L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure
l402.org
l402.org
Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody.
I'd rather have this than the status quo, which is...Patreon, basically, which is an utterly terrible micropayments platform from both a company-ethics standpoint and a user-experience standpoint.
If you're concerned about carbon emissions, then tax energy enough to provide carbon capture to offset those carbon emissions, plus a little on top. Then I don't care what you use the power for, as long as I can get some, too.
The problem isn't PoW, the problem is uncaptured externalities.
I don't think that a distributed ledger is the right way to solve this, but flawed attacks on a solution being proposed to a terrible current state of affairs, without presenting any other solution whatsoever, is irksome, and doesn't help anybody.
If you have a USA-bitcoin that only accepted blocks by miners verified to be paying real costs for energy, then it would be different. But nobody wants that
If making it "OK" requires global consensus on tax/externality policy, then it isn't ever going to be ok.
Escaping regulation is the point of cryptocurrency.
That "regulatory efficiency" doesn't and can't exist in our current flavor of capitalism. Yes, it is the same as any other industry. But pointing it out about Bitcoin doesn't scare the population as much as pointing it out for their entire economy.
What if, hear me out, micropayments are a bad solution in total? I have not seen anyone actually demonstrate that a micropayment based system will result in better production/creation than the patronage system that is working today. Instead it always seems to be driven by hyper-free market woo and ideology, as if that has worked out so far.
Micropayments are clearly theoretically better than a patronage model, and there's very little evidence to suggest that they're either bad or good, so no, there's no reason to believe that they're a bad solution.
> I have not seen anyone actually demonstrate that a micropayment based system
This is a fallacious argument. It simply makes no sense - there's a metric ton of historical evidence that good ideas can fail to materialize either because the technology doesn't exist yet, or because of cultural factors immaterial to the validity of the idea.
> Instead it always seems to be driven by hyper-free market woo and ideology, as if that has worked out so far.
This statement is anti-capitalist drivel without any substance or intelligence behind it, meant to manipulate, with very little truth behind even the implication that micropayments are "hyper-free market" constructs, and a repetition of the earlier fallacy that "not currently successful = bad idea".
Micropayments are a pretty clearly better system than patronage. It scales better (smaller creators are more accurately rewarded for what they produce, instead of the largest creators getting a disproportionately large fraction of revenue), it's fairer to the creators (as their work gets directly rewarded, instead of them effectively having to beg for patronage), it's more sustainable (as creators are rewarded for all of the content that they've produced, instead of just the most recent), it's less guilt-inducing for consumers (who don't need to worry about whether or not their $1/month donation is "fair"), it naturally rate-limits consumers and helps them quantify and/or limit their entertainment time and/or spending, and it allows consumers to "own" their media more.
"Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true.
"I don't see modern payment networks doing anything to get there" - this is also true.
Neither of those imply we must solve this problem with Bitcoin, and neither of them contradict OP's statement. Bitcoin is slow, energy inefficient, and a shit transaction currency because of philosophies built into the creation of the coin. It's a fine speculative asset, but by this point in its existence, it should be pretty obvious it's not an actually useful currency for this kind of exchange.
Probably not. They've been proposed all the way back to Chaum's DigiCash, but no micropayment system has ever really taken off. Not just crypto schemes. Schemes to put micropayments on your cellular phone bill were a flop. Even 976 numbers never got traction outside of dial-a-porn and have mostly died out.
All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. Not from consumers wanting to send them.
I don't know exactly what "micropayments" means to people now. I get the impression it's more on the order of a dollar. But DigiCash really wasn't even meant to do large volumes of payments that small. I don't think a system like that has ever really been tried.
It's true that any kind of pay-per-use would be a hard, hard sell, though. Who wants to have to think about whether every click is worth the nickel it's going to cost? But it's also true that people don't like to buy subscriptions. So now we're in advertising hell. Which nobody likes either, to the point where a double digit percentage of users are blocking ads.
I think advertising took off because there was no coordination problem; nobody had to ask the consumer about whether to deploy it. And for larger payments everybody already had credit cards, so there was no onboarding issue.
I've heard this argument before, but there's a common existence proof to the fact that it's possible: video games. People who play many different kinds of video games (RTS, MOBA, MMO, RPG) get used to making decisions as to whether to buy things many times an hour with barely any cognitive load - their brains just get used to working with smaller units of time and money.
And why shouldn't they? I found sources online that say that a YouTube video earns about $5 per 1k views, or 0.5c per view. If I have to pay half a cent to watch a video, even a short five-minute one, that's almost below the threshold of caring, and even those making median income are probably going to be constrained by the actual time that they have available to watch, rather than the cost of the videos. People will spontaneously spend $20 to go out to eat - after the initial adjustment to a micropayment system, they should have very little trouble spending 60 cents to watch YouTube for five whole hours after work, especially if the micropayment system has common-sense features such as clearly showing your wallet balance over time, how much you've recently spent, and how much longer your balance will last at your current rate of consumption.
Now, to be fair, the fact that it's possible, and that people will quickly get used to it after they spend some time with it, doesn't mean that people will be interested in trying it in the first place, and that's a much harder problem, because subscription services are more lucrative for companies. I think the only way to get micropayments off the ground would be a grassroots movement supported by a bunch of content creators making their stuff available on a micropayment platform. Otherwise, companies that move away from ads (e.g. Google) will just turn to subscription services to lock their users in.
If it's true that Chaum fucked up the deal to have it shipped with Windows 95, then this is a bad example.
Not saying it was ever "desperately needed." But being on everyone's computer by default, somebody would surely have found a use for it. Probably gambling, which is more than sufficient for bootstrapping.
Then it's a race: does the consequent acceleration of malware become such a nasty pain point that Microsoft just removes Digicash from the Windows 98 installer? Or does pets.com accept it as payment first, and it therefore becomes entrenched? :)
1: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/genesis-files-how-david-...
NOBODY wants to pay a penny per grain of rice. People want to pay $10 for a nice bowl full of rice.
VERY FEW CONSUMERS want all news to be stuck behind a five cent paywall before you can even decide whether it's worth that. Consumers WANT to pay for "good journalism" as an abstract service.
Subscriptions are one option when they are less hassle than alternatives.
And they already know where things will end up. Now it might be cents to get something, but soon there will be adds and after that the price will go up. Probably to full units...
microtransactions exist within the realm of individual video games already though. spend $10 to get 5000 in-game tokens and 150 tokens gets you better gear.
for the calorie and cost conscious rice eater, why should I pay $10 for a bowl when I'm only going to eat half? per-grain is ridiculous, but a la carte pricing on food isn't. Not everyone is a fan of buffets.
I don't want to pay for a whole newspaper when I'm just reading the whatever section, and micropayments would let me do that. Whether or not that's a good thing for the newspaper is a different question.
Yes. That does work.
Linden Lab, the people behind Second Life, spun off their money system as a startup, called TiliaPay.[1] Tilia obtained money transfer licenses, linked up with JPMorgan Chase Payments, and offered a system where you could process a 2 cent transaction with acceptable operating costs. Unlike most "game points" programs, users can trade with each other and cash out in dollars. That's why they had to become a regulated financial operation.
It never took off. It does work, but Second Life and, to some extent, VRChat are the only real customers.
But it shipped with Windows, so they did. :)
People might be willing to pay $10 per month for a broad spectrum of quality content, but they don't want to spend 13 cents for a given arbitrary single article. It's an annoying decision burden, even if you try to shunt it away from them with delayed end-of-month billing (constant fear of a surprise $300 bill) or a prepaid-credit scheme (where you have to still check your balance regularly).
It has to be unmetered at the moment of use -- no surprise paywall popping back up-- and it has to cover enough content that you're not reliant on "if we lose our #1 draw, the entire platform falls over".
The perfect prototype was basically the Japanese phone-book manga magazine. If you liked one or two series consistently, it was enough to justify buying the book, and since you already paid, you may as well explore the other 18 series in there to see if there's something you like.
It failed.
It's what Google Contributor should have been. Not the bizarre v1 where your money tried to outbid ads, or the pay-per-view v2 that also only supported a handful of websites.
It could never get a following because the initial set of providers and customers would be always too limited to gain proper usage numbers which in turn would prevent it from being expanded.
v2 had a pathetic reach and worked in a mediocre way.
Youtube premium does basically the right thing, so it would be nice if google talked to google about how they made it happen.
This is true, but it's not really the same thing as "we don't need micropayments" and "there's no configuration that would work for micropayments." Hell, ad networks are basically micropayment networks, just not for consumers, and the current economic configuration of "everything is free, we just sell all your personal data" is pretty new, so it's not like we haven't already invented new economics for the internet.
> All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. Not from consumers wanting to send them.
Well, yes, but that's every kind of payment in the world - in just about every transaction in the economy, it's the people producing the thing that want money for the thing, not the consumers who want to pay them.
Less glibly, the current economic arrangement of the internet is eight shades of fucked. Nobody's getting paid for their work, content on the internet has sprinted to the lowest, shittiest, clickbaitiest denominator, social networks are incentivized to tear society apart so people spend more time hate-scrolling, and GenAI is coming to hoover up any of the remaining scraps individuals could've possibly been getting for their content. The fuckup of the last 50-odd years of economic policy is the monomaniacal focus on the individual as a consumer and the absolute exclusion of the individual as a producer from policy. If you want a good economy, you need to pay people for things.
The good news is there's a revitalization of just fucking paying people for things - Patreon's a good example, there's a whole lot of new writer-owned sites making good enough money to be sustainable (defector, autopian, 404media, etc), and generally there seems to be a much larger appetite for paying for things than the last 20 years of the internet would have lead one to believe.
I genuinely believe that a system in which users could easily pay small amounts of money for content they're enjoying and producers could easily get compensated for their work on reasonable terms without the friction of building a durable (subscription) relationship and without the machinery in the middle taking 30% from both sides would be transformative. We're nowhere near it, but man, we sure have tried the other ways, and they're all pretty crap.
But if it involves cryptocurrency, I'm out.
Nope. Credit cards, in the form of Diner's Club, were invented by Frank McNamara, a millionaire who went to a restaurant for dinner and forgot to bring enough cash. ATMs were conceived by Walter Wriston, CEO of Citibank, because he saw too many people waiting in line at his teller windows for cash. The big push behind FedNow today is from the parts of the U.S. Government that pay out money for tax refunds, medicare, and pensions.
Yes, they are. The current dominant payment models are (1) individual patronage (which doesn't scale, and disproportionately concentrates rewards/wealthy to the very most popular creators) and (2) ads (which are incredibly problematic in almost every way imaginable).
> They've been proposed all the way back to Chaum's DigiCash, but no micropayment system has ever really taken off.
"Nobody's gotten it to work yet, therefore it's a bad idea" is a basic fallacy that has been disproven many times throughout history, especially in the past few decades, where there were many ideas (e.g. VR, machine learning, high-level programming languages) attempted in the past at points when the technology and/or market culture simply weren't right yet, that were later validated as good ideas.
> All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. Not from consumers wanting to send them.
Yes, because free-with-ads and subscription-based services are the two dominant payment models. Both are incredibly problematic (ads come with huge privacy and coercion issues, subscription services remove media ownership and don't proportionately reward creators for their work), but because they're already established, consumers don't feel a need for something else.
This argument is like saying "All the enthusiasm for eating healthily comes from doctors who want to pitch diets to people. Not from individuals wanting to eat healthily."
Paying for individual pieces of content is clearly superior to having your attention and personal information sold to advertisers, but because ad-supported services have a price tag of zero, there's no transparency as to what data is collected and sold, and the ad-supported model is popular and familiar, consumers will choose that over a new unproven system.
That does not mean that micropayments are worse. The principled arguments for micropayments are far stronger than that of either ads or subscription services.
I'd love it if my media players/viewers just compensated artists directly commensurate with how much I consume. I'm not comfortable using a middleman for this because all of the available middlemen are giving a pittance to the artists while spending the rest of that money on technologies that make life worse for everyone. I don't want to legitimize that behavior by paying somebody for it.
Piracy + donations is often the most ethical option available today, but even better would be Piracy + micropayments on use because then it would happen whether or not I bothered to look for a "donate" option.
Strawman arguments against Bitcoin often stem from a combination of factors: the complexity and rapid evolution of the technology, widespread misunderstandings fueled by media simplification, resistance to financial system changes, and a lack of technical knowledge among critics. These issues are compounded by confirmation bias, lingering associations with Bitcoin's controversial past, and sometimes vested interests in traditional systems. Overcoming these strawman arguments requires ongoing education and clear communication about Bitcoin's current capabilities and limitations.
Also, Lighting is capable of using other blockchains.
If you really want micropayments, then use one of the newer, better base systems that do the same things better on every metric, including not ripping through half a percent of the electricity generated in the world.
Even if Bitcoin were the only choice available, micropayments aren't needed desperately enough to justify the climate impact. But in fact it's not.
But if you're trying to build something for decades, as you should be for internet infrastructure, there isn't much option.
Given the public ledger of Bitcoin, I would hardly say it has "censorship resistance". On that metric I would think Monero or some such would be better:
* https://www.investopedia.com/tech/five-most-private-cryptocu...
Conflates two orthogonal issues: Identifiable payment vectors and publishing preservation / ability to be censored.
Lightning network consumes half of the energy on the planet?
Because L402 pretty clearly states that it uses Lightning and not plain Bitcoin. Using the power consumption of all Bitcoin would be deceptive and dishonest.
And it turns out that Bitcoin's energy usage responds not to the transaction volume, but to the total available miner income: transaction fees plus total block rewards. Rewards still dominate. Driving the transaction volume up is at best not going to reduce them, but the bigger issue is giving the Bitcoin chain a reason to exist.
So, your 1% figure was Bitcoin in general, not Lightning, and you intentionally used the wrong value to be misleading.
> Using Lightning encourages Bitcoin, and in fact requires doing transactions on the base Bitcoin chain
...which is irrelevant to the fact that you intentionally used extremely misleading language in order to deceive readers into thinking that the same technology that powers L402 consumes 0.5% of the world's energy.
> In fact, if Lightning-based Web micropayments caught on, it would drive the base transaction volume over the hard cap that's imposed by the current Bitcoin protocol.
What does "caught on" mean? Show us the math, because you clearly can't be trusted to be truthful.
> And it turns out that Bitcoin's energy usage responds not to the transaction volume, but to the total available miner income: transaction fees plus total block rewards. Rewards still dominate. Driving the transaction volume up is at best not going to reduce them, but the bigger issue is giving the Bitcoin chain a reason to exist.
I don't see any problems with any of this.
You cannot use Lightning without using Bitcoin. And nobody is actually planning to change that so far as I know. I said that the "base system", which is Bitcoin, was what was using the power. I do expect that people reading technical discussions have some minimal knowledge of the systems involved.
> What does "caught on" mean? Show us the math, because you clearly can't be trusted to be truthful.
Bitcoin can do, charitably, six TPS, and there is massive community resistance to changing that.
It takes a minimum of two on-chain transactions to be able to use Lightning: one to get the Bitcoin to fund a channel (it is not legitimate to assume many people already have Bitcoin, because they don't), and a second to actually open the channel. In reality, anybody who used Lightning on a regular basis would also do multiple other on-chain transactions, to change the funding level, eventually to close the channel, probably to have multiple channels, and occasionally to lock in balances when counterparties misbehaved or were suspected of misbehaving.
But let's pretend it's just two. That means that, even if Lightning uses the entire capacity of the Bitcoin block chain, freezing out all other transactions. it can create at most three channels per second, worldwide.
According to Wikipedia, the New York Times has 9.9 million online subscribers. It would take 3.3 million seconds, (917 hours, 38 days) to onboard all the subscribers of that one Web site, if the Bitcoin chain were doing nothing else. And the fees would of course spike through the roof if that actually happened.
Now suppose this thing caught on to the level of, say, Instagram, which supposedly has 2.4 billion user accounts. I picked Instagram as an example of a "middling" platform, before I looked at any user numbers from any service. Let's be nice to you and say that people have three Instagram accounts apiece (they don't), but for some inexplicable reason each of them would only have one Lightning channel. Let's further say that only half of them would join "the micropayments system" (micropayments have no prayer of working if there are more than one or two systems with significant use). That's 400 million channels. Creating them would take 1543 days, or over four years, of the full capacity of the Bitcoin chain.
And, again, all of that is based on a bunch of rosy assumptions I made to rule out typical Bitcoin-lover objections. Ten times that would be more realistic.
This should be intuitively obvious to anybody who has even the slightest idea how Bitcoin and/or Lightning work.
Irrelevant to the fact that you used intentionally misleading language to massively overstate the potential energy/climate impact of using L402 built on Lightning.
> I do expect that people reading technical discussions have some minimal knowledge of the systems involved.
An intentionally unrealistic expectation. You know very well that just because a person is "technical" doesn't mean that they have a base level of understanding of every single technical system in existence, and you exploited that to mislead readers.
> And, again, all of that is based on a bunch of rosy assumptions I made to rule out typical Bitcoin-lover objections. Ten times that would be more realistic.
This, and all of the above, are arguments about the scalability of Bitcoin. Not the power consumption or climate impact. You've convinced me that Lightning is fundamentally not a scalable technology, but you've provided zero evidence that it'll have any significant climate impact, much less that the impact is meaningful relative to the provided value of having a distributed micropayment system that replaces the brainrot that is ads.
> This should be intuitively obvious to anybody who has even the slightest idea how Bitcoin and/or Lightning work.
Another intentionally unrealistic expectation. I have a decent understanding of Bitcoin, but no prior knowledge of Lightning, nor knowledge of transaction throughput limits or power consumption. This is not "slightest idea" knowledge, this is details that most people will not know.
YOU are the only one talking about coercion. Perhaps that says something about your mindset.
But OK. It turns out I'm not opposed to what you suggest. By all means, let's go ahead and raise carbon taxes high enough to drive emissions down low enough that we all parboil at least a bit later in the game. That should happen regardless of Bitcoin. We can start by raising them above their current median worldwide level of (checks notes) zero. This will, of course, involve overcoming the political obstacles that have kept them from catching on, but sure, great.
I haven't run any numbers, but I'm guessing that any meaningfully effective carbon tax is going to be higher than the Bitcoin block rewards you could get from the electricity the carbon represents... and that such a tax would drive the price of electricity in general up enough that Bitcoin fees would put even Lighting out of reach of most users.
In a sane, functioning market, that would kill Bitcoin, since there are cheaper and more effective alternatives. But I imagine it'd still stick around the way it always has, as a speculative vehicle for would-be rent seekers. Seems like there's no greatest fool out there in the Bitcoin market.
> Perhaps that says something about your mindset.
This is extremely inappropriate for HN and clearly against the guidelines. Please don't do it.
Artificially limiting the block size to try and push fees up as high as possible is simply not a good designe choice that was added long after Satoshi left.
Is Bitcoin inherently worth less than dollars? What about gold? Why?
I don't see how you can make currency valuable unless you pay something for it. So I don't see how dollars are environmentally more friendly than dollars. If that's your point.
As a matter of fact, most dollars are indeed created without "paying something for them". Out of thin air. They are just points in a database, no more real than the Bitcoins you say need to be "mined".
Curiously, this energy hunger is driving decentralization despite the otherwise inevitable benefits of scale.
There is no such thing as "wasted energy". The fact that cryptocurrency mining exists means there is load on the grid, which needs to be given supply. If that load/demand goes away, then the supply can be reduced or shutdown. I.e., if there is no demand the power would not be generated in the first place.
Your argument's basis is detached from reality: https://orientalnewsng.com/global-gas-flare-heightened-by-15...
Thankfully, there are market participants who are capturing this previously-wasted energy and putting it to use: https://hashrateindex.com/blog/flared-gas-bitcoin-mining-101...
And in 2022? In 20221?
How about the miners that are using coal plants?
* https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
* https://www.indystar.com/story/news/environment/2023/12/05/c...
Is that using "wasted energy"?
This makes the only acceptable energy for Bitcoin to morally use be self-generated, clean, and has no impact to you whatsoever. A failure to recognize this fundamental belief will always lead to you belaboring your point. The only thing I can leave you to think about is whether you truly believe Bitcoin is the biggest "waste" of energy for you, or why there aren't as many conversations about the consumption of the rest of the 99% of energy demand (the CBECI estimates Bitcoin took about 0.1% - 0.9% of global electrictity demand[1]).
There are two different points:
* Bitcoin is useful in some way
* Bitcoin 'soaks up' energy that would otherwise be "wasted"
In this thread I am saying there is no such thing as "wasted energy" (regardless of the pros and cons of Bitcoin).
And even if mining used only energy/electricity that would otherwise be "wasted", so what? If cryptocurrency mining was never invented in the first place, the energy production would be curtailed because it wouldn't be needed to begin with, and there would be no net loss.
So the production of some (unneeded) energy is curtailed, so what? Not needing energy in the first place is hardly a hardship on society (and the environment).
in previous crypto bull runs such statements would been censored
Bitcoin was hijacked and corrupted on purpose with injected hacks like "segwit" and rbf. So you are 100% right, BTC is broken and LN doesn't help.
But POW BITCOIN, as designed and built originally actually works fine at Visa-level scale while maintaining low fees. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) still functions as Bitcoin perfectly well, it just doesn't have the "crypto-bro" idiots pushing it as an investment.
Do you have a citation for this? The reported transaction figures are orders of magnitude smaller than VISA, and cost more.
Also the signature data has a lower “weight” now.
It also happens to have been a soft fork for Bitcoin where the block size was increased to roughly 4 MB.
Also isn't the signature part of the witness?
The objection to PoW is thinly veiled objection to tying it to physical value instead of policy. The objection would be the same for gold. What they object to is physical constraints on political authorities, and these sort of "bitcoin bad!" comments should not be admitted to spoil serious discourse.
The economic case for PoW is that it converts any source of energy anywhere in the solar system to transferrable stored value. It would make a lot of space based energy harvesting projects economically viable, but also remote hydro projects that can't transmit electricity long distances, but can absolutely provide compute as an economic service from long distances and make the a local hydro system economically viable. PoW tokenizes electricity via compute. It's a very elegant idea, and the opposite of environmentally unsustainable because it actually rationalizes the price of electricity with endogenous demand.
The same people objecting to bitcoin micropayments schemes also object to nuclear because it would actually solve the zero-sum problem narratives they want to sustain and manage. These views are not without controversy, and personally I reject them on principle.
If you had a source of power, you had to use it, either directly or indirectly, to make goods and services-- satisfy actual needs somewhere-- to exchange it for stored value. Your model cuts productive economic activity right out of the loop, Why would anyone bother using their hydro/solar/nuclear resources to run a factory when they can just use it to grind for Bitcoin directly?
Well, at least until the economy becomes so wrapped around this delusion that we end up with real-world scarcities, and all the Bitcoin in San Francisco won't buy you one taco.
I arch my back at trying to restore "physical value" to economic prominence. Fiat currencies are a socially progressive tool. It gives us the chance to decide as a civilization whether and how much to incentivize those who hoard, those who invest, and those who spend. Conversely, physical, undilutable wealth reassures only the existing wealthy, who can ossify their position with no fear of inflation undermining their treasuries.
75 years ago dubai was a bunch of tents, and it is now diversifying its economy in a very short time. the reason they would run a factory is because they need something to spend the revenue from the money they're exporting on. also, why do they need factories, it's pretty sustainable to just import everything and then leave no trace afterwards. anywhere with hydropower is a potential PoW mini-dubai, if perhaps a bit more godless.
the ossification critique reflects a scrooge mcduck understanding of wealth, where it assumes people sit atop a pile of it counting it or fill pools with it to swim and luxuriate in it, with no understaing of what capital is. the only scarcity in the world is freedom from fear and corruption to build, absolutely everything else is abundant.
I get that this is an typical perspective for the HN crowd, but "where do I sign up?" An aspirational goal of civilization is that we should be able to cooperate and efficiently distribute labour, so we aren't all spending all our time trying to outhustle each other. Public sector unions and planning committees seem a bit more interested in that goal than VCs and and startup devs.
Dubai is an interesting example. It's not just "we have to spend the money on something", it's "our entire economy has a best-by date, whether it's via the ooze running out, or just the march of renewables and EVs, so we'd better diversify while we can afford to."
Even assuming that transport is free and 1000% green, local manufacturing capacity is important just to ensure you have some control over your needs-- look at the shipping fracas in the Middle East, and ask what products you want on the far end of a 10,000km container-ship journey?
Perhaps Scrooge McDuck is an exaggerated model, but when I see "trillion dollar companies" next to "the middle class household is typically 2+ incomes these days", I'm not sure that taming 10% inflation is what really fixes the latter.
this exchange we are having reinforces that the objections to PoW and bitcoin are exclusively objections to free and counter-socialist economics, and as a category, their presumptions disqualify them from a basis in reality. if the problem is PoW is not socialist enough, it begs the question in regard to why it should be in the first place- implying it's not actually a thing.
if you model the world as a closed loop, zero-sum, finite redistribution problem, the 10k km container ship journey seems like a risk, but if you have money or something of value, you just hedge it and pick the next supplier.
in markets these are solved problems using futures contracts, and even when it crashes, nobody reverts to cannibalism. I can't say the same for planned economies[1]. Dubai, las vegas, the moon and mars will have similar economies based on currency production whether it's oil or gambling risk or bitcoin, they're the same kind of local resource-based economies.
To put this to rest, there is no niche HN worldview, like most of humanity does to get-by, people who post here generally make stuff. If it weren't it would be Comrade News, where people post about What Is To Be Done, sort of like tumblr and reddit, where nobody does anything and still mainly complains.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...
I'd like to clarify a few points and add some context to the discussion.
1) Protocol: While the current implementation of the L402 flow uses macaroons for credentials and Lightning invoices for challenges, the protocol itself is agnostic to these specifics. As long as the challenge has a verifiable "proof of completion" and a way to identify the credentials, the L402 flow can work with other types of credentials and challenges.
2) Micropayments: While L402 supports micropayments, it's not limited to them. At Fewsats, we use L402 for subscription-based services with standard SaaS payment amounts, issuing macaroons with 1-month expiration dates.
3) Multi-currency support: The Lightning Network currently uses Bitcoin, but with the introduction of Taproot Assets (also from Lightning Labs), it will natively support other currencies like stablecoins (USDt?)
4) Open Protocols: The Lightning Network and L402 are open, decentralized protocols that anyone can use and integrate without depending on any specific third party. There's no native token, ICO, or controlling company, making comparisons to bankrupt entities irrelevant.
5) Network health: The Lightning Network has been operational for years and continues to grow and evolve, with developments like L402 and Taproot Assets enhancing its capabilities and utility I would say it's future looks better than ever.
If I forgot anything feel free to as me in a comment.
I suspect you have answered your own question - historically cookies in the browser have been one way to identify and control what a user can access, I'm guessing authors have continued the small baked goods theme in naming their own access token.
Now, if I had to guess, this are "a new kind of cookies" so they just took a name that went with it (like they did with biscuits https://www.biscuitsec.org/)
There are many chances that they got he name wrong and they meant Macaron (with one O instead of two). Those are "layered" cookies, which bring some resemblance on how "caveats" can be understood.
https://github.com/lightning/bolts
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd
https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning
Can it go bankrupt? Yes
Can it be corrupted? Yes
Can it go down? Yes
https://www.reddit.com/r/lightningnetwork/comments/190orn6/c...
There are a ton of outstanding technical issues that lightning has had that have just kind of been glossed over for the past half-decade because people start companies, raise funding, build small fortunes and their success is predicated on pretending those fundamental technical issues don't exist.
Don't get me wrong, L2 has its own set of technical issues. The complexity of L2 is high, and some of the currently popular L2 chains are not decentralized at all. But it has much higher usage and popularity than Lightning, and is being pushed forward strongly by the Ethereum Foundation itself.
Because payments happen been pairs, there's no easy count of activity. The best estimates I know of are things like https://blog.river.com/the-lightning-network-in-2023/ which is almost 12 months old.
As to "no wallets support it", that's a strange thing to say, since lightning wallets support it, obviously.
I'm yet to see any comparable statistics in L2s on Ethereum? Was hoping you'd have something there, too :(
Lightening Labs, or whatever company owns, Lightning Network, should be able to pay for better quality shills I would think. Shame on a CEO like Elizabeth Stark for using poor innocent flobs like you to do their dirty work.
Lightning Labs is one of those companies, but they don’t own the protocol.
For example, https://acinq.co/, makes the Phoenix Wallet and Phoenixd, a node implementation that you can also run for yourself.
P.S: I feel you :)
Having created a micropayment network, you quickly discover that infrastructure does not exist where you want to use it. Web APIs are kind of the obvious use case, but because there was no micropayment system they trended to an account and batch payment method by necessity.
This aims to fill that infrastructure gap. Of course, there's a huge chicken-and-egg bootstrap problem, but you have to start somewhere!
E.g. Prior to L402, services needed to conglomerate into siloed ecosystems because there's the need for statefull authentication (Backend: Is this user who is requesting inferences allowed to run this query? How much credit account balance do they have remaining? You third party app have to integrate with me if you want to my users to be able to make calls to your module)
Post L402: A stateless service can compose a list of service calls (which all operate independently -- without the lack of competition, costs of integration, and politics of service<>module app ecosystem -- Read OpenAI etc) to potentially 100s of services to produce the broad number of API results needed fulfill the users request. Detailed explanation and examples are provided by the company who published the FOSS L402 spec here: https://youtu.be/6u1G8QIDuNU?t=206
That's the least of the problems.
The concept is that each user has a pre-purchased local store of some cryptocurrency. For some reason, they don't actually say that. Servers send an "invoice", with just enough info to get paid but not enough to identify what they're selling or who the seller is. An unconditional "pay invoice" function in the example charges however much the service wants to take. Bad idea.
Automated irrevocable transactions with anonymous parties. What could possibly go wrong?
There's a lot that's not mentioned.
- The server must have a connection to the payment network, and it has to get a success reply back before the transaction can proceed. This is happening within an HTTP transaction, so there's a time limit.
- This lacks atomic transactions. If the connection is broken after the payment is sent but before it is acknowledged, the money has been transferred but nothing was returned. The client doesn't know if the payment was made. This problem is common to all payment systems, and unwinding failed transactions is a part of payment systems that get used.
You can rate-limit (runes do this, which are simplified macaroons) but then the server is no longer stateless. Pretty sure I've ranted about this in HN comments before, could dig it out if you're interested?
Heres the inline:
See https://github.com/rustyrussell/runes for a simpler alternative and implementation (this has C and Python, but there's also a Rust implementation because why not?)
However, the "no db access" property has proven to be untenable in practice. Users end up wanting to see what runes are issued, blacklist them, know when they were last used, and have rate limits. The last two are a killer, requiring some state to be kept (unless your system allows you to return a modified rune to the user, which is a different workflow from normal bearer creds).
Most notably, content should be able to cite its sources and I should be able to verify that payment is being split and sent to those sources directly. Sending it all to whoever maintains the server and trusting them to pass it on to the right people feels like a recreation of exactly the problems that crypto micropayments were supposed to solve.
If I rehost some content, I should just be cutting into the server-owner's slice of the pie. Other contributors should get paid just the same. Otherwise you might as well just do paywalls like they currently do paywalls.
Imagine confirming an experimental result and adding a "replicated" annotation to the original such that all upstream citations that trust you can now have more confidence in the original result. Or imagine doing the opposite with misinformation.
I dream of a world where being trustworthy is the most profitable thing. How strange would that be?
No amount of smart contracts or bitcoin magic can prevent me from taking someone's work (say by web scraping), stripping all attribution of original author, putting it on my server, charging people for it, and pocketing all the money.
As with all accounting, participation of others is needed for it to be meaningful. It's no more of a fairy tale than intellectual property is in the first place, or money for that matter.
Creators want to get paid in local currency so they can pay their rent. They probably don't want to speculate in Bitcoin. They want their income to be stable and not vary based on Bitcoin prices. They can automatically convert Bitcoin but that adds an extra step.
Consumers also want to pay in local currency. They don't want the prices to vary with Bitcoin, or their wallet to lose value.
> Consumers also want to pay in local currency. Taproot Assets will bridge this.
In Fewsats for example the user prices the services and gets the payouts in $ by default.
> Consumers also want to pay in local currency
... which are often times different, so there has to be some kind of conversion step (not saying that it should be bitcoin).