Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction
reallifemag.com
reallifemag.com
I am older than most of the crew here and can remember when the majority of the telnetting and IRCing we did was against .edu domains, using the disk space of a Sparc 1, sucking up someone else's bandwidth. In February of 1993, someone very much like Don Draper woke, inexplicably but smiling, with the first morning erection in years as the <img> tag was invented; banner ads slouched towards CERN to be born. NetZero told us that the Internet should be free. Email, free of expensive stamps, flew 'round the world. And Advertisers and Spammers and the Attention Economy held illimitable dominion over all.
We have paid an enormous price for the "free" Internet and that price has been hidden from us through layers of affiliates and misdirection and double-Irish. Rudderless algorithms decide whether your fame career has any kind of money associated with it and for precisely how long. When the axe descends, the only sentence can be "You have violated the ToS."
I am not sure what the alternative would look like, but for anyone with complaints about the current situation, it is important to examine just how we got here.
Which is fine. I think you're getting downvoted because you made their turn of phrase seem like a bad thing.
https://socialjoey.com/services/advertising/
Your unceasing hatred of the advertising-driven internet led you to profit off of it?
Even more, people attacking the free part tend to evoke an image of all the other manipulative parts of modern media vanishing if people somehow pay. But the Wall Street Journal and to a lesser extent the New York Times, do their best to be paid but it's the same sort of product, trying to eyeballs. Spotify has a paid and an advertisement based service. It's the same service. Media, free or not, is based on attention. In fact, in the present and earlier eras, advertising gave more money than subscriptions for all the subscription based magazines - subscriptions are valuable to show advertisers your loyal customs.
What's the solution for the problematic of modern media? I could recommend this text but it takes concentrated reading to get through.
The free web has democratized media and publishing in many radical and transformative ways, but in the process of unseating the old media gatekeepers has also completely destroyed the quality of journalism and long-form content, worldwide.
Mind you that this has not been going on for that long. 15-20 years maybe. In the bigger picture, that's nothing.
The idea that a system is fine in which the creators have little means to earn money is crazy to me. Lots of places will just go without the deep, investigative journalism we might have benefited from in the recent past.
Replaced by noise, as you say.
We're all impatient, though. 15 years is about how long I'm an adult. 20 years is about how long I'm able to make use of news. If the way out of this mess is going to take another 20 years, it's not going to be of much use to me :). "In the long run" is good, but "within the productive lifetime of people concerned about it" would be best.
It started much earlier in the US I believe but came into full swing in the UK with Tony Blair's Labour. [0] you can be sure she wasn't the only one, just someone that got caught.
News media in particular has become so polarised and only really feeds into it's own respective echo chambers, to the point where it's all but useless as an impartial presentation of facts and opinions.
There is still some great instructional and educational content on Web and it feels for the moment all of these issues are still limited to news and entertainment.
Television ushered the era of contentless spew well before the Internet. The Internet gave more variety than the TV world but indeed devastated the print journalism world that had existed before.
The point is this all part of a long term trend. That said, more media generally means that there is a significant amount of decent content still available but, yeah, the quality of the content produced by journalist institutions continues to decline. You'd need an extreme reversal of overall social trends to change the sound-bite factor here.
We can have a look at what the world might have been without the Internet's decision to build without a billing layer, and indeed to route around billing, without needing a time machine. It would have been a faster version of Prestel and Minitel. Fully centralised, with national borders. All the TOS issues would still be there, except that because the billing system knows your address abusing your account could get you prosecuted.
Which means you still would have had free content, as well as paid.
The fascinating historical bit is when you follow the cross-border issue... it would have required efficient, scalable (small to large amounts) international monetary transfers between individuals.
And that would have been as, or more, transformational than the internet.
CoL arbitrage. Individual international mobility. Remittance fee slashing. In the late 1980s. The mind boggles.
That would have caused it to face even bigger barriers to adoption, surely? The UK only just abolished capital controls in 1979: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_Controls_in_the_Unite...
The current cryptocurrency system (cryptography itself was subject to arms control until 1991!) relies on being able to use a credit card to transfer real money to a (usually foreign) exchange, do some transactions, and then receive a wire back with the real money. All of which are products of the Internet itself.
I don't really think it would be any different if we paid. Look at sports for example. That's paid via subscriptions, tickets, merchandise, state sponsorship and so on, but it's still just as plastered with ads as the Internet. I think anywhere exploitation is possible, it will happen. If we paid, it'd just make some people even richer than they are now.
But some services do manage to do without ads; Netflix is the big one that comes to mind. Hulu has an ad-free version if you pay more. Spotify has a free ad-supported plan or a paid ad-free plan. Then you have things in the middle like HBO Max: most (all?) shows have ads before them, but it's an ad promoting another HBO show.
So clearly paid & ad-free is possible. What's not clear to me is why it's possible for some things and not for others.
To use your sports example, perhaps without ads ticket and merchandise prices would have to rise to the point where enough people wouldn't buy them such that it would cause a problem? I don't know what the contribution to revenue is for ticket sales vs. ads.
There’s a metric ton of ads in Netflix, they’re built into the content. All the extra time in a car chase focusing on the car logo and the characters talking about a car’s feature are not part of the plot.
I find it even worse than ad breaks, since the content itself gets worse, and you waste your time. Although, I know TV networks were doing heavy product placement even before streaming came around, so they had ad breaks, ads in the show, and subscriber revenue.
Despite what marketeers say, having no advertisements is a huge differentiator for a service, and people is willing to pay extra for it. But it won't happen in markets where it's difficult for new players to enter. I'm not familiar with sports broadcasting but I can bet this is the case.
It's the same with Apple's current shift to privacy, or Microsoft's doings in open-source. Sure, they know privacy and OSS is the ethical thing to do, but they're not doing it because it's "right". They're doing it to gain customers. If either Apple or Microsoft became monopolies you can bet they would cease doing privacy/OSS it overnight.
I wasn't thinking just broadcasting but also venues, jerseys and everything. Look at a typical NASCAR or football game, ads are everywhere at the event.
I think you're right though. There has to be competition or regulation, otherwise they can get away with it and as you both say they will.
Most ( if not all ) bad things starts from very good intentions.
What if that model had taken over?
How about a neighborhood hub where you pay someone to put in a small fiber run from your house and choose a vendor who can run your traffic back and forth from that hub? Or maybe there's a citywide ring network everyone hooks into and you pay for out-of-city data?
Or what if most cellphone data defaulted to wifi first? No cellphone plan required if no cellular connection?
This was later replaced by a private BitTorrent tracker as the government briefly tried to crack down on piracy a few years later; traffic between peers in that tracker was unmetered as well, as they were all clients of the same ISP.
This introduced a lot of people in my city to torrenting; a few more years down the road, data caps were relaxed and eventually removed, another ISP's local tracker evolved into the nationwide filesharing platform that my peers still cherish. (Sure, Hollywood got screwed, but there was minimal value they could extract from our market in the first place, considering the vastly different standard of living.)
Of course, I hear the ISP landscape in the USA is a little different; and with worldwide content streaming services like Netflix and Spotify being paid monthly, usage patterns have surely changed. Maybe today's equivalent would be local ISPs playing the privacy card and providing self-hosted encrypted NextCloud instances?
I'm not sure what percentage of local traffic would this amount to, but it's not that difficult to imagine a world where the atomization of society driven by the non-locality of the Internet is offset by the fact that your cloud services are at least hosted in the same jurisdiction as yourself, and where the Web serves as an augmentation to local communities. (My dark Balkan side does not discount the possibility of walking into one's ISP's office and kicking their asses for fucking with one's connectivity or data, legal consequences notwithstanding - good luck pulling that on Comcast, or flying to Dublin or Frankfurt or wherever to kick Google's ass!)
Maybe it's a little difficult to imagine how this can be competitive to the current globalized landscape though. It would effectively go against the interests of the same entities that fund the underlying infrastructural development, and besides political pushback (e.g. my ISP contract prevents me from redistributing the connection to my neighbors, although I hear this scheme is nonetheless widespread elsewhere) there might also be purely technical scaling issues (such as the existing technology simply being poorly adapted to whatever novel model of organizing connectivity eventually sticks.)
Maybe we should think about the associated negative externalities and act accordingly.
Narrator: "They didn't"
If we had that much foresight pollution wouldn't be an issue that is attempting to destroy us.
The "community" part is heavily monetized, and isps and wireless carriers are the most profitable companies on the planet with 60% gross margins.
As to the non-local stuff, I've was told that nowadays 1 fiber could handle all of netflix's traffic.
> I am not sure what the alternative would look like, but for anyone with complaints about the current situation, it is important to examine just how we got here.
One alternative could be to restore the authority of the processes that societies have evolved over the last two hundred years - courts. Given that modern social networks essentially act as public space, a gateway between the digital and meatspace world, they should also be regulated by independent authorities.
That would set a precedent that any site with any user supplied content must require intervention and approval by a court before any form of moderation can take place, or at least that all sites must require court approval for their terms of service. which by extension means all speech on the web will be under direct government control. That would include Hacker News and any blog that allows comments.
This is a much greater degree of control over freedom of speech than exists in public spaces in the real world - where people can speak freely generally without government enforced moderation, and in any case websites are not public spaces. So on top of everything else, governments would assert unprecedented control over free enterprise and freedom of association.
And it doesn't matter where you decide to draw the line, perhaps only requiring this level of regulation for sites with a certain number of users, this being Hacker News I shouldn't have to point out the potential slippery slope in having the government decide where that line is drawn.
The situation we're in now is bad, but needing a judge to sign off on every moderation action would be much, much worse.
I had not meant that every moderation action would need a judge, but that every person should have the legal right to appeal and plead their case in front of a judge instead of hitting stone walls.
And besides: that access to legal protection is what taxes and court fees are paying for!
But nothing social media platforms are doing is illegal. A judge is just going to tell you that you agreed to the platform's terms of service and they have the right, including Section 230 indemnity, to moderate content on their platform.
But that's the thing: they aren't public spaces. The number of people which have their content hosted on a private platform is inconsequential to the legal nature of the platform. Social media are very much subject to legal regulations and lawmaking.
Calling a space which is governed by a private entity that doesn't represent you / answer to you, as "public" is a contradiction. The worst you can do is persist this notion to a point where enough people believe they are public spaces. That's the most direct way of legitimizing their dominance in modern telecommunication networks.
They are the de-facto places where online discourse is held, and at least German courts have acknowledged that even speech that borders on hate speech is a part of public opinion forming (e.g. https://www.idowa.de/inhalt.gerichtsurteil-nach-sperre-faceb... or https://www.e-recht24.de/news/facebook/11029-neues-facebook-...).
> Calling a space which is governed by a private entity that doesn't represent you / answer to you, as "public" is a contradiction.
It is not, even in the meatspace. Spaces that are open to the public yet governed by private entities are also covered under the freedom of assembly (e.g. airports, see https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/bverfg-zur-versamml... or train stations, see https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.gerichtsurteil-zum...).
> That's the most direct way of legitimizing their dominance in modern telecommunication networks.
In Germany, telecommunications providers are actually banned from terminating your access by law (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tkg_2004/__45k.html); the only exceptions are non-payment and spoofing fraud. The reason for this is that access to telecommunication networks is seen as a vital basic right to participate in society.
Why is that contentious? Because that's exactly the one thing social media try to avoid: being seen as mere publishers. That would have massive implications:
https://socialmediahq.com/if-social-media-companies-are-publ...
It's another argument why treating them as "public spaces" isn't much sensible.
Battery life would be terrible. Personally, I'm still waiting for the coupling of mobile and "personal servers".
Micro servers at the exclusive use of one person, in an attractive form factor, made easy to use. Products that you can buy in an electronics store, such as a smartphone or a laptop.
- Free from control. Governments are a tricky thing. You trust them until you don't; especially if your country has a history of distrust for authority.
- Free as in beer. This was always more of an illusion than anything. The IRC servers you spoke of had to be networked and hosted. The services had to be developed and reworked over the years. People had to staff the network to keep it free from abuse. The networks were never free, but they also never had aims to monetize.
Our friends in marketing and the people who run dubious spam businesses recognized that people are drawn to free and made a business case out of it. You can't fix people being drawn to free, but you can fix the definition of what it means to say you offer a "free" service. For instance, what Facebook and Google provide isn't free - they broker your data in exchange for nifty services. What if you had to say that, and weren't allowed to use the word free?
I don't think the future lies in non-freedom, I think it lies in gatekeeping what it means to be free.
The key idea for me is 1 request for 1 page. It's a stripped down markdown with no images allowed.
Although even then some clients are trying to support embedding images which goes against the protocol.
Blogs could be sustained with little readership considering how cheap it is to host a lightweight website that sees little traffic, and larger websites like HN would pay for their hosting and on top of that maybe even have some funds to hire another dang. All of this could come without any advertisement, without dark patterns, tracking, tapping into our subconcious or primitive brain, and all the other evil genius ideas to come out of the advertisement industry. I can't help but think that this would create a better and perhaps less hostile place for everyone.
As long as more traffic still means more profit there would still be plenty incentive for websites to engage in evil tactics against their users, in order to ensure that the users spend as much time as possible on that site.
I too want a web without advertising, but I don’t believe for a second that all of the problems associated with advertising will go away even if advertising itself did. Some problems might disappear, others not, and new problems will appear in the place of problems that did disappear.
After all, there are very many people out there who have gotten really good at coming up with evil tactics. These people would still be out there, and in demand, even if advertising disappeared.
The real cost of maintaining a blog is the time one spends to compose, edit, proofread, sometimes illustrate a blog post. And no, you don't think about a post only while you're working in it; you think in background, too.
This cost can hardly be remunerated by every reader paying a few cents, unless your readership is in tens of thousands at least, and the money allow you to actually free up some time for writing.
Extrapolating further, people spend orders of magnitude more time, bandwidth, and server-side CPU resources for everything else they do on the internet: Scrolling JPEGs on social media sites, streaming gigabytes of Netflix movies.
Sending a 100KB blog post page to someone might take 0.00001% as many resources as streaming a 2-hour Netflix movie. If servers were paid according to resources used, blog authors would receive virtually nothing relative to all the multimedia based services.
Alternatively maybe something that was on dragon’s den BBC : https://gener8ads.com/ , where you get paid for seeing ads or can opt to be completely anonymous.
Meanwhile it seems that most people consider viewing ads to have zero cost to them (whether that's true or not), or use ad-blockers.
If we can get over the initial weirdness and make it completely seamless (as easy as dismissing a cookie banner) I'm sure people would get used to paying a cent for every blog post they read.
On the other hand, if there's a thousand different micropayment platforms each with a different way of getting past the paywall and of adding funds, then I don't think it'll be an easy path to adoption.
In the real world, though, you won't be getting 247 such requests per hour. And that's the crux of the issue: quantity vs quality.
If you're reading 247 different sources of information in an hour, unless you're doing some kind of heavy research, you're probably overloading your brain in any case. How many blog articles can you read in an hour? Less than ten, probably more like 5, if they're actually worth reading.
Why would this stop ads? In this case, ads still make you more money; your hosting costs just go down a little.
It was one of the ideas behind Project Xanadu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
Discussed in this sub-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217015
It allows them to transfer crypto coins between them, but you still have the problem of actually delivering something phisically if it's a physical purchase, and blockchain will not help with that at all... if you settle the transfer when the purchase if agreed upon, the buyer takes a big risk as nothing forces the seller to actually ship. If the settlement is delayed until the buyer confirms delivery, then the buyer takes all the risk as the buyer may choose to not confirm the transaction. Is there anything in blockchain that allows you to solve this problem?
Much of their work has been on how to make smart-contract based 'ownership tokens' (akin to NFTs) enforceable in existing courts in as many global jurisdictions as possible. They believe that they've found a way to make their arbitration system enforceable "in 150+ countries via the 1958 New York Arbitration Convention" [1].
Vinay Gupta ('hexayurt' on HN [2]) is co-founder and CEO and may be able to enlighten further.
[1] https://mattereum.com/2021/04/01/mattereum-product-walkthrou...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hexayurt | https://twitter.com/leashless
My thinking is that if people actually saw what they are paying for they would advocate for different policies because it feels great to spend other peoples’ money from some magical endless pool of money on programs that at the surface make us feel good.
A large number of people do not pay income tax, and this includes retirees, the disabled, students, the very wealthy, etc etc.
There are many types of taxes. And just about everyone pays taxes of some sort.
For example it would be great to receive a receipt indicating that I paid $10.12 for school meal programs (0.31% of my tax contributions) if I don’t have children in school.
Nothing about what parent wrote indicates that they are unwilling to pay for school meals, just that they want to know how much it cost them. Much like most people would want to know how much they are paying for socialised cancer treatments or food banks, but generally wouldn't oppose to paying in the first place.
Yes, not everybody does that and not everybody does that to the fullest extent, but it's the same ideology just applied to every last facet of interaction.
Of course this isn't how the web started. The Internet was built on military technology and first settled by scientists, amateurs and aspiring tech nerds. Everything was free because it seemed obvious that "information wants to be free", which really just meant charging for bytes more than it cost to generate, store and transfer them (i.e. deriving "surplus value" or "profit" if you want) seemed like a rip-off even when commercial BBSes started popping up. If you wanted to put an edge on it, you could even call the early web a form of "primitive communism".
But there's no reason to bring politics into discussions of technology of course. Running websites costs money and how else are people supposed to turn a profit on providing a service if we don't find better ways for them to charge visitors for access?
I think existing internet contains both the commercial and benevolent 'free, no strings attached' models and to me it strikes a good balance.
Yes, transactional issues are a thing, 25 cents doesn't work well with VISA etc. but never underestimate people's willingness to 'not want to pay'.
That was always the 'big issue' and that has not changed.
You also have a first-mover disadvantage. No one wants to be the first blog or small newspaper that starts charging in this way, because people will just go elsewhere. To be effective, everyone would have to agree to magically enable this simultaneously.
The major problem with that is you end up with nothing but clickbait articles where the first part is pointless filler designed to hook you in so you buy the paid version.
Is it? Seems to me there are a bunch of questions left unsolved.
For a start, will Visa and Mastercard go along with you using them to make your lower-cost-per-transaction competitor? Won't Apple and Google want to shake you down for their usual 30% ?
If a site gets all its revenue from a micropayment 'partner' won't the partner have massive leverage to alter the deal later and screw the site over?
How do you protect against perverse incentives - like a micropayment of $0.0001 per page encouraging sites to split articles into 20-page slideshows?
Should the payments be automatic or manual? If manual, won't sites get loaded with garish reminders to pay, like youtubers asking for likes and subscribes?
Who will set the rate of payment, and will it vary by media? Should viewing two of Reddit's user-uploaded cat photos cost more than reading one piece of quality investigative journalism? What about super-premium things like pay-per-view sports and computer games?
What sort of records will be kept - will it maintain an itemised list of all the pages I've visited and when, so billing disputes can be resolved?
How will it work for children - can they be given a daily allowance? Will it have loads of parental controls, if I'm happy to pay for some types of content and not others?
Are users going to end up quadruple-paying, where they make a micropayment, watch a youtube ad, watch an ad read by the video creator, and it's a shill video anyway? If you have value-for-money standards, how do they get enforced?
Will people be able to undo their payments if someone hacked their account? What if their kid was using their computer? What if they just thought the article was clickbait and not worth paying for? Can a user view content for free by viewing it then cancelling the charge?
Accountability becomes impossible with decentralization, and small decentralized distributors can be easily intimidated with copyright-related legislation. This is partly why p2p fizzled.
Internet change will require political change, such as rolling back various copyright legislation. For example, limiting to 20 years (like patents) and several others. The consequences of this would be to erase the book-value of the rights holding companies.
But decentralized media can not be held accountable to society/politics like for example Youtube. I suspect this is the underlying political motivation, not so much charity to Disney.
It is not difficult for me to speculate that it is due to people’s desire to get paid for their time and effort. The people working at Universal (Comcast) and Disney have the option of doing their own thing and trying to get people to pay for it outside of centralized platforms. That they do not seems to indicate it is not a viable option.
That is not to say anything about unnecessarily long copyright terms, that is a separate issue.
Living independently from patreon and youtube is the dream of most content creators. Whether it is currently viable isn't an argument in favour of current copyright legislation.
On average, they seem to be doing better than people trying to earn money from Patraeon and YouTube. They might not be the intended or primary beneficiary of current copyright legislation, but they are a beneficiary of their employers earning money due to the copyright legislation (however disproportionate).
> Whether it is currently viable isn't an argument in favour of current copyright legislation
Yes, that’s what I was hoping to convey by ending my comment stating current copyright lengths are a separate issue.
That's news to me. The less legitimate ways of acquiring media seem to be thriving in this day and age, and most are p2p.
That would effectively convert every device/internet interaction into an individualised financial transaction which is not necessarily a good thing.
But many people budget poorly when it comes to finances, and many people budget worse when it comes to attention and time.
I fear a THX1138-like future, but in many respects we are already living it, but we aren’t able to easily enough take advantage of it.
But ultimately what I find most fascinating about this article is blockchains being applied to all interactions- accessing web pages, doing this on web pages, everything. I'm thinking we'll all have wallets that constantly process micropayments everywhere we go, money going out, and coming back in, continuously.
Can't say I like it, but maybe it's more fair?
Conceptually, I really like the idea of being able to monetise one’s own attention beyond just one’s own time employed.
Ultimately, jt would be super cool to gain a better understanding of one’s own time value beyond just employed work but also leisure and how it might help us to better conceptualise the limited time we have.
Perhaps a less intuitive/instinctive and more quantifiable approach to how we might optimise our time.
Even if the world doesn’t turn into a micropayment dystopia, I would think there’s great scope to utilise strictly voluntary smart contract personal incentives.
Perhaps Jenny Craig turns into a smart contract blockchain platform that unlocks food pellets when the customers performs X. I’m mostly joking.
My first thought is how it might be of value with my kids when it comes to school performance, fitness goals, as well as leisure/fun.
We already do it, but maybe we could do it better.
Not only memes but individuals’ identities can become speculative assets via platforms like Clout Market and BitClout, which allow creators to mint themselves as NFTs.
I especially hate this part of it. Ye gods.
Oh and the part where the current web is dismissed as largely controlled by large corporate entities, with absolutely no words spared as to why the future all-crypto hellscape will be a perfect utopia inherently resistant to the sticky, hungry fingers of corporations, is a good part to hate too. We all thought "Internet 1.0" was going to be gloriously free forever, then corporations stepped in. "Internet 2.0" was gonna save us from them and now we just have new corporations mining our eyeballs for ad profits forever. "Web3 is decentralized and inherently monetized at its core through tokenization" - well that sure looks like a great place to build a middleman who provides part of that service, with their hands out for their take on both sides of every transaction, doesn't it? How much of every "art" "sale" on an NFT platform goes to the platform?
I'll stick to putting my stuff online for free and having enough folks supporting me on Patreon to pay my bills, thanks anyway.
I've seen crypto be used largely for flash money grabs and little else since the entire thing started and I'm largely convinced that until volatility, speed and energy consumption are fixed it will only remain in that realm until it's inevitably cracked down on by various governments.
Those are some pretty big issues to solve and personally I think ETH is poised with PoS to solve those issues, or so I've been led to believe, and offer utility in those every day transactions but I'm not holding my breath because of issues like that that you've pointed out and people who only view it to be used for that aforementioned money grabs.
When I've used crypto I've used ETH exclusively for my beliefs there, but I'm really not all that convinced this will ever be more than a novelty in current form.
I'm no expert in the field and I don't even generally follow crypto more than the passing news article, but this continues to be my general perception, especially when things like Doge are surging in value with really no discernable economic basis.
Let the crypto hoards now rain down upon me.
As an aside this also reflects how money is now arriving at a point where it's more closely reflecting its nature as a measure of stored energy. This also has interesting implications for organization, and how money is spent.
I do have a stake in mostly Eth but it is sized for fun.
It ends up being efficient enough to run at scale. Skynet currently has over 100,000 active users, and is doing something like 300,000,000 crypto transactions per month. This could easily scale another 100x without increasing the energy footprint of the system, and quite possibly 10,000x as well.
The promise of crypto isn't that there won't be any middlemen, it's that you'll be in control of your own relationship with the people you follow. Right now your relationship with the content creators you follow on YouTube is under the management of the YouTube platform itself. YouTube decides what counts as acceptable, what needs to be de-monetized, and what needs to be de-platformed. In the crypto world, those decisions are left in the hands of the content creators and their viewership, which imo creates a much healthier public grounds for free speech.
The best part is that it's all opt-in. If Patreon + YouTube is what works for you, then more power to you; there's no pressure to switch.
There's nothing about gambling here, the crypto tokens are liquid, you can sell them as you receive them and get fair value for your content.
Unlikely.
They probably mean Skynet by Sia[0], which is (according to their website):
> Decentralized Internet for a Free Future
> Skynet is a content and application hosting platform bringing decentralized storage to users, creators and app developers.
[0]: https://siasky.net/
ETH proof of stake is already live since December 1st, 2020, and it runs as a separate chain at the moment. There will be a "docking process" in which the state of the current proof of work chain will be moved to use this new chain's consensus algorithm. This cannot be stopped by miners. https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-2-0-beacon-chain-goes-live...
I don’t think it would really work, but it wouldn’t be exhausting either. You wouldn’t have to put in your credit card number and address every time you viewed a document.
Really, "micro" payments are not micro at all! "Micro" should mean a thousandth of a dollar at most, with the assumption that volume will make up for the profit.
On the other hand, in the before times, people paid by the minute to a network provider (such as Compuserve, Genie, AOL, etc) as well as to their phone company to get online. I might consider paying per minute to access some high quality journalism... But then again, probably not, I'm cheap.
Facebook really perfected their version of it.
>I can send you a file with scp trivially right now.
You'd still have to set up "cruft" for that as well. Generating private keys, enabling port forwarding, configuring sshd, configuring firewall rules. I don't see how setting up some crypto wallet is unreasonable in comparison.
The exception is Airdrop. But with a Windows computer or Android phone on either end, there's (at best) Bluetooth file transfer which is slow, unreliable and painful. Or there's scp (you get the joke, right?)
The point is, the technical infrastructure exists, but nobody has bothered to implement this simple stuff for ordinary users. A testament to the power of the public goods problem to block even simple, long-overdue improvements?
Maybe the Fed’s new system will allow for it:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...
If you’re not paying, you’re the product. Ads are a bigger scourge than “basing everything on money” which is just value made fungible.
Adding explicit commerce to every conversation devalues and corrodes our social bonds.
P2P networks and decentralized services have historically suffered because they relied on generous volunteers who donate their time and money (via resource allocation) to benefit the network. Blockchain / crypto is a mechanism to introduce financial elements into p2p networks. The experiment is ongoing, but there has been more advancement in p2p tech in the last 5 years than previous 20.
Which is greatly overvalued because it gives you the illusion and convenience to use numbers. Which "frees" you from actually thinking about the problem. Everything is a finance problem (and when you understand finance and management you understand everything).
See, I don't understand you either. It makes no sense to me how soooo many intelligent people could fall for something so silly and not see how deep inside a hole they are standing.
Like all models, it's a really great tool for the right job. Humans tend to forget about terms and conditions, when finding something worked well they ignore the fine print.
This scares me. Right now every smart contract needs to be audited, but If the front-end is running fully-featured Javascript, it can connect everywhere so there will be a need to audit also client-side. What If it's "leaking" data into 3rd parties. I hope for a better future than the current chaos.
It would be great If browsers have some kind of extra sandboxing, so the end-user could set that only some blockchains can be used and block everything else. Right now we can do something like that with trackers.
* Spam - It will be to expensive to send massive amounts of mail if you pay for it. * Robocalls - If there is a high cost calling you, then robo calls are discouraged. * Paid Journalists/News * Paid Content creators
get fucked
It has been greatest "socialist" force of our times. A billion may have been spammed with junk/polarising content, but millions are getting real value/upliftment from free Youtube/Google/FB.
Sure, we can go on for a while on air, unpaid work and ideals (look at OSS software), but eventually a market emerges.
Who wants to pay for every transaction? Not the consumer! It's a wet dream of economists, libertarians and dataminers so that everything is deterministic , discrete and measurable.