(On Legitimacy of Blockchains - 8)
From a purely technological standpoint, the blockchain technology is more than promising. The way a blockchain manages to allow all customers to keep track of one shared record of all financial activities, without having to rely on trusted third parties, is without a doubt a pure win in terms of efficiency and safety. Since the administrative power of a distributed web application (dApp) can be shared by any number of nodes, the entire network is highly DDoS-resistant and possesses the ability to recover itself even when a significant portion of it gets damaged.
We must acknowledge, however, that such an obvious technological advantage is not necessarily self-evident to an end user.
Let's imagine a customer who is shopping online. A traditional e-commerce website will require the person to either enter a debit/credit card number, connect a PayPal account, or use a mobile application to make a payment. This, for sure, involves one or more trusted third parties.
Now let's imagine that the customer decides to visit a brand new e-commerce website which uses a Web3 framework in order to let anyone pay in a "better" way. But alas! Can this really be considered "better" in terms of user experience?
The website will first require the user to set up a crypto wallet (if it hasn't been installed yet). Not only that, the user will also have to fund this brand new crypto wallet with a decent amount of cryptocurrency, since its initial balance is zero. And in order to do that, one must either use a debit/credit card or a direct bank-transfer protocol to move a decent amount of fiat currency to a crypto-exchange service. This external service, in turn, will have to trade the deposited fiat currency with a cryptocurrency and then hand it over to the user's new crypto wallet. Only after all these processes are over, the customer will be able to proceed with crypto-payments.
Okay. Let's admit. Once a crypto wallet is fully set up, all subsequent transactions issued directly from it will be far more secure than traditional means of payment because third parties will no longer be involved. It is the process of initial funding, however, which seriously tempts the end user to raise an eyebrow.