Perhaps a Gratipay, or Flattr link?
edit: speeling
edit: thought Flattr was dead -_-
* Let me (in whatever guise, publisher, consumer, etc.) have an account that I can deposit/withdraw real world money into. Charge me a fee (percentage/fixed/minimum/maximum/whatever the market is willing to pay) for these operations.
* Let anyone transfer any amount of money (OK, impose some granularity, but make it like 20 decimal places, that's fine) from their account to another. Do all the right security stuff that we already do for this kind of thing to ensure no abuse.
* If the cost of transfers exceeds the income from deposit/withdrawals, charge some additional fee on a certain number of transfers, or charge a percentage on every $x transferred, or whatever it takes, so long as micropayments are still possible.
Now sit back and count the profit.
How is this not a solved problem yet?
You would probably need a money transmitter license, which is hugely expensive and time-consuming. You will have to Know Your Customer to comply with anti money laundering regulations.
Basically you idea is to setup a bank and make transfers between customers free, which some banks already do, though not to 20 decimal places :-)
As a consumer, my choice is to now sign up for this tipping service, give them my identity, deposit some money, and then I can go tip a website $0.001 for a cat video. So now my identity and some of my money are tied up with the service.
Bitcoin seems more appealing than that scenario.
> How is this not a solved problem yet?
Because the State controls the banking industry.
Call it AdPoints, you can buy 1000 AdPoints for $10. Then you spend these points in websites you enjoy.
Add an API so they can be used as a virtual currency for goodwill (I liked this guy's post / comments, so I'll upvote him with my points) in those same third party sites.
Get a couple big publishers on board and it could become a pretty good deal.
You handle point purchase and deliver payouts to your publisher partners, add a reporting function to the API so they can overlay the revenue of adblock users vs non-adblock.
Scenario:
1) Criminal outfit buys 100M AdPoints with dirty money
2) "Trusted parties" setup blogs and YouTube channels and has them get setup with the "publisher partners"
3) Criminal outfit "tips" innocuous quantities of money for cat videos and blog posts about gardening made by the "trusted parties"
4) "Trusted parties" cash out squeaky clean money
> deliver payouts to your publisher partners
Each partner would have to do the KYC/AML work for each content creator, but if they don't do it for donation sources, then you have the potential money laundering channel so the State will get involved.
In a real world scenario, you wouldn't even allow new partner sites to sign up online, instead you'd contact most of them via direct sales and vice versa.
I'm thinking about the NYTs and Yahoos of the world, not cat blogs.
I see your point, but this is more like buying world of warcraft currency than it is a bank.
Bitcoin is not fundamentally different. It decentralizes the role of the bank, but adds the step of currency exchange to get bitcoins in the first place. These currency exchanges have to comply with anti-money-laundring regulations that are very similar to those of banks, so they have to know your identity too.
The only advantage bitcoin currently has is that not all governments have gotten around to figuring out which existing regulations apply to bitcoin related businesses.
Also, there a plenty of governments that have placed Bitcoin squarely within the regulatory framework already.
Any solution which would require the visitor to pre-fund an account, no matter how small of an amount, is destined to fail.
But I'll be damned if I'm going to pay $455 per year to read all them on any of my devices: http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.htm...
Cameron Schorg here with SnipBit. We are currently creating a platform exactly like what you are describing. Users would have a browser extension that allows them to pay for articles with one click and browse the web a la carte style -essentially solving the subscription problem and the annoyance of the paywalls themselves. You should definitely check us out at www.snipbit.io . In addition, i would love to have a longer chat with you to better understand our user base. If you would be willing, please reach out to me at [email protected]!
Edit: Before you mention that trustfree doesn't exist in the lexicon, i will point out to you that the concept of a trustfree anything also hasn't existed, but now does, through bitcoin. :)
Name something shady (and true) about coinbase.
You may not like or agree with the reasoning, but I guarantee you that a lot of normal, non-tech people are going to be thinking like that.
This is also in addition to the fact that I just don't want to make another money account. Especially for something I'm probably not going to use outside of this.
Ergo decedo ad hominem
> You may not like or agree with the reasoning
I don't dislike or disagree your reasoning, objectively speaking, your reasoning is a common logical fallacy.
I like your approach of looking at a technology and asking "who's going to get rich off of this". That can reveal a lot about certain actors motivations and behaviors.
With bitcoin, if adoption is high that means there's a lot of value in the network and the technology. Increasing the wealth of a bunch of early adopters (who supported the network/technology when it was vital to do so), seems to me to be a feature, not a bug. You can further concentrate wealth among a select group of venture capitalists (who typically benefit from valuable innovations), or you can more randomly distribute it to early adopters.
There is some value in it, however as I stated, these people really didn't do anything to warrant the unreasonable amount of gain they have or will have. A better system can exist where this unreasonable distribution doesn't occur. Bitcoin in its current form isn't the only possible version, so why not compare it and break it down into "oh, well there is high adoption so there's enough value that we should look the other way and ignore better ways where value is even higher for even more people - or even everyone."
It sounds like you're dismissing the innovations around bitcoin over a broader grievance against speculation.
A few more points on this:
1) They risked their money. I agree that sometimes a very high return seems unfair/unwarranted (again, true of speculation in general).
2) Many people holding a lot of bitcoin (e.g. the Winklevii) are working very hard towards bitcoin's success. They believe in the technology. If that turns them into billionaires, I don't see that as any more unreasonable than Facebook billionaires. Aside from those who are working hard, with any technology/startup there are usually some "passive" investors that hit pay dirt. Would you cap Mark Zuckerberg's upside since there must have been some people invested in, or employed by, Facebook that really didn't do anything, yet made quite a bit of money? Who's going to decide what's reasonable?
3) Let the market decide. There are competing alternatives, let's see what happens. If enough people are outraged by the thought of a few bitcoin speculators making billions, then perhaps that could kill it. I'm guessing that kind of broad dislike for speculators would lead to less speculative ventures, which doesn't sound good for innovation.
Not true. Miners helped secure the network (and were rewarded with more bitcoins for doing so due to the mining difficulty) when bitcoin was brand new and vulnerable to attacks. It sounds like you haven't read much about how bitcoin works.
Why?
"You can further concentrate wealth among a select group of venture capitalists (who typically benefit from valuable innovations), or you can more randomly distribute it to early adopters"
Circular comment thread is circular:
> Increasing the wealth of a bunch of early adopters (who supported the network/technology when it was vital to do so)
Additionally, if you're just thinking of bitcoin as a currency, and not a global social paradigm shift, I think you're missing the point.
You can issue your own currency on top of the Bitcoin blockchain— among the other myriad uses.
This is about emancipation even more than enrichment.
Bitcoin is not a global paradigm shift; it's an interesting technical novelty with some niche use cases. The never-ending hyperbolic glorification of bitcoin is a great way to foment the idea that bitcoin isn't worth taking seriously.
> This is about emancipation even more than enrichment.
Why can't a global social paradigm shift occur in a different way? It's the current structure of Bitcoin, not the other values that it does provide. If it didn't provide those other potentials then it would of had a much more difficult time taking off and getting adoption from anyone.
It's probably a nifty technology. Stop talking about it like it's the second coming of Jesus.