Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

I read the paper. Still not sure how this solves anything besides transferring wealth from the gullible to the authors:

* Noted are the transactions-per-second limits, but solution is missing behind some handwaving

* Lots of talk of fees for doing things like sending messages and lots of mentions of "premium" offerings. This is not a free messaging app (which means likely nobody will use it and the network effect will not happen. Will you pay anything over $0.00 to send messages?)

* Talk of incentivization of "reading posts" meaning "there will be ads"

* Literally mentions farming user data "users generating behavioural data for large scale analysis"

* A completely ridiculous claim that pseudonymity == privacy

* No talk at all about actual message encryption (you would not want your 1-to-1 messages publicly readable in the blockchain, would you?)

.

And then finally, by the last page it is suddenly clear...they are selling their tokens...

The world makes sense again..

> I read the paper. Still not sure how this solves anything besides transferring wealth from the gullible to the authors.

That's MC's modus operandi.

I came to understand it as users of the app willing to put a price on their visual attention, giving advertisers the ability to bid on users' attention based on the users' own tolerances, and then it all becoming an ad bidding network.

Except the marketers would pay you money (I guess, the coin) to show you the adds, and not say, a TV network.

I'd probably put a high price to my attention — $5 per second. If I get an ad maybe someone messed up, but I get paid dearly. A lot of people I imagine would be down to get paid some fraction of a cent per view, probably seeing more ads, but also probably making enough revenue for a handful of coffees every month.

Here the blockchain is the distribution network.

I'm quite positive this EXACT idea (pay people to watch ads) was implemented by more than one dot com fucked company around 2000. I hypothesize this scheme will be as successful.

It's kind of amazing to me how the current blockchain/ICO bubble is almost an exact repeat of the original .com bubble. Back then, it was anything and everything "on the internet", and now it's anything and everything "on the blockchain". Of course, some of today's biggest companies were birthed from that .com bubble, but the vast, vast majority of them crashed and burned. I suspect the same will be true of the blockchain bubble.

It's probably difficult to prove that the human actually saw the ad. I would just have a script 'view' as many ads as possible and earn the $

Haven't read the paper to see if they solved that concern though.

I don't know about messaging, but paying per comment would be a really interesting idea. There are a lot of people out there who are very aggressive about posting in tabloid and newspaper comment sections. The comments are usually so argumentative, angry, and spiteful that I have to think that just having the comment itself appear on the page is worth quite a lot to those people.

But YOU wouldn’t pay to participate in a place where they can do that :)

My scenario is just me thinking out loud. Most people don't participate in online discussions. It's a very small part of the population that logs onto the internet to critique news articles and spread their agenda.

I don't participate in that sort of thing at all.

If HN wasn't financially viable would people pay $0.10 to post?

Would $0.10 per post decrease participation?

Would $0.10 per post significantly offset the cost of running HN?

Would $0.10 be enough to improve the forums, maybe have it notify you when your comment was replied to?

No, because a webforum is not exactly difficult to replicate. The users would all move to whatever free alternative popped up.

HN as a following and prestige at this point. People would pay.

There have been a number of websites with a fee to create an account, to prevent spam. Metafilter, Something Awful, Bitcoin Wiki previously.

There are also sites meant to be exclusive with fees $1000 and up https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/26/15407144/exclusive-social...

I've also heard proposals of email readers charging fees that senders have to pay, to stop spammers from being able to send them anything. Sometimes it's a computation fee instead of a monetary fee, a proof of work to rate limit spammers.

People will pay to not have their data sold and then the companies will sell the data to double down

Well a newspaper is different, few contributors and many readers. Normal chat is either 1 to 1 or a small group of people in a channel/room.

Just like email, I'd happily pay a small amount, say $0.10 to email a person the first time. Especially since even a small fee, negligible to most would be catastrophically expensive to spammers.

Might also create an income stream so that it would be easier to compete with gmail, microsoft, and yahoo.

As spam bots become more common on social and messaging networks I don't see why it couldn't be a similarly effective measure.

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