How to make a mint: The cryptography of anonymous electronic cash
jya.com
jya.com
I think there's a lot than can be done in this field - not with micropayments, which everybody seems to think about first when they see this. What I find a lot more interesting is the possibility of many competing Internet currencies not tied to any national one.
How about turning HN karma into a currency? Probably no mass-market appeal... what's lacking is a killer application for digital money and when it comes, it'll probably be in a form that doesn't seem like money to us now.
Would you also find it interesting to be indicted for money laundering? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/e-gold/
Take Youtube, for instance: people go to considerable lengths to create videos that others find interesting. Then they sit glued to the screen watching the view counter go up. There's a currency: people paying with their time (which everybody only has a fixed amount of) for someone's work creating videos.
Now have some ISP give extra bandwidth to people with Youtube videos over x thousand views. It doesn't cost them much "real" money since bandwidth is more or less a fixed cost but you have turned "virtual" money into a currency.
Granted, the example is a bit contrived but you can see where I'm going with this.
I don't know if transferable coupons redeemable for in-kind services would meet that same test, or surely Blizzard would have been prosecuted over tolerating real-money-trading in World of Warcraft assets.
Strangely enough I had a dream the other night where I was going to a HN meet with my friend (next SF one will be early September, BTW - and I owe 2 people coffee and didn't email them yet...sorry!) and when I got there, there was a vending machine where you could exchange your karma for everything from pants (?) to programming books.
I woke up laughing because this was so obviously stupid, but then I started to consider that if HN was a more conventional site with advertisers and sponsors, rewarding the higher-ranked posts and users with discounts from the merchant sponsors would actually make perfect sense. It's very obvious on a lot of niche forums who the community leaders are, and how much they influence the thinking (and often purchasing decisions) of others.
Seriously, it's just an informal get-together that seems to take place about once every 6 weeks at a cooperative bar where people can drink beer and network a bit. The last one seemed to go off well so electronslave and I were thinking to have it at the same place. It's not a secret, I'll post it here the week before and day of.
(digital gold currency magazine)
Very, very interesting stuff.
It would be a viable alternative to the ad supported model.
Most websites operate on very small fractions of a cent per pageview, you would have to have an extremely low overhead to make it work.
Say you pay a monthly subscription to the payment service provider, they then do all the bookkeeping based on a .js tag that is embedded on the page that you visit.
If you don't have an account the .js redirects you to the signup page for the payments service provider, you register, pay your initial fee and continue to browse.
You might even end up saving online newspapers in the process.
I would easily spend 5 or 10 cents to read an interesting article, multiple times per day, especially a well written article from the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.
A much better point against JS would have been about XSS or similar. Yes, that's still a real risk, but incidents seem to be on the decline as it's become standard web developer practise to guard against it. And that's only ever a single-site vulnerability, not the local-machine arbitrary-code-execution exploit you seemed to allude to.
But even if I am confused about all that, I'm certainly not wrong about the numbers - it's about 5% IIRC, and going down. JS is here to stay, is becoming a necessity on many sites, and everyone's just going to have to deal with that.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but "of course you don't." If you did, you would change your opinion.
* I think the majority of people who browse with JS deliberately turned off are misinformed*
Even if so, they are the same so-called 'paranoid' people to whom a secure (and hopefully anonymous) micropayment platform appeals.
And even if I am confused about that I'm certainly not wrong about the numbers, they're minute.
What is important is not absolute numbers. I reckon that school teachers comprise a minute portion of all web surfers. I doubt that Patrick would use this as a reason to exclude such from his Bingo Card Creator site.
I consider myself to be super-paranoid and would welcome with open arms a proper cryptographically secure internet payment system.
You would think that one could generalize this.
I've done my dues in network admin and I can assure you that informed users like yourself are in the minority. I've only ever known a couple of people who turned off JS as a matter of course and they did so for all the wrong reasons, as I mentioned above. I am sure you can imagine the type of "power user" I am talking about.
Anyone who is actually informed about these security issues tends to mitigate them behaviourally. It's like antivirus. Most of the clued-up tech people I know do not constantly run antivirus software; they don't need to because they never take any action which might lead to virus infection. They might scan once a week or month or something.
It's the same with JS, IMO - if you know about the real issues with it, you also know how to avoid them, and you wouldn't ham-fistedly cripple the rest of your browsing experience in the process.
I don't think anyone was making a point against JavaScript in terms of vulnerabilities in the JavaScript interpreter itself. If you read the statement to which you reply, you might notice that the parent comment referred to people wanting to avoid execution of code from the Internet on the machine -- not about whether JavaScript is itself directly vulnerable.
> the local-machine arbitrary-code-execution exploit you seemed to allude to.
I didn't get that impression at all.
Sorry - as mentioned in my other reply at this level, I really was imagining a certain type of person (in fact, a certain person) as I typed that, and kind of went off on my own.
Still:
"you might notice that the parent comment referred to people wanting to avoid execution of code from the Internet on the machine"
I maintain this is a largely irrational fear. The very phrase "execution of code" is very blurry when it comes to the web browser. And one hitherto unknown bug in an image or (closed source) PDF library and you're "executing code from the internet" too, and at a far more dangerous level of access than anything inside the JS sandbox.
I don't think the remaining 3% are going to be the ones to make or break such an application.
Try using facebook, youtube or any other number of sites with flash, java and javascript shut off.
Actually, I do visit those sites without Flash automatically playing in my browser. In fact, I use a script to download YouTube videos and play them locally with a media player. I'm not sure what Java has to do with being able to use Facebook or YouTube at all.
JavaScript is pretty ubiquitous, but stuff like Google Maps still degrades usably for those who aren't using JavaScript (for instance), as do the sites and Web applications I design.
I think that explicitly throwing away 3% of your potential users is pretty short-sighted, especially when it's for something as lame as "Well, they don't use JavaScript, and I could do this stuff with other technologies too." I wonder why people don't think of, for instance, the blind using screen readers when they utter platitudes about how the 3% don't matter.
How about something like Amazon Turk? Except you don't get paid in cash, you get paid in points. All points had to have been generated by somebody doing a small, useful service for somebody else.