tatertots1234

Because there is a small group of people that care enough to use it. Most anti-crypto people do not want anything to do with it. Neutral-crypto people don't see the reason for enhanced privacy, or are afraid it might put them into trouble with regulators.

Pro-crypto people can be broken into different tribes. Bitcoin maxis feel that only Bitcoin is worth using, and they might think the privacy of Bitcoin is "good enough." Ethereum maxis want to use applications and smart contracts for DeFi, escrow, exchanges, lending, stablecoins, and Monero does not support that. Ethereum maxis also feel that privacy is solvable with ZK proofs and private rollups. Then there are other tribes like Solana users who are looking for scalability for games and apps, and don't care as much about privacy.

It’s really not that hard to build a Patreon style service on crypto and web3. It’s also far easier to build a new payment processing platform on crypto than it is to build an alternative to PayPal or Stripe.

Yes, a theoretical crypto-Patreon would have to be coded in Solidity and frontend interfaces built around it for the web. This might be OSS or just a private enterprise.

But the users of this platform do not need to know how to code.

Theoretically possible but practically impossible, and one of the reasons that NFTs and DeFi will probably never be adopted on Bitcoin L1 unless the protocol changes.

It’s pretty much non-news to anybody who isn’t invested in Solend.

Most of the things that cause these problems, like stolen apes, would not work on Bitcoin as it lacks smart contract functionality.

In crypto creative and art economies the standard is around 2.5%, with various platforms competing on that by offering lower commissions even down to 0%.

Crypto presents a real solution to this problem despite HN’s hate for it. Users who want to achieve Patreon style donations and gated access to digital media can use stablecoin payments on a high-throughput layer two network. Cost per transaction would be minimal, allowing micropayments without cutting into artist profits. The protocol could be fully open source as well.

In a hypothetical crypto Patreon, if you send $1 to an artist, your only recourse to get that back if you are displeased with their art is to ask them politely, or ask the platform or protocol creator. Most likely you will not get your funds back, but this is assumed to be the case.

Many Patreon payments are simple donations, or gated access to digital media. These can be achieved with smart contract functionality to mitigate the need for costly payment processing.

> The crypto bros totally miss the point in understanding this too.

The crypto folks are pretty cognizant of it, which is why they built an entire technology that isn’t reliant on intermediaries, banks, and payment processors to manage transactions.

A crypto Patreon in stablecoin like DAI on an L2 would basically be able to remove most of the high fees creators see in Patreon.

and it will probably continue to fall long term relative to better assets, unless the protocol or tech changes drastically - or if PoS somehow proves to be untenable.

but contrary to a lot of HN commenters in these threads, this is not nearly the death of crypto currencies that they think it is.

If you are an anon dev and you share your real identity with a counterparty, you aren’t doing a great job at staying anonymous.

Anybody can start a new crypto wallet and receive funds into it, and then make transactions and keep that value on-chain to remain anonymous. There are a number of anon devs in the Ethereum ecosystem doing just this.

With enough effort your IP might be traceable if you do something like mint a token from a compromised website. But advanced methods also exist to break anonymity in systems like Tor, VPNs and cash which we often consider to have strong properties of privacy and anonymity, and to this nobody would refute as “bullshit.”

All of their transactions are visible in the ledger, not hard to find. The same tools they used still exist today, except with additional privacy enhancements like some chains using zk-SNARKs.

The only weak points are exchanges. The OP can decide how anonymous they want to be - complete anonymity would imply not exchanging to fiat at all.