GM 🌊 "Another word for money is 'currency', as in 'currents', as in 'river'. This term emphasizes something important about money: it has to flow to exist at all. Money is a protocol, a shared idea that has power to the extent that people participate in exchanging it." - Gordon Brander

Talking to the @Plebeian Market team about the differences and synergies between @Shopstr Markets's marketplace approach and theirs after the first @Sovereign Engineering SEC-03 demo day helped me put together exactly how Nostr identifies and the ability to send Lightning and ecash micropayments completely flip existing incentives. A seller's network and reputation are entirely locked in to a legacy market platform, meaning platforms can favor buyers almost exclusively without needing to consider their sellers much. This leads to a majority of disputes being settled in favor of buyers and to much higher take rates than are necessary. Marketplace platforms have little to no incentive to help their sellers because they virtually have no other place to go. Being able to monetize through micropayments on promotions or simply taking a lower transaction fee (due to the potential velocity of money being much larger and the flow of money being more seamless), marketplaces must build a system that favors the buyers and sellers equally in order to not cause sellers to flee while still providing a relevant shopping experience. The cost of doing business trends towards supporting operating costs rather than exploiting the people who give the marketplace value in the first place. It now becomes up to the buyers to put trust in sellers rather than having sellers hope they won't get screwed. Sellers are now greatly incentivised by natural market forces to be as honest as possible because they'll get a near 100% cut of their sales volume and carry their reputation across the network (which can be quite difficult to establish on Nostr), almost eliminating the need for escrow (at least for growing merchants). Buyers can also earn sats by simply engaging with promoted products in a privacy-preserving way. This makes browsing products less meaningless and promotion more meaningful, while also establishing a greater trust relationship between both parties, even if there isn't one prior. Aside from realizing truly permissionless markets, these technologies give smaller projects a huge opportunity to build out sustainable niches that massively undercut the incumbents. To paraphrase Jeff Bezos (ironically): Your take rate is my opportunity.

@PABLOF7z-level naming here... 😂

Law is violence.