> The traditional financial system is basically not available for an individual to build on without the blessing of VCs. ... implementing rules about who can send money to whom (that differ by country)

Building on the blockchain does not indemnify you from following the relevant laws. You mention also Visa's rules, which also mostly tend to be based on the relevant laws (though there are exceptions, like their restrictions on adult content).

> It feels wrong to me that building financial apps for public good basically requires creating a capital class and handing over profits and control to them

The amount of "financial apps for public good" being made are exceedingly few. Acting like the apps being made by "web3" companies just want to faciliate trade for underserved populations with no gain to themselves is perhaps disingenous. Yeah sure if you are one person it might be easier to build an app to allow folks to send money to each other when you build it on a cryptocurrency, but is it easier or have you ignored all the ways nefarious people will use your app to do things that are absolutely something that should be stopped? Is that better than gatekeeping these apps for those who can manage these sort of protections?

> I got into crypto because I realized the things I actually wanted to build I could basically only do so using crypto. (Also, watching myself earn interest every 15 seconds was just incredibly cool.)

Hey, if you want to build some financial apps, that's great. Go forth! But it is not "web3". I will say that I don't think of earning interest in real time as anywhere near as "cool" as literally any other aspect of technology/engineering I can think of. And I don't feel compelled to enable that feeling you had in everyone else either.

> prices are a lot higher now, and so is the level of grifting and hype

The prices are a lot higher because of the hype, not the other way around. In fact, the prices are above zero because of the hype. To be clear, that is not to say the hype isn't warranted, but I think it's important to have the ordering clear.

> Anyway, the short answer to your question is that the time cost of Zoom verification will in many cases deter low-level and botting fraud, but Zoom verification overall is a stopgap to bootstrap the network, and over the long term applications will require users to be verified by a few of their IRL F&F (and Zoom parties can be used to connect their social network to the rest of the graph.)

The time cost of Zoom verification will deter individuals from performing it, but not specialists who do it on individuals' behalf. I could imagine starting a business solely to participate in these Zoom calls, generate identities, and then pass the credentials for one or more of those identities to anyone who puts up the ETH. Since I have to assume it's not just the same people in every one of these Zoom calls, I have no doubt you could send the same "seemingly unique" person to many of them and get a new set of credentials for each one, and then sell those off like anything else. Given how things like Spotify botting and phone farming are actually happening, this will be compromised in no time, just like all the previous prevention techniques have been.

> but Zoom verification overall is a stopgap to bootstrap the network ... over the long term applications will require users to be verified by a few of their IRL F&F (and Zoom parties can be used to connect their social network to the rest of the graph.)

Even after the stopgap is stopped and the network is strapped and booted, is someone without a network of "acceptable" social contacts not worthy of being able to participate in this ecosystem? So folks who do not want to divulge their social contacts literally cannot participate? This seems like one of the core audiences of decentralized privacy-conscious technologies, and yet they could not participate without (publically?) divulging personal information.