(On Legitimacy of Blockchains - 9)
Just step outside of the pure beauty of Web3's backend system and see what its frontend looks like from a layman's perspective.
If the customer is required to pay fiat currency through a traditional method of payment (e.g. PayPal) just for the purpose of initially funding one's crypto wallet, what is the person going to think?
Wouldn't the customer simply say to him/herself: "Hey, wait a minute. What's the point of setting up a crypto wallet, if I am still required to enter my credit card number to start making payments? Isn't the Web3 technology supposed to get rid of all these potentially insecure processes?"
The problem lies on the fact that we are still requiring the customer to use a centralized exchange system (e.g. Binance, Coinbase, Changelly, Huobi, etc) as well as a centralized banking system, despite the fact that we are expected to provide a "fully decentralized service" to everyone without involving any of these central authorities. Such a counter-intuitive aspect of a typical Web3 application is what encourages people to simply dismiss the whole branding of Web3 as a mere scam.
In order for a cryptocurrency-based web framework to attract customers who are not yet familiar with the long-term prospects of cryptocurrencies, it must be able to provide services to them without requiring them to pay any fiat currency whatsoever. This is the only way through which it can convince them that it really is using a brand new technology, independent of any traditional means of payment (thereby creating a psychological assurance that it won't try to give itself any chance to steal money from the customer's bank account). But how?
First of all, we cannot just summon cryptocurrency out of thin air and hand it over to a new user. If we do this over and over again for every new customer (Don't forget that a "new customer" can simply be one of many duplicate accounts made by a single person), the inflation will be so severe that the currency's value will dwindle. So we cannot just keep air-dropping forever.