A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. To use a website or read an article.
That would make the world so much better for indie developers.
Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have. If users would pay directly, that would change.
(I hold a whole $40USD in Stellar, I do however think it's a good thing. But I think there's space on the net for more than a couple of cryptocurrencies so I'm curious about Monero)
Stellar is way faster the XRPL even more so (1500Tx/s) but even then it can not be used to stream money. You dot want to go to a site and instantly donate 0.001cent you want to donate only if the content is good and the best way to measure that is by time. Hence Coil steams the money as long as you are on the site. That only works trough ILP not direly on ledger (on-chain). IPL can stream money from any kind of wallet. So it would work with Monero as well but its unlikely to gain traction as its key feature (anonymous) is rather useless in this case. and Tx are slow and expensive compared to XLM or XRP.
I could see myself paying 25 cents to read a NYT article right now as an impulse buy. But how does it even work right now. They’d probably ask for my email, phone, and address. Then I’d have to enter credit card details.
Perhaps it's as simple as this:
1) Make adding a box to pay a website in your crypto easier than adding google analytics or facebook share links.
2) Make buying small amount of your crypto easier than anyone else's crypto.
3) Give lots of your crypto away to as many folks as possible to put lots of it into circulation.
4) Provide easy ways for people to buy amazon and walmart gift certs with your crypto. (so web site operators can do something with the coins they receive)
Has anyone done step 1 yet?
The economics would be better with a stored balance system, but those are sketchy --- you'd need the balance holder to be someone you trust already; or a credit system where you pay once you've accrued enough content debt to make billing worthwhile, but that's going to be totally scammed.
As an example, the current dispute where the US is leaving the Universal Postal Union (a month from today) because the exchange is unbalanced due to e-commerce from/to China.
You're off by a factor of ten here, it would be 4.5 cents, not half a cent.
Why would I care that FB has 2.4 Billion monthly users and squeezes more then 10cent out of them via ads? That's none of my business.
If you want to compete with free you have to offer superior quality and convenience.
The hell we have, there's just no alternative other than not using what have essentially become utilities at this point. I applaud people for whom not having Facebook and Google and WhatsApp is an option, but it's not for me.
I'd gladly pay a large chunk of cash to have those companies not be doing shady shit with my data and showing me adverts, but that's not an option available to me.
Doesn't mean people don't value privacy. Just means that people don't value online services and content.
I don’t think it’s been well tested, and we should at least try giving people the benefit if the doubt before we give up, in my opinion.
If you really want to see "cash on the internet" I would advise you to do some research and find the cryptocurrency that best resembles it, then help build it. It will be an uphill battle the whole way.
Coil, the co-sponsor of this grant, is a company founded by the ex Ripple CTO and trying to do that.
I'd honestly delete my Twitter account if they introduced that. Twitter as a social media channel is fine (to keep up with creator's content elsewhere and maybe the odd follow-up generated by that content) but there is zero content in my feed I'd be prepared to pay any money for (and that would still hold if it was longer form/mixed media).
Nobody uses them.
The gp post is correct. When given the option between an ad, adblock, or tipping, people overwhelmingly choose option #1 or #2.
They then complain about ads, if they chose #1, and about adblock naggers, if they chose #2.
And, of course, all three sets of people lose their mind when they run into a paywall.
There is no non-legislative solution to this problem.
That implies high transaction costs to say the least.
If you're referring to the cut AdSense takes out of ad revenue, it's about 30%
All governments in the world hate cash in hands of citizens. It's hard to track. It can be used for tax evasion, buying illegal stuff, financing of undesirables, any transaction that a government would not approve of, but cannot easily learn about.
Many countries evict cash from daily use, either leaving it for small-scale purchases ("we only accept notes of $20 and below"), or even completely.
The chance of an anonymous online currency to appear is nonzero. The chance of it to be widespread, convenient, and not under constant legal scrutiny is epsilon, for it to last, epsilon squared.
I once thought that ISPs should pay for all content, then pass the bill onto users + costs-and-profit. I guess there would need to be separate standardized rates for video, audio, and text, but that creates a ton of regulatory and technical issues. Not the least of which is people don't want to pay. It would be like music licensing essentially, and look how that played out.
So just make it all voluntary like patreon, but integrated into my ISP billing, and give me an app/browser add-on to make payments and track my spending.
And small children paying a thousand dollars for an app does reach the news.
Essentially a very simple browser extension to tip websites, where you load some credit and it gets distributed as you browse (with more nuances obviously, but that is the main idea)
Even if it never amounts to anything it might at least inspire others to start similar projects until something better than ads appears!
Basically, you earn BAT either by directly depositing money into your wallet, or by viewing "privacy respecting ads" (herein lies part of the controversy), which let you earn 70% of the ad revenue as BAT. These tokens are then distributed over the content creators who have signed up for the program. The exact distribution depends on how much attention you gave each creator.
It is, like all crypto currencies, bottlenecked by the issue that it has to be exchanged for hard currency.
But that's just not the way it is. Nothing anonymous can be tolerated.
Might be about timing. Maybe this time it could be different.
1: You need to download and install software to use current cryptocurrencies. And users hate that.
2: Turning Fiat into Bitcoin and vica versa is not easy.
3: It is less private then cash.
4: Volatility of the value. Users would want something pegged to their currency of choice.
People already trust companies with their money. If banks supported crypto natively the no-install/web app model works great. The last three points are rendered irrelevant here if banks are able to make the experience easy and guarantee some value.
Those who don't want the protection of a bank are trading off points 1/2/4 for point 3.
Users don't have a problem installing apps on their phone.
The rest are valid problems, with #2 and #4 being directly linked to low adoption.
Web pages and browser extensions are pretty low barrier to entry.
Exchanging cost is not too bad, but probably the biggest hurdle still.
Privacy I don't think is a problem here. One random address to another is good enough for these type of transactions.
Pegging to another currency means centralization, though that is acceptable to plenty of people.
You said you wished there was a solution, all I'm saying is there is a clear path to how it could be done.
> Also by increasing the size of the blocks you increase the orphan rate due to propagation delay which results in needing more confirmations before a transaction is considered truly immutable.
Which happens at around 20 MB. Improvements like Graphene, Xthinner and blocktorrent will drastically reduce the orphan rate allowing for much bigger blocks to be propagated fast enough for the orphan rates to not climb in a relevant fashion.
> Bitcoin has to have a fee market to incentivize miners so that as block rewards decrease the cost of securing the network doesn't shrink as well.
Or Bitcoin needs many more lower fee transactions to compensate. In a couple of decades.
Cash Shuffle and Cash Fusion will also provide the privacy needed for users to safely enjoy Bitcoin Cash.
I can see it now.. every link I click on here or reddit I have to pay $0.05 to read. Yeah, no thanks. Suddenly the most upvoted things will be ones that people promote to make money on etc.
I already have to pay for every damn thing when I leave my house.. when I'm at my house browsing the internet I would really like to not have to constantly be mindfucked with small purchases every moment.
Do you feel this way about using the toaster, shower, every light switch, turning on the TV, marginal usage of rechargeable electronics, etc? You already make "micropayments" for a million tiny, less-discrete usages of electricity, but have learned to adapt to only getting feedback and adjusting usage at a monthly cadence. Why do you assume this couldn't also be the case for Internet usage?
The problem would be the friction of deciding what I reward and what I don't. I don't want to make 200 decisions like that every month in my day to day browsing.
If you bundle it, then it's basically just a subscription (I already pay for, say, the Atlantic).
If you let an algorithm decide for you, then it probably becomes a shitshow.
Maybe there's a genius idea to solve this massive UX problem but I certainly don't see it.
Yeah that is exactly the problem. It would be like having an ala-carte TV cable where you were charged every time you turned on the TV to watch a certain show. I just wouldn't do it.