I grew up in the 90s and witnessed the evolution of internet access from its humble 56K model dial-up days to the common fibre internet access commonly found in most homes today.
In the early days, I remember there were Yahoo! auctions and winners could simply do a inter-bank fund transfer to the seller before the goods would be delivered to your residence. Alternatively, meet ups can be arranged to facilitate the trade. Payment in those days were either through Cash or bank transfer. Traders on the internet were still relatively trusting towards each other as both parties were usually based locally.
I am unable to recall the details on eBay and Paypal when they came into the picture. EBay came first and I was exposed to international sellers but purchases were quite for me back then and there wasn't any confident for me to conduct trade with foreign sellers. Yahoo! auctions was still popular in my region.
Fast forward more than a decade later, the internet has evolved but the fundamentals of internet trade remained largely similar with the exception of the death of Yahoo! Auctions. EBay became the few marketplace sites that survived with Paypal nicely integrated benefiting both buyers and sellers. The emergence of Bitcoins changed this web of trust.
As a person who finally tried Bitcoins in 2016, I was amazed by its concept of a decentralized global currency that could be used to purchased almost anything from Luxuxy goods, to daily products and goods from the underground.
But for the new comer who is interested to get a decent amount of Bitcoins to purchase something useful, he or she has to either has to pay a premium to get their first coins at Virwox. Credit cards are generally not accepted by most merchants due to fear of chargebacks. First time buyers are not likely to get their first coins using their own Paypal funds because sellers are wary of chargebacks.
What are the other ways for them to get their first coins? They could stick to the regular exchanges - but hey, they are required to take a selfie and submit a photo ID. What's the hassle here? What happened to the good old trust systems in the traditional marketplace? I am hearing from friends who run small businesses on eBays getting frequent chargebacks from buyers. The concept of chargeback was relatively unheard of five years ago. Where is the integrity and honestly?
Did technology advances and globalisation aid our progress or did it expose the darker side of humanity?
The entry level to cryptocurrencies are, and have always been, the number one obstacle for growth - ignore every scaling-, forking- and whatnot issue and we are back at square one: attracting new, genuine users and businesses. The entry level into any cryptocurrency must be lowered substantially with significant advantages (i.e. next to zero fees and instantaneous transactions ) to ever appeal to the average Joe.