For the payment thing in particular, what I'd really like is if internet payments moved towards open standards. If my bank or credit provider was the one actually providing the "payment" part of the checkout flow, they could easily display my account information without adding a whole ton of complexity or additional privacy concerns.
Relatedly, it is frustrating that we have OAuth2 for authorization and OIDC for authentication, but we don't have similar open standards for making payments and subscribing to subscription products, even though PayPal has had proprietary implementations of the basic idea for ages. We don't have it for traditional currency, and we don't have it for custodial cryptocurrency wallets. What's the deal with that? I can totally understand why existing payment companies don't necessarily want interoperability everywhere, but the lack of attempts from even cryptocurrency exchanges seems bizarre to me. It's all just more proprietary stuff. Everyone wants to be Stripe, nobody wants to be PayPal. Why not both?
There have been various cryptocurrency-based efforts (including some of my own) in this space so we must presume that their lack of adoption is the issue rather than lack of available technical solutions.
Why the lack of adoption? I'm not sure but some combination of incentives, inertia and regulatory capture seems likely. Consider for example that the payment mechanism most people use (credit cards) took decades to become ubiquitous and is itself based on an older system (cheques and banks) that is much older. It's still not possible to freely and cheaply send money digitally in the US, but it is in the UK but only because the government made it a rule that banks had to provide such a service.
If there really are attempts at standards that sound like roughly what I am describing, I am definitely interested in hearing about them, FWIW. All I am aware of is the W3C Payment Request API, which is definitely very interesting and in a similar vein, but I really want something that works between parties on the web rather than between web entities and platforms/browsers...
Because there's nowhere to extract fees compared to the buyer/seller relationship?