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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

It's not a "requirement" but monetizing content is a really hard problem that hasn't been solved real well. The most common strategy is ads, but everybody involved (by that I mean the producer and the consumer of the content, not an unnecessary third part like ad sellers) hate that solution. There are some attempts like Medium and their subscription model and Brave's BAT. These solve the problem of "micro payments" but they still require a third party and they have significant limitations (especially that content providers don't have any say on "price"). Direct payments so far suffer from the "micro payments" issue in that small payments aren't feasible since credit card companies and other third parties take a non-trivial portion.

So yeah, if a browser can fix this problem with P2P payments, that would be huge.

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Paying content creators is a very valid problem, however using proof of work in place of CC processor fees is just moving the problem around - and arguably, making it worse: you're essentially taking on environmental debt, which all of us will eventually have to pay down.

What "monetizing content via a crypto browser" really means is "voluntarily submitting yourself to this 'decentralized' control structure we have set up." Which, in the case of Bitcoin, is "controlled" by 5 mining pools at any given time, who are all, one way or another, going to have to submit to government control at some point in the future. Meanwhile the whole thing about "decentralized identifiers" is people using the system will be connecting to central data centers.

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.

The nice property that well designed cryptocurrency protocols have is that they are censorship resistant - they align incentives and telemetry such that operators shouldn't want to censor transactions, but even if they do they cant differentiate between the transactions they like and the ones they don't. Bitcoin itself doesn't really have this property but there are other ones out there that do.

I suspect a cabal controls exactly what goes on despite bitcoin community claims. They are slowly selling off their positions over time and converting to real world assets for that point when they pull the rug out and it all crashes down around all the other investors ears when the curtain falls and the wizard(s) are exposed.

> It's not a "requirement" but monetizing content is a really hard problem that hasn't been solved real well.

It’s not a “really hard problem” - cryptocurrency is a solution looking for a problem that doesn’t exist.

> It’s not a “really hard problem”

Then what's the solution?

There are a lot of really hard problems and as big as fixing any such really hard problem would be the question is why this needs to be handled by the browser itself not why this would be a good problem to have solved.

Well sure, it could be implemented without the browser, just like FTP and other things were back in the day before they got implemented in the browser (which made browsing an FTP server accessible to tons of people who didn't know how/why to use an FTP client), but it's a lot less user friendly. Instead of configuring your preferences or clicking an "approve" button or whatever, you have to provision yourself a wallet, click an "I want to pay $0.15 for this article", get the receiver's wallet address, copy it over to your wallet. Copy over a transaction ID, click send, wait for an email confirmation that includes the access code, copy paste that into the original article, and you're golden. Or all of that can just happen seamlessly in the background if the browser knows how to do it. Also, I don't see an average user ever going through those hurdles, so probably the idea dies on the vine and we'll end up stuck with ads or centralized subscription models for eternity.

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.

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