I appreciate the candor -- I still hold out hope, thinking maybe PoS (with equally bought-in parties) could work, but at that point you might as well have regular old paper and pencil coordination/contracts...
The tech is novel, but the applications just don't seem to be falling into place at all... I even consider the ability for it to function as cool points (not NFTs but just a way to make and check exclusive tokens) is OK because it gives community builders a way to pull forward revenue. If I think of it like a self-hosted app for managing exclusive tokens then I can kind of see a use -- if before people didn't have an on-ramp to enforcing their own manufactured exclusivity then maybe it has some positive effects...
Unfortunately right now it looks like the ecosystem is just a backdoor to unregulated securities. Some of the automated exchange stuff (uniswap and co) seemed cool too though I haven't looked too deeply at them.
Like buying a monthly subscription for a tool like, say, Icy.tools, is so much faster when you can pay directly with metamask. No accounts, no logins, no credit card screens.
The catch, of course, is that for the tech to get adopted by the mainstream, you will need way more regulations and safeguards. Maybe KYC on wallets (which means creating accounts/logins), maybe the ability to reverse transactions to reduce fraud.
All of these regulations might introduce enough friction that the final experience doesn't differ much from current legacy systems.
But a built-in browser wallet that makes payments (including micropayments) easier is really needed. It's the only antidote to our current advertising dependent model of the web.
No sign-up flow, no emails, no commitment. You just tap login and you have an account. One more tap and you've paid.
Plus other benefits like effectively free micro-transactions as small as thousands of a penny at a transaction rate in tens of milliseconds, for some chains (e.g. Solana w/Phantom or SolFlare browser extension).
All this adds up to being able to try, pay, assess, and "logout" of any completely novel (to you) service/site faster than a WSJ article page can load.
The effortless of the user experience doesn't translate well to words. Getting use to this frictionless use of compatable web apps is an experience qualitatively similar to browsing the web with an ad blocker. You can't go back. Going back feels broken, messy, slow, and outright aggravating.
Which is why I said that the tech really needs a lot of improvements. But the core idea of a browser wallet that takes care of logins and payments is really powerful and might just be crypto’s killer app