Fediverse

All of this talk is actually ignoring the very fundamental aspect of this sort of transaction: trust.

When you buy from a place, you do it because you trust the store or the service to handle problems [1]. I remember one saying that a purchase is actually a very intimate relationship, and if you have any reason to think that person or service would screw up over, you’d never engage in any monetary transactions with them.

A marketplace where anyone can sell only works because despite your diligence to look for reputable sellers, the platform usually offers some assurance that you’ll be refunded for any type of scam, which means they take on the burden of doing some quality control on approving sellers. At least that’s how it works in Brazil, I suppose that a country with a high societal trust might have less of this problem, but the incentives are the heart of any system.

[1] Sure, sometimes it doesn’t go the way you wanted it and you can end up being screwed by the service, but the expectation was there.

Pretty much what they're doing all over this thread.

Like some people can only see the glass half full. Few have the guys to look at both the fullness and the emptyness equally.

a) You’ve never run a business

They might have run a small business or been present in a bigger one in management position, doing their own job well enough to avoid painful understanding they don't get it as a whole. Arrogance is not always cured by experience, actually I doubt it's ever cured in humans and we all have it.

b) you’re more interested in fantasizing than a realistic conversation.

That much was clear from the very beginning, I tend to have such ideas too, but I have BAD and thus mania periods.

I have run several businesses, some of them on this micro-scale. That's how I know that part is trivial.

You can literally set it up for yourself for free, if you want to see: https://stripe.com/