That's because the old startups were running on the fiat system. Payments don’t work well on the fiat system, and fiat people also run on a mindset that they don’t want to pay for anything. So yes, it won’t work if your customer base is fiat people.

But on the Bitcoin system, it’s different. Bitcoiners are more willing to pay for things because we already have access to money without going through a bank, and most importantly, we have micro-payments. You simply can’t do micro-payments in the fiat system unless you implement some “exchange your money for credits” setup.

Zapvertizing works well. I get some of those maybe once every two weeks, and it works, I always check the profile of who sent it to me. It doesn’t bother me because most of the companies are legit and genuinely trying to advertise their brand. The only spammers I see are the ones abusing the like button, which is free which is why I have been pushing for pay sats to follow someone/interact with the profile as well.

Spam doesn’t just exist because it’s profitable, it also exists because it’s free or cheap enough to spray at scale. If you raise the cost per attempt, even slightly, you cut out the majority of low-effort spammers instantly.

Sure, there will always be some determined actors with enough margin to pay a few sats, but Bitcoin allows you to tune that cost dynamically. If you set the price just high enough to make spamming unprofitable, you filter out the noise while still letting genuine people through.

On the fiat system you can’t fine-tune like that, transactions are too big, slow, and costly. On the Bitcoin system you can make it cost fractions of a cent, and that tiny friction is often enough to kill mass-blast spam.

That’s why a pay-to-message system on Nostr and everywhere could work where fiat failed.