I don't see anything good about this or Solana, it is still a centralised ponzi scheme like the rest of all the crypto coins.
How can Solana be the next Visa if it keeps going down every time. If this system is going down now, it certainly cannot scale when more people use it.
All of these fintechs (Solana, Paypal/Venmo, etc) are racing for relevance before the Federal Reserve's instant payment system goes live next year. Transactions will settle almost immediately, and each transfer costs a penny. Initially, the transfer limit will be $100k, with the eventual goal of $500k (with FedWire remaining as the product for transfers above those limits).
With regards to international transfers, [Transfer]Wise and OFX have shown the way forward (not just cost of course, but also UX), and from there it should be a race to commoditization of that model.
What does this mean for credit card companies (no longer charging per transaction), checking accounts (does this help to further kill checks), Western Union (how does their business survive), Gemini/Coinbase (what is the impact of their marketplace), MetaMask (niche coins only), etc?
Thoughts and opinions are my own being adjacent in financial services.
Checks? Rapid decline with eventual phase out. Western Union will be forced to pivot to international remittance to maintain volume. Credit card companies will see a fate similar to checks but over a longer window of time (but will still maintain some volume) depending on consumer and merchant incentives (passing the credit card cost to consumers, for example, while not charging for Fed instant payments). Crypto? Stablecoins are looking like they'll be regulated by the gov and require a banking license to issue. See Matt Levine's latest Money Stuff "The Fed vs. stablecoins" segment on this [1] [2] [3].
Here in India, the credit card business is booming despite UPI (i.e. better FedPay). The value proposition of credit card is unconditional short term credit. There is also the additional consumer protection through chargebacks. Popular credit card companies have moved to offering actual short term (<1 year) loans via the card. I don't think Credit cards would be going away anytime soon.
Consider Affirm and Afterpay in the US. This is what I believe the future of short term payment credit looks like when you have instant payment rails. You could even "overspend" your deposit account, with the negative balance being credit, dynamically managed by your deposit account provider's risk management system. The well off can do this with a margin account at their brokerage, but there's no reason this can't be done with your bank or fintech with personal credit. Several big commercial banks even underwrite your credit profile based on your deposit account cashflow vs your credit score (JPMC, for example).
EDIT: Check out https://cred.ai/ for an example of a financial product this might look like, from a quick Google search. No affiliation.
Credit cards aren't going away, but they're also no longer going to be the least worst solution for payments and transfers where assurances are needed. They're antiquated value transfer rails imho (and I'm aware the chief benefit of CCs are the 20-30 day float, longer with interest). In summary, the credit is the product, the rails are the utility, and there are many ways to issue and manage that credit.
While I agree with you, I like the improvement in Solana of verifying transactions on the GPU. I wish Bitcoin would do the same at least for signatures. We’ve reached the frequency scaling limit of CPUs, and the protocols we use should reflect the direction hardware improvements have taken.
> a centralised ponzi scheme like the rest of all the crypto coins.
How is a PoW coin emitting 1 per second with no financial reward of any kind for the developers, who wrote the software from scratch, a centralised ponzi?
MeiliSearch looks fantastic! I haven't tried it but at least it is written in Rust so that should be a good reason to try it out for a project of mine.
For fully managed (similar to Heroku Postgres) Crunchy Bridge [1] supports replicas across regions including say EU to AU. Which would actually couple really well with Fly.io for the app side.
The simple solution is to run Postgres replicas in those regions and do local reads for your app while directing the writes to the master region. This works well for read-heavy apps, and you can also put the master in a geographically central location to help with write latency.
If you need cross-region multi-master then I recommend something like CockroachDB or Yugabyte that have regional distribution as a core feature.
Heroku is only available in EU and US east. Latency from Australia is somewhat unavoidable. You can maybe reduce it by using Cloudflare or similar to terminate TLS as close to your users as possible.
Cloudflare give different Anycast IPs for each plan and they don't always hit the local ingestion point. Some people shot themselves in the foot with free/pro plan in certain markets (India, aus etc..) I don't believe in May 2021 local ingestion (TLS termination) is happening on anything less than Business plan in MEL or SYD
I would buy a non-EV code signing cert from any of those. Look for discount codes, I know DigiCert used to have a pretty nice discount code, although it still cost a bunch of money; OTOH, DigiCert was very flexible in my experience, even when I was just a small customer; I think we had a maximum of 5 wildcard certificates at once, plus one code signing certificate, but they would issue all sorts of 'custom duplicates' and let me 'rename' a wildcard to a totally different domain to avoid buying a new wildcard, and were helpful with adjusting expirations for the sha-1 cert sunset. If the price isn't a huge barrier, I think they're cool; but I also understand if the price is a barrier.
I don't think it particularly matters, any of the major CAs offers codesigning certs (worth shopping around a bit for prices and promotions though, the prices vary massively with little obvious reason why they should)
https://ui.dev
https://earnings.report
https://data.ai
https://database.new