chooses. The second is an authenticated NFT receipt, which admits her into your exclusive online community of verified sneaker-lovers. She’s now a customer for life.<p>This leads me to wonder: Why would I want an NFT of my sneakers in a game or virtual world, rather than just, say, a representation of the sneakers themselves, minus the NFT? I suspect it's because this introduces scarcity into the virtual world. There's no <i>technical</i> reason why every character in the game couldn't have the same pair of sneakers modeled on a real-life sneaker. But if you need an NFT tied to a physical purchase, now that virtual pair of sneakers costs you $99, and you can walk around that virtual world knowing that your fashion can't be easily (or inexpensively) replicated. This definitely has classist implications.<p>As for the exclusive online community of verified sneaker-lovers, note the words "exclusive" and "verified." It's a gatekeeping method so you don't have to associate with the hoi palloi who might love sneakers just as much as you, but don't have the cash to buy enough to get into the exclusive community. And who's going to build or maintain this community? Solana is enticing you with visions of an ecosystem, but it's not actually going to build that ecosystem.
Seems pretty hard to connect those claims to the docs <a href="https://docs.solanapay.com/spec" rel="nofollow">https://docs.solanapay.com/spec</a><p>"A standard protocol to encode Solana transaction requests within URLs to enable payments and other use cases"
Seems like I get to be the first to post the standards meme: <a href="https://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/927/</a><p>Except that this standard comes free of charge with the Pandora's box of crypto applications. Lovely.