How to design a payments system for e-commerce?

I was just thinking through some of the past problems that I have solved in my career and retrospecting about how I would solve them today. I was in a group discussion with a bunch of folks discussing a payments system design use case and it brought back memories of how I went about designing the system. Given the proprietary nature of what I did, I want to focus on what I could have done differently or better.

My three heroes

The initial premise

Around March 2024, I toyed with the idea of building an AI coach for tennis. Why tennis of all sports. Why not golf or badminton or other racket sports.I don’t have an answer to this. I found tennis to be a far more technical sport than badminton or ping pong. Also it felt way harder to learn than any other sport I have played. So I thought I will build out an app that will be a very basic version of a coach. I did some basic market research and found out that there was a play here. Based on the total number of tennis players and enthusiasts this seemed like a 10-100M$ idea at the very least.

Understanding GDP

Whats the real use case for a blockchain other than a cryptocurrency

Common web apps in the distributed world.

Distributed everything

Or decentralization, however we term it, one paradigm shift that we are witnessing is the transition to deentralized computing. Predominantly driven by “cryptocurrencies as the antidote to centralized money printing that is supposedly endangering global finance”, school of thought. With that said premise, I tend to think,

The beginning, sometime in the future

It is my belief that progress plateaus once you reach a state of satisfaction. Which is why most of the progress on this planet is driven by gree

I happened to be just browsing through Paxos made simple and trying to undersand the principles that have become the bedrock for clustering and horizontally scalable applications, including databases.

Often, in the startup world I come across this choice paradox that investors seem to face. What is the predmoinant critera that drives our investments. Do we invest in people first or market first or technology first. Sequoia proudly invests in markets first and A16Z prodouly invests in people/team. So what has driven the most tectonic shifts in technology in this century ?

This is just a place for my ramblings, acciedntal discoveries and crap that goes on in my day to day life.