Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

I find it both sad and funny watching folks discard efficient, regulated, centralized financial systems, and turn to a decentralized one and deal with the constant scams that such a system would obviously produce. Irreversible transactions, 90% wash trading, the hilariously bad idea of "smart contracts," and surprisingly inefficient core technology designed to become more wasteful as it scales.

Who knows what the future holds, though. There's clearly huge hype in this space. Will anything come of it once the pyramid scheme and ponzi scheme foundational core of web3 is realized and replaced? Or will that day never come? I don't think it will and this is just another gold rush.

Some people are surprisingly open about it, running scams and hyping up other people to try to strengthen their own pump-and-dump scams. We see things like this with people Tweeing/Telegraming/Reddting/whatever about AMC stock too. At least in regulated markets this is easier to catch and change, and it's the minority of trades, where it's the foundation of cryptocurrency.

Thinking more about it, I think I feel bad for the people caught up thinking this will be useful or game changing technology. I wonder how much they realize the core technology has limited use, and all of the hype is around trading unregulated, untaxed asset bubbles.

My favorite new thing are these metaverse land sales. Not like there's an infinite amount of land in a virtual world or anything...

I find it sad and funny watching folks use this tired argument that forget how filled with scams the current financial system is. A good 3/4 of dotcom, penny stocks, boiler rooms, and even highly regarded stocks like Nikola prove that it doesn't matter where it is, money attracts scams and the SEC and others do nothing to prevent it. Try not living in such a naive world longing for a nanny state that doesn't/can't exist at least to protect people before the fact. Try owning responsibility for your financial existence. We'll still be here growing and taking on the financial world that exists to leech upon the naive and empowering people to create their own wealth and comfort.

To the proponents of the "efficient, regulated, centralized financial systems" I want to ask - why can't I pay $0.10 to a random paywalled site to access a single article?

See, that's the whole problem with the approach though.

Paywalls are shitty. Nobody wanted that to happen except for the money-men. It's for this very reason that if an article gets linked here and has a pay-wall, a few volunteers will go hunt down a free version of the article and post it on archive.org for everyone else to view. You may see this as flawed - but I see it as beautiful. The way the "good parts" of the web still work.

Money/currency/blockchain absolutely does _not_ have to be a fundamental structure of the internet. There is zero reason why a currency needs to be fundamental to the basic operation of "the web" other than for incumbents to try to increase the value of said currency. Like - seriously; the internet was supposed to be about democratization of information. I realize that didn't exactly happen due to big-tech extrapolating value out of everything - but the "solution" you are proposing is to say "oh you don't have any [insert coin here]? Yeah - you'll need to exchange 20$ USD first before you can even use our internet. Or if you don't have any cash we can give you some freebies so you can shill for us." Like - what? No. Not going to work.

Or maybe it will. But, not because it should.

So you'd rather choose privacy invading ads just because it's technically not a paywall? I'll take microtransactions every time. In fact, I'll argue that the current state of the internet can be directly attributed to content producer's inability to directly monetize their work so they have had to find an indirect way to get paid.

Information can be copied almost for free, but it still takes a fixed amount of work to produce even one copy of something. It is better to sell more copies at a fraction of the price assuming the revenue ends up the same because more value is created in the world. Unfortunately you can't charge people low enough amounts via the current financial system as they're not interested in innovation. So we are stuck with ads.

Those are decent points. I'll admit to some dormroom philosophizing in my original comment.

Moving on:

> So you'd rather choose privacy invading ads just because it's technically not a paywall? I'll take microtransactions every time.

Surely there is some middle ground there? I find _both_ ends of that spectrum deplorable. At least with the freemium model I can bring my own ad blocker. But no, I don't "choose privacy invading ads". I accept that the current internet has flaws. You understand that cryptocurrency is going to get co-opted by mainstream elites and the top 1% though, right? Sometimes I feel like I'm watching history repeat itself.

> the current state of the internet can be directly attributed to content producer's inability to directly monetize their work so they have had to find an indirect way to get paid.

I agree and I think the causation is actually reversed; the internet has enabled cheap copying of 0's and 1's since its inception. This has of course caused all sorts of issues and I agree that content creators should have a more direct way to monetize their work.

What I don't see is how NFT's enable that. Yes, they enable a content creator to collect currency from a one-time transaction, or perhaps a smart contract setup to provide a commission. But; the file contents are not actually encrypted anywhere. So ad-based websites can still easily steal content and profit from it. Further, even if they were; it would be ad-based networks buying the best content as they can afford to.

Oh, I'm ashamed to admit that I don't really know what NFTs are, but I was thinking of something along the lines of Patreon. I use it and like it, but it's still a third party that both sides need to sign up with so not everyone's on it and it's not available everywhere due to the limits imposed by traditional banking, among other things. A third party can still host the content and mediate access and charge fees for the service, but it should be working for the creator and not the other way around.

Because an advertiser will pay more and most people don't want to pay anything? There's a technical problem of handling micropayments but those are a lot smaller than the social/business problems: think about what the experience would be like clicking around with “Please deposit $0.25 to continue” prompts, and whether sites would bother with that when Google will give them a check every month for less work.

Google has tried this with Contributor back in 2015, and then again in 2017, but it wasn't popular because you were committing to pay a noticeable amount of money every month (which is more than many people think they can/should pay) and the people who would pay that would only pay that if they didn't see ads at all (since you were effectively bidding for your own ads, this wasn't a given). If, as is common, you hit sites which weren't using Google's ad network, you'd still see ads and the prospect of paying more to buy those out wasn't going to be a fun sale.

Now, maybe Google isn't trustworthy here but they're far from the only party to try this and there are also services like Apple News or Blendle which are trying a more targeted approach. I don't know how their sales look but the fact that it hasn't been newsworthy suggests that the status quo isn't going anywhere quickly.

Why pays the advertiser? More often than not it's me and you when we buy something online, even if we never click on ads. Advertisement is just another cost of doing business and it's built into the price. I can't imagine paying for content via all these middlemen would be more efficient than paying for it directly. That said, what's different is who's doing the paying and I suspect that a small minority of users are paying for everyone.

Don’t forget offline sales, too – the profit margin on one person buying a $60k SUV pays for a ton of ad sales, which is why you see so many ads for big ticket items.

Direct cost efficiency isn’t the only factor: I think site operators value the simplicity of not needing a relationship with each visitor (especially internationally) or needing to ask permission to access content, and visitors like that they don’t have a taxi meter ticking as they browse around.

I’m definitely not saying the system is perfect but any time something is this resistant to change I would assume it’s better at a factor we’re not considering. Ads certainly aren’t perfect and the major publishers would drop Google/Facebook in a heartbeat if they thought they could afford it, so I would look at proposed replacements from that perspective.

A blockchain based system has a few obvious challenges but the biggest one for me is the assumption that enough people don't like ads enough to pay a comparable amount of money & deal with thinking about transactions. That experiment has been tried enough times that I think the failures are an important lesson about revealed consumer preferences.

Insufficient consumer demand, and the economics of it don't work for publishers/creators. There've been plenty of attempts - Flattr, Coil, Dropp. If people want it, it could be built but there doesn't seem to be much market demand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com