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Why would crypto be the missing piece to micro-monetization? You had me till that paragraph but there's no reason Reddit can't pay contributors in cents per thousand likes if currency is really the bottleneck. If it can be properly valued, it can already be properly paid.

> Why would crypto be the missing piece to micro-monetization?

Accounting fees, laws regarding employment, the "tiny problem" of child labor...

Something I've found very interesting on reddit gaming subs is how a lot of gamers easily admit they use Bing simply because it gets them a free gamepass every month.

Could Microsoft give them an equivalent amount of money? Maybe, but the costs in red tape alone would eat a lot of what they'd get.

A gamepass paid by Microsoft rewards points achieve the same thing, without having to consider the legality of say whether compensating someone below 18 to use a search engine could constitute child labor.

Microsoft has tried to shove Bing down people throats using various strategies, but this one works! I see it as one early type of micro-monetization, and crypto as what will enable that for most companies who can't mint xbox gamepass :)

> Accounting fees, laws regarding employment, the "tiny problem" of child labor...

And you think that crypto has no fees, that it can't be taxed, and that children can't get it?

> And you think that crypto has no fees, that it can't be taxed, and that children can't get it?

I think that companies rolling their own (or adopting low fee ones) can mitigate all this - along with making these problems other people problems (capital gains -> you, KYC -> exchanges!)

Oh, and BTW:

> that it can't be taxed

It's interesting you're shoving these words in my mouth :)

I guess it goes with the usual irrational crypto hate that often flies here... but FWIW, I think reddit may be more concerned with the legal implications of paying cash (W9, and OMG the paperwork, accounting etc.)

Imagine how much worse it would be for reddit at scale (friction!)

About taxes, for a coin, it's up to the individual to declare what they did with that they received, or the parents of said individual :)

Then no need to bother with age checks or expose yourself to potentially thorny contractual or PR issues (ex: parents monetizing their kids' videos on youtube)

Your hate for all things crypto may prevent you from noticing the huge opportunities that await given the various problems it solves, and which may be all that's needed to create the missing market here.

> I guess it goes with the usual irrational crypto hate that often flies here... but FWIW, I think reddit may be more concerned with the legal implications of paying cash (W9, and OMG the paperwork, accounting etc.)

"irrational crypto hate" says the guy who doesn't think that there are any tax forms involved at all when paying people for work in-kind using volatile securities.

Well, double down on tax stuff all you want, I replied fairly to your biased views.

Your answer makes me think you're missing the forest for the trees if you still refuse to see the reduction in paperwork and the gains from automating/internalizing some stuff that most companies can't do (Microsoft can mint gamepass, what about you?)

Crypto doesn't enable that. Blockchain is nothing but a very expensive way to maintain a shared spreadsheet. There is nothing crypto can do that a regular-ass database can't do faster, cheaper, and more reliably.

> Crypto doesn't enable that.

Actually, it does, by solving an entire class of coordination problems!

> Blockchain is nothing but a very expensive way to maintain a shared spreadsheet. There is nothing crypto can do that a regular-ass database can't do faster, cheaper, and more reliably

Sure, if you accept the "small" constraints of requiring centralization or mutual trust, which usually requires paperwork and lots of procedures... which was the point of my comment.

You don't like crypto so it must be pointless or a mass delusion, and everyone is wrong but the HN is right?

Sure, just like how the iPod was called lame or how dropbox was nothing that anyone couldn't do with just a little bit of SFTP :)

>solving an entire class of coordination problems

Coordination problems that you wouldn't have if you just decided to not use crypto.

Proof of work helps resolve byzantine faults, big whoop. Know what else solves byzantine faults? Trusting an authority, which Reddit would be anyway in your hypothetical UpvoteCoin.

Also, the problems aren't "solved" in any new way. The crypto "solution" to the byzantine solution is the same as the classical one: assign an authority to set the ground truth. The only thing that's different is that instead of picking a single authority, the authority is randomly assigned via lottery with a ticket price in kilowatt-hours.

> Sure, if you accept the "small" constraints of requiring centralization or mutual trust, which usually requires paperwork and lots of procedures

Mutual trust does not require paperwork and procedure. Trust is absolutely trivial. You have, throughout this conversation, trusted that Hackernews will record your comments and render them faithfully to everyone else in this thread, without even thinking about it. What did that cost you? What paperwork did you have to sign? What taxes did you have to pay?

Trust is not a bad thing, and it costs nothing, certainly not as much as crypto transaction fees which fluctuate moment to moment with the needs of the network and frequently spike over $80. Would you be having this conversation if you knew that, upon hitting enter, your accounts would be charged an unknown transaction fee and miner tip?

> Sure, just like how the iPod was called lame or how dropbox was nothing that anyone couldn't do with just a little bit of SFTP :)

2010 called, they want their irrational optimism that crypto will ever have a use case outside of buying drugs, ponzi schemes, and money laundering back.

sounds like you're missing the point of crypto. it's not about the data management, I think some ETH clients use postgres internally, the blockchain as a network is about removing central coordinators and trust assumptions (including ones we take for granted in our society)

The only trust that crypto removes the need for is the trust that a transaction will be recorded. You still need to trust that the person on the other side of the transaction will uphold their end of your bargain, which is literally the only thing that actually matters in any transaction.

When I swipe my credit card at the grocery store, I'm not worried about whether or not it will show up on my bank statement. Switching that transaction to crypto solves nothing, it gives me no additional assurances to whether the food I just bought is poisonous, whether somebody was watching over my shoulder for my pin, whether a delivery for something out of stock that I ordered will arrive, or anything else.

In fact, using crypto would make me less confident about those things because, since crypto transactions are eternally immutable, I can't get my money back if they screw me.

Being able to trust the fact that a transaction happened is not a useful innovation.

I don't see how this solves any problems.

How would this hypothetical reddit coin work? Does reddit mint them or do the users have to buy them? How are they distributed? (e.g. based on interaction vs awarded by users)

If this is to be a payment system, then these coins have value, value which can be taxed. Sure, meeting up with some dude and paying cash might avoid it, but the success of Coinbase shows convenience is king, and the demographics of reddit are far different than the initial Bitcoin crowd, so these exchanges would pop up much sooner. Even if reddit manages to dodge the tax situation by minting coins themselves (vs charging sales tax on purchased coins), the tax man will be more than happy to collect records from exchanges.

You may be right in that distributions of virtual coins may not fall under any existing labor regulations, but I don't see that as a good thing. "Just think how much money we could save by skirting labor laws through paying people in crypto" is only a win for the employer.

But even if these coins have no real value and can only be used on reddit for virtual goods reddit wholly owns (e.g. reddit gold), considering how people farm karma, a meaningless virtual number, I can only see more perverse incentives being created for those running repost bots.

Edit: Much has been said about the state of Youtube monetization over the years and how infuriatingly often that yellow "limited/no ads" icon appears for seemingly no reason, about the drop in payouts, abuse of copyright claims, and how some people take advantage of the system (see: Dan Olson's video "Weird Kids' Videos and Gaming the Algorithm" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8). But despite all this, I think the current state of Youtube would be more fair than a hypothetical reddit monetization scheme, and most micropayment schemes I've read about for that matter.

I've gone from not giving a shit about crypto to being repulsed by it because of comments like this. Using smilies to convey the benefits of using shitcoins to skirt around child labour laws? Employment laws? And proper accounting/taxation? Thanks but not interested.

> Using smilies

Is the problem the form, or the message?

> And proper accounting/taxation?

Interesting, here's yet another person shoving words in my mouth!

Nowhere in the above or anywhere else did I even suggest people shouldn't pay the taxes they owe if they make capital gains.

And FWIW, taxes are a very small problem in the grand scheme of things: my core argument is about reducing friction, which may allow a missing market, even for companies that are not at the scale of Microsoft and can't mint a gamepass.

This is exactly what YouTube does already. In fact I see no reason why Twitter couldn't spill ad money to the content (tweet) creators within the next year or two, creating a similar ecosystem. Maybe the value attributable to individual creators would be too small? Videos are quite a bit bigger than tweets (in terms of what matters most, the eyeball time), after all.

I'm not certain why crypto is hugely important here. Can reddit not just ask people to link a paypal/some other banal payment provider if they would like to pay content creators?

I see two huge reasons: 1. friction and legal issues when it comes to money being send to people 2. lack of a second market for current reddit badges etc.

Now if said badges were say NFTs and could be traded for something else easily, I would agree with you.

Isn’t reddit already doing this with NFTs and a secondary market? And I think it’s not working out so great.

Edit: I can’t for the life of me find the link but I swear there was an article posted to HN in the last week or so about Reddit giving mods an exclusive NFT or token of some sort that the mods were then selling for significant sums.

> Edit: I can’t for the life of me find the link but I swear there was an article posted to HN in the last week or so about Reddit giving mods an exclusive NFT or token of some sort that the mods were then selling for significant sums.

IDK, but it's bound to happen eventually, one way or the other!

I think we're in the very early stages for something that will change the power dynamics in social media

> legal issues when it comes to money being send to people

how is the mode of sending money the problem here?

The mode is a problem when sending fractions of cents (the elusive micropayments), but the core problem is sending money in the first place.

Giving people that's not money comes with fewer administrative burden - and even less if it's digital.

Crypto is important because those invested in crypto have to keep growing the market to find new people to buy they stuff they own.

> Sooner or later, I think companies like twitter or reddit will want to "lock in with golden handcuffs" their most valuable writers, those who result in precious ad money eyeballs.

Reddit already "pays" their writers, they pay them in upvotes. But seriously though, that's how places like Reddit get their content. You want to post because you think "people might like this", and "I might get a ton of upvotes" and "I might even get some awards". Now all of these things are completely worthless, but the point is to trick your brain into thinking those things hold value in an attempt for you to post.

> Reddit already "pays" their writers, they pay them in upvotes

Good enough for now, but then it's a high status zero wage job :)

> Now all of these things are completely worthless, but the point is to trick your brain into thinking those things hold value in an attempt for you to post.

Think further: not _if_ but _when_ a company comes with a good way to exchange this social capital for more traditional financial capital, it will crush those who don't allow that.