(On Legitimacy of Blockchains - 12)
What a typical Web3 payment solution often misses is a user-friendly protocol which is more convenient and somehow more engaging to use than traditional means of exchange. Most customers do not care about the fundamental integrity of the system; they just want a system that works for them.
And from a user-friendliness point of view, having to require a protocol to go through the burden of painfully inefficient consensus mechanisms such as PoW (Proof of Work) or PoS (Proof of Stake) is a major performance bottleneck which takes away opportunities from Web3 services to beat out the reign of centralized services.
Therefore, a distributed financial infrastructure must base its primary means of operation on a kind of method which is both computationally efficient (i.e. no graphics card grinding and all that jazz) and possesses a means of issuing and resolving transactions that is clearly being perceived by the public as "swifter" than those of existing frameworks.
How do we discover such a method? With a fair bit of certainty, we can easily find myriads of alternative means of consensus when it comes to distributed finance. Cryptocurrency protocols such as Ripple (XRP) and Stellar Lumens (XLM) are capable of resolving transactional uncertainties based upon FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement), which consists of a network of partially overlapping voting groups whose members must be manually invited by other existing members of each group to which they belong. The process of manual invitation ensures that no bots (or "zombie PCs") can register themselves as new members of those groups, since it creates chances for existing members to evaluate the legitimacy of newcomers based on human interactions (e.g. chatting).
The problem with such a manual process is that a user cannot just open up a new account and start participating in the network without being invited by others, which can often be more of a hassle than just buying some crypto through a centralized exchange and using it. One way to bypass this would be to establish a centralized KYC (Know Your Customer) protocol in which the user proves the validity of one's unique identity by presenting a certified ID material (such as a passport or a driver license), yet this ensues a great fear of being scammed and thus is an optimal way to discourage prospective customers from using the service.