The Impervious Browser: Your Portal to the P2P Internet
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The fact they're using Bitcoin, instead of Ethereum or another altcoin, is a positive for me.
So yeah, if a browser can fix this problem with P2P payments, that would be huge.
AFAIK they aren't advocating for the banning of other browsers (like Chrome), so if you don't want to use a browser that has support for that protocol, you can choose one that doesn't.
It’s not a “really hard problem” - cryptocurrency is a solution looking for a problem that doesn’t exist.
Then what's the solution?
As far as 'micropayments,' that is begging for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. I'll give you an example. Netflix users watch about 100 hours of their service a month, for $15.59. So 15 cents an hour. There is no scenario in which Netflix benefits from creating a virtual currency in their system pegged at 15 cents an hour (think Flix-Bux), people are already pushing back hard on these internal 'currencies.' The irony is not lost on me the amount of energy used by smart dudes to create a browser that is proposing virtual currency which has been utilize to nickle and dime gamers from adolescence to adulthood (robux, vbucks, the plethroa of 'money sellers' on many platforms).
Nothing about this is about freedom, this is all about changing one central control structure for another, with little crumbs of implication that it's better for users and sellers alike.
I might be wrong, but no one responded to my question with an answer of a better solution than crypto. All they say is: "should not do it". Well, the question was not whether they should do it or not. They already did.
You think crypto is on the net positive side of nothing. A great number of HN do not see it as such they see it as a constant source of scams, funding hype source, fraud, speculation, laundering, and so on with little to actually show in the way of being the world changer it is always promised. The point of that isn't to bring up a debate about if crypto is or isn't so, that conversation has been rehashed a thousand times here and nobody really wants to touch it with a 10 foot pole plus much better resources on the topic exist than comments, it's mentioned as why that portion is wary of a product which puts a lot of spotlight on crypto payments being a core part of why it exists instead of just focusing on the initial crypto based revolution it is already promising: a p2p decentralized browsing experience. Combine the two and you've got something that for many is squarely in the "I'm not going to touch this until it is shown to not be like the other stories and wish it wasn't about payments" camp.
I consider my industry to be Media. I wanted to be a Journalist(TM) when I grew up. Won a contest...went to a major paper in Boston as part of a group of "those that will one day be Woodward and Bernstein." Then Youtube happened. I pooh-poohed it because I couldn't wrap my head around why anyone, in my thoughts at the time, "would want to watch a bunch of amateurs do x."
Fast forward to today. I watch more YouTube than Netflix and Prime Video combined. These are the only two services we still pay for...we used to also have HBO and Acorn, but they are both one trick ponies and are not adding enough compelling content quickly enough. Also after HBO ruined ASOIF, they landed on my no-go list forevermore. Acorn is simply too expensive for what it offers. It might become for compelling if it were to expand to the Scandies...
I currently maintain a folder on my desktop (one of hundreds) called The Olsen Meter. And in the folder I save every article I come across about industry people-in this case finance industry folks-who I feel are making the same mistake I did all those years ago by pooh poohing crypto. The problems will get worked out...they always do. The energy issue is a sideshow. And mainly bandied about by those who (I feel) are reacting out of nervousness about the future and the unknowns. Crypto is constantly maligned because of the hacks and thefts, but the most stolen currency in the World is/was/always will be the US $100 bill. To the tune of Trillions. Crypto and is multi-billions have quite aways to go before it even comes close.
As to whether or not this will solve the micropayments problem, maybe not but I like the idea of it as a stopgap. Until someone builds something newer and better. And if it keeps journalists from selling their souls to corporations via ads, then the Devil I know and like will always be a better deal.
Last thing I'd like you to consider: How does Dr. Beverly Crusher pay for fabric on TNG in Episode 1? Now before you dismiss the question, realize that she has never been on this planet before, this is the first time they (the crew) have met the Bandi and she procures a whole bolt of beautiful fabric with one sentence? How does the vendor know whether or not she's good for it?
Yes: to not implement them at all.
I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies by any measure, but I can understand why people would like that.
Why would I be against payments being built into browsers in a standardised and open source, open standards way if it might eventually solve those problems?
Since when has paying for content meant no ads?
I pay for a newspaper - ads, I pay for cable tv - ads, I pay for the internet - ads, I pay road tax - ads, I go to the cinema - ads, I buy a ticket to a sporting event - ads.
That is before we get to the influencer product placement world.
That ads still exist in other places where you've ostensibly paid for the content doesn't invalidate the op's preferences.
You can get ad packed content free, you can get ad-free content, you can get paid content that has ads, or paid content that is ad-free.
The "I paid for it" input has zero weight when it comes to determining if the content has ads is sponsored, infuenced or otherwise paid for.
1. As long as they’re paying a reasonable amount, paying customers should be more motivating to the company than whoever’s buying ads (because they provide more revenue), which means they are hopefully trying to keep me happy with their service.
2. I hate ads because I don’t want to see them, much less be distracted, or worse, influenced by them.
So I pay for content and run browser and DNS level ad blockers aggressively on all devices, as well as using reader mode wherever possible.
If I can’t avoid the ads I’ll usually go without. You’ll never find me watching broadcast TV.
But they'll be competing against people that don't do that, so unless their content is really really good and unique, they'll lose in the market and either adapt or die. Maybe some mega celebrities could pull that off, but it would be pretty rare.
I mean, they could easily be doing that right now. $1.99 is high enough that the problem of micro payments isn't really a problem at that price. But they don't because it would be a terrible strategy...
That's already the case, yet there is no way to escape. We need to go back to browsers that don't take over our computer (harvest personal info etc).
How is anybody accepting micro payments currently? What technology do they use?
I believe there are people creating micropayment superchat like systems for crypto, but its difficult when its not integrated into the browser/not integrated into content as well as it is with youtube.
Brave has a pretty cool tipping feature that I’ve used a handful of times, but it’s not integrated into the user experience in a way that people actually use/very few people seem to know about it or use it.
I’m curious to know how it could be more widely adopted. Maybe a Flask integration? Other ideas?
I agree with long term concerns as block rewards decrease, though, which is why I prefer Monero’s tail emission to Bitcoin’s model.
Part of the brilliance of block rewards is it actually does pay for itself. Miners are rewarded for their efforts, and the reward amount varies based on the needs of the network.
At least that’s been true for the past decade, prior to getting towards the supply cap. It’ll be extremely interesting to see how miners behave as the rewards decrease in reality vs in theory. My personal belief is that the lack of tail emission and resultant price increase will keep bitcoin alive indefinitely, but make it more and more static overtime, even with stuff like lightning, and turn it into a kind of reserve note. This is not a novel theory and is what many are seeing happening.
I’m most bullish on Monero long term/think it’s extremely under-appreciated as a viable means for the mind of decentralized uncensorable micro-transactions people in the space all fantasize about.
Just because one browser bakes it in, it doesn't mean the resources created are limited to being accessed through that browser.
The concept seems to first appear in Nick Szabo's paper in 1999:
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-...
Things like Brave's Basic Attention Token seem to solve this problem in the sense that it's completely automatic based on the amount of time spent on each site. But then you have to use Brave, and you have to use BAT...
In my case, most of the money would go to YouTube, Reddit and HN. (I think Brave actually has a way to send the money to individual creators on a site rather than to the site itself. But I haven't used it personally.)
I don’t mind paying for certain things, but the crypto trend is very much pay to play.
HN comments aren't free to host though. There is compute involved. How are they paying for that compute?
If it is out of boredom and good will, that's cool. But I very much am keeping that in mind when I comment here. I don't expect a hobby site to stay up long term because they'll just shut it down when it stops being fun.
If HN is paying for this from advertisements and job postings, well there is your answer. It is commercial.
I am not against commerce; I am against a pay-to-play internet.
You aren’t paying a fraction of a cent to post comments, but you’re paying in other ways. You just prefer the business model of HN, but i find the fraction of a cent model to be more straightforward and clear.
Would you say that Youtube is “free” as well?
Many people would simply prefer a more transparent / straight forward business model and I don’t think they are wrong for having that preference.
I would say that Youtube is pay to play as well. You’re just paying with your attention to their advertisers.
I don’t think this logic is misplaced. HN has the same business model as all “free” tech platforms, doesn’t it?
For better or worse, for most people the browser is the internet right now.
There's tons of cool P2P web stuff to do that isn't payments. And I don't want my browser to have a payment mechanism baked in anyway.
Along a different line of criticism, my bet is P2P payments in the long run is a nonstarter because once legislation catches up (which it will) every peer will need to be as compliant with financial regulations as a bank which is no fun to run as a peer so things centralize and we're back where we started.
And Bitcoin is absolutely not a positive. It's incredibly destructive to the environment (and in some cases, national economies and power grids) to the extent even diehard cryptocurrency advocates are warning everyone away from Proof-of-Work in favor of alternative schemes like Proof-of-Stake. Bitcoin is notable for being the one that popularized the tech, but there have been massive improvements on the core idea since then.
Which kind of confirms the previous commenter's argument about all things crypto being about pump n' dump projects that get abandoned quickly after their coin offerings.
What makes you say that? Hypercore just launched a major upgrade that includes multi-writer support.
> Which kind of confirms the previous commenter's argument about all things crypto being about pump n' dump projects that get abandoned quickly after their coin offerings.
Hypercore is not related to any coins. https://hypercore-protocol.org/
Yes, where hypercore 8 is incompatible with hypercore 7's wireformat, kind of confirming my point.
Building a usable frontend first is never going to get you excited about a project, but the only way we are going to get mass adoption of decentralization is to make it as simple as TikTok or Chrome.
I'm also sorry it is just "another bitcoin project." If you happen to have $20 million kicking around to fund the project so they don't have to depend on crypto, by all means reach out to them. Alternatively, use that big brain of yours to figure out a better way of funding a company that doesn't make money off its users.
The people that come out to defend those projects almost certainly owns token. How is this not an unregistered security?
There's a reason the Bitcoin developers:
- were anonymous
- released bitcoin weeks after the ruling on e-gold
- continues to remain anonymous
They clearly knew the implication of e-gold and US security laws.
This is built on Bitcoin. There is no other token.
• Zoom, without Zoom.
• Google Docs, without Google.
• Medium, without Medium.
• WhatsApp, without WhatsApp.
• Payments, without banks.
• Identity, without the state.
- The percentage of internet users who care that the above services are centralized is likely less than 1% and probably much less
- If the open source movement is any indication, the percentage of people in that small group who want to pay to build such decentralized services is also very small
- There is no mention of a moderation slash policing mechanism. The idea that "The State" will allow people to trade child porn or buy and sell ghost guns without interference is ludicrous
My intuition tells me that there is a network law that hasn't been formulated yet that says that decentralized networks trend towards centralized super nodes when certain contraints and requirements are placed on the decentralized network (or maybe there is one and I haven't heard about it)
There’s a generalized version, if not one specific to blockchains and cryptocurrencies: In complex, non-linear dynamic systems, the critical resources of the system tend to concentrate and consolidate over time, due to positive feedback, winner-take-all, and similar effects inherent in these systems. Decentralized systems are subject to these dynamics too, as we’re seeing with both mining/validating concentration and ownership of the wealth in these systems.
People are aware of the problem, but it’s probably unsolvable, deterministically at least.
In broader society, in the past, such trends have tended to eventually result in some kind of collapse or revolution (French, Bolshevik, etc). It’s like there’s a natural asymptote to the concentration of resources, that forces a (painful) reset once they become too concentrated.
I've come across various essays and posts that make this point tangentially, but not much that investigates it directly. If you are aware of any, links would be appreciated.
> It’s like there’s a natural asymptote to the concentration of resources, that forces a (painful) reset once they become too concentrated.
Likewise, if you know of work to determine how concentrated is too concentrated, that would be interesting.
Any decentralized network will create abundance, but also all the problems of abundance - identity, filtering, search, stability, etc. Some trusted gateways or intermediaries are then created to solve those problems. And then we're in a race to get a monopoly, one that well-capitalized startups can win.
A "browser" is a play to control or at least have influence over all of these experiences, just like IE was for Microsoft or Chrome is for Google.
Although their journey has stopped.
But I’m a skeptic. I’ll remain a skeptic until I see something that works as well as our existing tools. I’ll also remain a skeptic if I need to join the cryptocurrency cult for it to be usable.
Most of the things listed here are worthwhile ideas. I want safety and privacy on the web for everyone. But I don’t want to get involved with Bitcoin if that’s a prerequisite.
The world needs this in a way where they can install a browser like any other, and just start using it. No wallets, no angle. Just let it be a free tool of communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Failure is an opportunity to start again more intelligently. I have no doubt the Internet will eventually become distributed and decentralized. Just add time and political will.
So philosophical you're right, it's decentralized. But practically, it's more complicated.
Not really. The early Internet was a tool for the army and the academia. Web3, so far, is a tool for speculants.
Just because it's an open platform that makes speculative assets emerge doesn't mean the underlying technology and philosophy has great potential. I'm pretty much sure that the killer app of crypto is not here yet, and when it is here, it will change many views.
What convinced you?
Juicero was also a toy system, and it crashed and burned. What (except wishful thinking) makes you think crypto is the Internet and not Juicero
If you don't care about identity, payments, etc then is there a reason you couldn't do that with this browser? But also, as much as I don't like the near-monopoly situation, we do have a pretty usable mature set of options for that already in Chrome and Firefox.
It offloaded routing to peers that had better hardware/bandwidth. The downside was that many people were not aware of that at the time, myself included, thus on some computers Skype would seemingly consume more resources than expected.
Well, that tells me everything I need to know. =)
As for this, Lightning is not even Bitcoin, so what is the point of even mentioning 'decentralization'? Lightning is known to be significantly (and growing to be) more centralized and defeats the whole point of it all since there is a relentless push for people to use that instead of using Bitcoin on-chain. Lightning's centralization is inevitable.
Hence this, does that also mean Bitcoin has failed in its original purpose if everyone is going to use Lightning?
So the Lighting Network is Bitcoin and it is all working on chain then?
Furthermore, we also have 1 day old accounts created for the purpose of attempting to refute my comment with themselves having ZERO counter evidence.
So when are you going to refute this research paper which evidently highlights the Lightning Network's centralization problem? [0]
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062
As Elizabeth Stark Said Friday: “LN has its own native token called sats, and it’s maybe just worth stacking some”!
(Source: I implemented the first Lightning node, was original chair of the spec process, and have worked full-time on Lightning for over 6 years).
> I'm sorry, this simply isn't true.
I'm sorry but anecdotes are not 'sources'.
The Lightning Network is an off-chain 'layer 2' system that is NOT Bitcoin. It is centralized by design [0], defeating the entire point of using (and promoting) decentralized on-chain payments for Bitcoin.
I hate to bring it to you, but much has changed after 6 years and the 13 years around the supposed original intention of Bitcoin.
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062
Now we wait for various 3rd party evaluators to assess and audit (and of course, publish).
Be nice to see a demo ISO or something for evaluation.
I signed up for it just now... Indeed, it sounds very good, but the proof is in the pudding.
All those "MSCS required, PhD preferred" hires they're making ain't working for free...
> Google Docs, without Google.
> Medium, without Medium.
> WhatsApp, without WhatsApp
Trademark lawsuit, without adequate funding to defend against
Could someone help me understand the user story/user case for the problem this solves today for a user?
I honestly have a hard time with these p2p/decentrialized/ blockchain/*xyzcoin items. After you have seen one, they all kinda cast the same shadow.
Web3-type projects in a nutshel
The knight helmet logo and the name are not appealing in the slightest to any normal person. The whole brand image just screams "edgelord".