Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdwr | Hacker News Reader

You kidding me? You're a complainer in search of an issue, there's nothing wrong with this. "Buying things on the internet" obviously works already, in the form of patreon, subscriptions, and digital purchases. This is a minimal, clean service, does exactly what it says on the tin. IDK if it gets any uptake, and the UI doesn't quite look trustworthy enough for my taste, but the idea itself is pretty much perfect.

View on HN

> You kidding me? You're a complainer in search of an issue, there's nothing wrong with this. "Buying things on the internet" obviously works already, in the form of patreon, subscriptions, and digital purchases.

And I've used such services, yes. But this looks way too minimalistic to me to be useful.

On Patreon I subscribe to a specific artist. I know who they are and they can know me if we talk to each other. I can favorite posts, provide feedback, get perks, etc. When an artist says that for $10 I'll get access to their latest sketches that's a public announcement on Patreon, and if they don't hold up their promise, fans will get upset.

Here there's an obscure link. I don't know what I'm paying for, or who made it. I don't know whether it belongs to the actual person who's supposed to benefit. Somebody could pay for the first access, make their own link and then leech off the actual artist by spreading their link around.

The artist can just have a webpage/blog/... where they would include such "paid links". That is, the audience still knows who they are and still builds some trust etc. But now they don't have to deal with setting up payment systems and account handling and billing and all that stuff. The value proposition of the OP service is to take care of all that and the artist can focus on their art instead. A per-click webshop, basically.

The issue is I as a scammer can create a paid link to any arbitrary URL, including your URL. There's no verification of control like how say LetsEncrypt works. As a user I'm taken to a link with no verification of what I might be paying for. There's no preview of the content or even a declaration of who might own rights to the linked content. So I get a link that says I need to pay $10, what the fuck am I paying for?

Even if I followed a link and expect to be paying, a scammer could also send me a link to the same content. I expected to pay through this site so I go ahead and pay for the content. Since I followed the scammer's link they get paid instead of the content owner.

This is a system just rife with abuse potential.

> The issue is I as a scammer can create a paid link to any arbitrary URL, including your URL.

Sure, but that was a problem that already existed. People already sell other people's artworks / pictures / etc.. Having to copy a file rather than a link is not a significant barrier.

> Even if I followed a link and expect to be paying, a scammer could also send me a link to the same content. I expected to pay through this site so I go ahead and pay for the content. Since I followed the scammer's link they get paid instead of the content owner.

Presumably you're getting the link from somewhere reputable - the creator's own site, or their patreon/twitter/etc.. Sure, a scammer can create a fake profile to impersonate them - but again, that's something that already happens.

Since it's something that already happens and it's a known issue, it's pretty ridiculous a brand new project doesn't have some mechanism in place to prevent it. Something as simple as a signed file at the site's root would let a content creator make paid links to their content but not a scammer.

It's not helped that there's no preview of the content or creator's site branding to give some indication of an intentional connection between the creator and paid link.

> Something as simple as a signed file at the site's root would let a content creator make paid links to their content but not a scammer.

How does anything like that help though? The scammer can download the file and host it themselves and you're right back where you started, and that's always going to be the case.

You can put a video behind DRM. You can screen record that video, but it's going to lose quality.

If it's a link, it's available to anyone if they have it

Theoretically you can. In practice I've never seen that done, and certainly anyone big enough to do that has their own store infrastructure already.

I’ve done it plenty. Got hours of live concerts that were live-streamed during the early part of the Pandemic. All screengrabbed with OBS.

I've watched DRM videos, couldn't do anything unless I logged in even after downloading it

You don't seem to have addressed your parent's point. A creator can post a paidlink link on their own site. You already know they're not a scammer because you're part of their happy fanbase. So you trust the links they post will do what they say.

Of course you wouldn't just pay money for some random link you found on Google search.

What happens when the URL inevitably starts 404ing would be my first question.

It would be a plus if paidlink.to actually made a call to the link before accepting payment, and put up a warning / stopped the transaction if it didn't get a 200, "We're sorry but thingyouwanted.com/enticing.html isn't currrently available, please try again later."

Wtf man?

First you claim this is useless, then, in this reply you claim that you've used similar services before. Make up your mind.

Yes, it's simplistic and ugly af. But don't attack the idea.

And, I guess, you got that link from somewhere, or rather from someone.

He said he used similar services to Patreon.

It is "perfect" in the H L Mencken sense: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

One of the reasons that Bitcoin never took off for their stated purpose, payment, is that they had a similarly too-simple model of irreversible one-shot transfers. Anybody who has worked on an actual payment system can tell you that commerce is more complex than that.

I don't think that was the main issue. Bitcoin's main use as an actual currency was for things like drugs, where the legal system wouldn't be on your side anyway. So lack of chargebacks wasn't an issue anyway.

The bigger issues with BTC is the onboarding problem, limited capacity and rapidly fluctuating exchange rate.

I don't think I said it was the main issue. I agree that it had other problems too, including the ones you name.

But I think you're missing my point. The anonymous, one-shot nature of things made it most appealing to only one set of merchants and one set of customers: people doing crime, and who were therefore most tolerant of the risks.

The onboarding problem is also partly a consequence of this. Because a bitcoin transaction is irreversible, and exchange can't just take a credit card payment and give you bitcoin.

Bitcoin actually DID take off for payments. The issue is it became too popular and the people in charge of it didn't want to extend the block size limit.

I would use Bitcoin to play poker online because the alternative was using Western Union - which is much more of a hassle.

Because of this issue, online poker sites now use Litecoin, BSV, BCH, etc.

See: bovada.lv and other poker sites who still offer their services to US players

It actually did not. I agree that it's useful for certain niche quasi-legal cases, but it poses absolutely no competition to both traditional payment media like credit cards and debit cards or modern options like Venmo and MPesa. It was accepted for a brief period by something like 1% of top internet retailers but it's down to at best a handful.

That's because the network maxed out and they decided to fuck everyone by keeping the block size limit. These things don't happen in a vacuum, Bitcoin lost momentum in a critical period

The block size limit was possibly one factor, but I think there were bigger ones. For example, that it's inconvenient, deflationary, slow, harder to use, riskier, and has a double currency risk amplified by Bitcoin's high price volatility.

It has a positive annual money supply increase, so in a way it's inflationary. If you look at the prices IN Bitcoin of common goods they have also increased by like 2x recently, so it has had inflation recently.

I don't think you can claim it as deflationary overall, but yeah, volatile for sure, riskier as well. But it's not like that's the only currency you take a risk with. When I had a plane ticket refunded to me that was settled in Euros I ate a $50 difference due to conversion fees (which were not refunded to me by Paypal). So currency conversion is a risk anyway.

Slow is also relative, a wire would take several days to come in. If I write you a check it takes a few months to clear, even though the bank will lend you that money before it clears.

And I would claim using those methods of payment is more inconvenient. Credit cards are not exactly equivalents because those funds are lent to you by a bank and you pay them back later.

The equivalent for Bitcoin would be Lightning Network, but it's not really usable right now, if it will ever be. Your channel might be closed after 45 days of not using it and other surprises you will experience if you actually use it.

For smaller payments it's actually better to accept 0 conf BCH payments. It has a feature called double spend proofs where after 3 seconds (the time it takes to enter the mempool of all of the nodes) it can detect whether this transaction is being double-spent

You can still double-spend it, but you need a pool with a decent chunk of mining power of the whole network to help you. So for a $1,000,000 payment it would be worth hacking the network (since you are a big pool operator you need it to be worth your while), but not for a $3 coffee

> IDK if it gets any uptake

This is pretty much what solution in search of a problem is. "Here, we made this thing that solves this problem someone could theoretically have." crickets

I still think there's value in a solution already existing if someone were to have that problem. As long as the site isn't hemmoraging money and/or needs users to survive, I don't see any reason the site couldn't just sit until someone needs it and/or grow slowly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com