The old way is actually the analog style you’ve mentioned, but that was the very early days of ecigs well before they became mass market, the cottage industry modding scene had no hope of creating sophisticated microcontrollers and the charger wasn’t even USB, it was a DC jack & plug. Lavatube was the first time we had that kind of microcontroller regulation & then the DNA15 and DNA20 came out, got cloned by China and that changed the game forever.

The problem with the older way is consumers understand watts alone as a relatively consistent measurement of power much better than they would the relation between voltage, resistance & current draw. They didn’t want to learn Ohm 's Law back then and wouldn’t want to know about it now. Microcontrollers simplified that massively.

This does already exist on a blockchain, but people hate shitcoins so it’ll likely never take off until the tech gets subsumed into some centralised Web2 service. Account access by a human and an account with a bot that’s been delegated access by a human have two different states being noted. A developer can implement a gate that requires a fresh physical unlock to get in.