So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.

The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.

“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.

Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.

They need repeat custom.

A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.

The price point is $1 to about $2.

Coffee quickly became one of the most frequently repurchased items at convenience stores, in no small part because it’s the one thing they can sell which is phameceutically habit forming but totally unregulated. (Just telling it like it is.)

But the coffee is not very defensible

The problem, such that it is, is that competing chains are everywhere and *all* of them serve Thoroughly Adequate Coffee at similar prices, so you’re back into the brutal economics of “Who is 3 meters closer to 40 customers at 1 office?”

Enter payment apps.

A thing which I unironically and enthusiastically believe which is unpopular among smart people of my acquaintance: financial engineering has in the recent past and present contributed substantially to human welfare. We should hope to see more of it.

Maybe more geeks need to meet someone who says “My job is teleporting value across time and space.”

Financial engineering is sort of a squishy term. I don’t primarily mean payments infrastructure or financial rails, although both of those involve substantial engineering.

I mean more “We took a thing and performed some alchemy, and now have a new thing.”

Except instead of alchemy it is generally quite a bit of math, a huge amount of contract law and due diligence, often an impressive amount of ops work, and a dusting of technology that web devs would recognize as such.

One of the big promises of software is composability. You can build rich, powerful experiences out of basic building blocks.

APIs add new things to the toolbox. For example: Treasury, which lets an app/platform store, move, and track a business’

I've been a small business owner and can talk at length about SMB banking, and will later, but let's put on the software developer hat right now.

Lots of software talks about money, keeps records about money, does calculations about money, but can't *touch* money.

This is extremely frustrating when you're building SaaS apps for businesses, because you have total control over your UX right until your app needs to touch money... at which point all data about it lives in a silo you can't access.

So you generally push work to the operator.

For example, suppose you’re writing a business-in-a-box system for electricians, including an invoicing feature.

You need to be able to read bank transactions to reconcile. You probably can't. The owner can. So you ask the owner to do mind-numbing work a computer does better.

It sure would be great if your business customers had bank accounts you could actually introspect and operate on their behalves! You could just get the list of incoming payments and match against the invoices.

There is some software to write but it is not rocket science.

FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.

The Internet is so much better at teaching writing than the traditional educational system principally because it removes an artificial and limiting constraint on output imposed by ability of gatekeepers’ limited time to evaluate output.

(Interestingly in fields where we actually care about performance we’re good at encouraging students to practice when no one is watching but for writing we basically assume all the value is created by the teacher-minute of attention. Teacher-minutes are scarce and rationed.)

If you ever want to be deeply, deeply disillusioned about the state of the world, compare what we do where we care about output quality and what we do where we don’t, and which domains sort into which column by revealed preference.

Let me indulge in a story...

Once upon a time there was a genius called Satoshi, this anonymous character laid down a block, it was called the Genius Block, but we we spell it wrong to this day.

Then along came your standard noob who believed in freedom, we know this because he went by the name NewLibertyStandard.

He created a site to buy and sell Bitcoins.

On his site, he priced Bitcoin on electricity.

The price went up, the price went down.

Then one day, he changed the pricing system.

BTC was no longer priced at the cost of mining.

He priced it by DEMAND and SUPPLY.

Geeks and legendary futurists, bought and sold the rarest commodity on the Internet for pennies.

Price teleported upwards.

Then came a Magic The Gathering gamer. He smashed together a shaky piece of software called Magic The Gathering Exchange.

It became the first widely used BTC exchange.

The whole world sent this kid money to buy BTC.

A new market had unlocked. Price teleported.

Let's fast forward 6 glorious years of price teleportation events.

Many of the story details remain unknown to me, though I see their impact on the blockchain.

But let me bring you to the year 2017 and save you lots of reading...

Slow and steady wins the race

Bitcoin is often critized for being slow in everything

But here is the thing: the more you complicate a design early on, the more you push it down a specific road

Get your assumptions wrong, and it's off-road

Thread/

1/20 Bitcoin is too slow and expensive for payments. We all know this. To solve this problem, the Lightning network is being built on top of Bitcoin's blockchain. Will it be the end of XRP?

(Video version @ https://t.co/7zJCuKrpqx)

A thread. 👇

2/20 On a normal day outside a bull run, Bitcoin takes ~10 mins to transfer, at a cost of about $0.50. Any time network activity ramps up, those times and fees multiply. Bitcoin's Proof of Work system is painfully slow and can only handle 7 transactions per second.

3/20 To attempt to solve this problem, the Lightning Network is being developed. It's a 2nd layer network that sits on top of Bitcoin's blockchain. It's been in the works since 2015. Yes, 6 years. Do you know anybody who uses it? Me, either, but I'll get to that.

4/20 Lightning works by opening "channels" between parties. Those parties can perform as many Bitcoin transactions as needed and then close the channel. Because the transactions aren't written to the Bitcoin blockchain until the channel is closed, it's much faster.

5/20 Individual payment channels between various parties combine to form a network of lightning nodes that can route transactions among themselves. The resulting interconnections between various payment channels is the Lightning Network.

Think crypto is confusing?

You're right.

Let's make it easier.

Here's Crypto Terminology 101: 🧵

Altcoin:

Any coin that's not #Bitcoin

Ether (#ETH) is the second most popular coin overall and the most well-known Altcoin.

Ether is the native cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain.

There are thousands of other altcoins, but for now, this is the one to know.

Bitcoin: (#BTC)

The first decentralized digital currency.

Launched in 2009 by an unknown person or organization known only as "Satoshi Nakamoto."

It is the most famous, and most valuable cryptocurrency.

Blockchain:

The core tech behind Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies.

An open, distributed, general ledger where transactions are organized into blocks which are then connected using cryptography.

Coin:

A store of digital value that lives on a blockchain.

Some blockchains, such as Bitcoin, use the same name for both the network and the coin.

Stable coins are another type of cryptocurrency which are backed by fiat currency (e.g the US dollar) or commodities such as Gold.