Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

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This is an admirable response, but I feel like Patreon is just one of the first approaches towards getting rid of the advertising revenue models so prevalent on the internet today, which should definitely be our goal. We can't allow greedy advertisers to hijack online services, as is the current case for YouTube.

I hope that in the future content creators won't have to depend on a single company which takes decisions purely based on their own profit. The marketing team can spin this anyway they want, but ultimately as a company that is their goal.

For lack of a better term, microtransactions and some form of digital currency should solve this problem.

I'm not a fan of the Brave browser, but they introduced a micropayment system last year[0]. It seems to have been launched with Bitcoin support, but maybe this has expanded (as it should) towards other currencies.

Can someone share their experience with Brave Payments, or with similar systems?

This seems like the only logical way to go, from a technology standpoint, and we're not that far off from reaching it.

Creators have their digital wallets, payments are made in the background (with very limited user interaction, or none whatsoever) after a certain smart contract is fulfilled between creator and consumer, and the funds are transferred with very little latency.

The content creation service that launches with this will be huge in the near future. Bonus points for open sourcing it and making an open system that all content creation sites can reuse.

[0]: https://www.brave.com/introducing-brave-payments/

I really liked the idea of websites mining some cpu-mineable cryptocurrency in place of having ads there. I suspect that might be a more widespread solution in the future. Maybe even in the long term, the mining will be done through webGL or some other API so that the browser can take advantage of the host's GPU/GPU equivalent.

So instead of paying cash, I'm paying through my electricity bill and my children's future (since all power where I live is fossil)? No thanks. I'd rather just give them money

Your children's future? Besides that we're continually moving towards cleaner methods of producing electricity, that's blowing it out of proportion. I highly doubt the additional energy consumption would be much more or even more at all than the difference between using a brand new or 5-year-old device that was less energy efficient.

> we're continually moving towards cleaner methods of producing electricity

Where I live we're actually regressing. Went from 30% nuclear to 0%, and now since natural gas is so expensive they're building coal plants.

What value does this generate?

Ads generate sales that does translate to real world value.

Mining generates distributed consensus on transactions. But why should all computers in the world participate in that? (Obviously, this is best done by specialized hardware)

Also, do you the imagine a future where people make content for the internet inorder to be miners??? Why not just invest in hardware, rather than content for the web.

Also power requirements would be crazy, most devices are battery powered today.. mining is crazy.

Value for the user: no ads and the site gets supported for "free" (the user is very unlikely to care about or even be aware of the electric use and device wear)

Value for the webmaster: the value of the mined coins, obviously.

Is there a certain definition of value you're using that these don't fall under? Why should all people in the world participate in the distributed process of counting out the correct amount of cash in person to each other?

Why doesn't every company just invest directly in finance instead of doing what they do? I don't really have an answer to that, but if user-end mining generated more revenue than ads then website hosts would just switch over to it. Imagining a future where people make content in order to be miners, or indirectly they make content to make money, seems fine, I already support some creators on patreon.

I think the power/cpu requirements for lower end devices could be worked out in time.

> Why doesn't every company just invest directly in finance instead of doing what they do?

Because you have to invest in something that generates value.

Otherwise, it's all just a zero sum game and we might as well go to the casinos..

I'm a believer in this approach as well. in-browser proofs of work can serve as anti-bot/scraper/spam filters as well

Coinhive has already been successfully deployed to mine $XMR in browsers. I haven't used it yet, but they claim to get pretty close to native CPU performance also which is pretty incredible.

https://coinhive.com/

Not a bad "spitball"/brainstorm idea, but what about slower clients? Mobile, screen readers, etc?

And what about abuse via advertisers, injection, cross-site, etc?

Slower clients can likely just be subsidized by faster clients since I imagine the return would be higher and more consistent than traditional ads. It's already been done on a few sites, so you could look into what they did, but I forget where.

I feel like the potential for abuse would still be a better tradeoff than the current situation of ads that try to download malware or redirect you to phishing sites.

It seems you haven't thought about the consequences for such an approach.

All current consequences are simply because the system hasn't been fleshed out and perfected enough.

It's way too early to judge the approach based on current implementations, because of flaws in those implementations.

But consider a system where the user is always in control of how much resources the web miner is consuming, via say, specific quotas based on domain, content creator, etc., and that there could be little risk for the miner to hijack those resources.

This is a technical problem that can be easily solved in future revisions.

That said, I'm not sure if mining is the right approach, simply because the proof of work is completely arbitrary for some currencies (e.g. Bitcoin) and has no real value.

With content creators it's clear: they provide the value, the content consumers want, and set the cost accordingly, and the consumer simply decides to pay for it. It's simple, and no client side mining would be required.

Mining is only necessary to lower the barrier of entry for the consumer, since they wouldn't need to have a digital wallet with existing funds. But in the near future owning a digital wallet will be just as common, if not more, as having a social media account, so this wouldn't be necessary for the long term.

> That said, I'm not sure if mining is the right approach, simply because the proof of work is completely arbitrary for some currencies (e.g. Bitcoin) and has no real value.

Exactly.

> Mining is only necessary to lower the barrier of entry for the consumer,

Even now there is a barrier of entry, which is the processing costs. The goal is to lower them, not to force burning the more hydrocarbons for every transaction.

If you see major issues then you should say what they are. I think trading some battery/mains power and a bit of wear on the device for using an otherwise ad-based service sounds fine.

First consider how much is "some battery." E.g. do you really want that more computing work allows higher payments? Bad luck paying anything not cents when you don't have your computer or a mobile plugged in the wall. Who's "richer"? Who has a bigger computer. Etc. Also see my other comment here.

What's the expected return per pageview for the average ad? Not more than a few cents either, is it?

Doesn't this mean the user pays 1/10th of a cent in electricity and wear so the website can get 1/100th of a cent in mining value?

I just want something where I can put in a few dollars and it goes to sites I visit. (Previous services have resembled this but with notable issues.)

Not having to put in money directly is one of the advantages of the approach. Aside from just convenience, hiding the true cost in this way will make it a lot more palatable for most people - if the device loses a bit of battery faster or gets warmer, it's not a big deal, but being forced to think about it in terms of direct payment will elicit more reactions of opting to just not go to as many websites.

If you just want for user to make it "palatable" you can produce the solution that doesn't involve mining and be "palatable." We are already having our batteries too drained by ads, that's a primary reason why I install add-block on the mobile.

This brave payments system seems like an awesome idea! Though I'd really like to have it as an extension for Firefox than have to use a whole new browser.

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