News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by FreeHugs on Monday September 16, 2019 @04:12PM (#20988096)
It's crazy, that we still do not have something like "Cash" on the internet.

A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. To use a website or read an article.

That would make the world so much better for indie developers.

Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have. If users would pay directly, that would change.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by droffel on Monday September 16, 2019 @04:18PM (#20988156)
Monero (getmonero.org) has many of the properties of cash on the internet. Definitely more so than Bitcoin. It's surprising how few cryptocurrencies take privacy by default seriously.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by bloopernova on Monday September 16, 2019 @06:46PM (#20989330)
I honestly don't know anything about Monero. How does it compare to Stellar, which was recently on HN due to the Keybase airdrop giveaway?

(I hold a whole $40USD in Stellar, I do however think it's a good thing. But I think there's space on the net for more than a couple of cryptocurrencies so I'm curious about Monero)

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by noxer on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @05:05AM (#20993101)
Forget Monero it can't scale for micro payment. Currently it does like 1 Tx every few seconds. We can assume it could handle a few Tx per seconds. And with proper hardware upgrade it could probably handle some dozen Tx per second. Anyway all of that is far far away for usable if people want to do micro payments to websites they read.

Stellar is way faster the XRPL even more so (1500Tx/s) but even then it can not be used to stream money. You dot want to go to a site and instantly donate 0.001cent you want to donate only if the content is good and the best way to measure that is by time. Hence Coil steams the money as long as you are on the site. That only works trough ILP not direly on ledger (on-chain). IPL can stream money from any kind of wallet. So it would work with Monero as well but its unlikely to gain traction as its key feature (anonymous) is rather useless in this case. and Tx are slow and expensive compared to XLM or XRP.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by bloopernova on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @09:11AM (#20994572)
Thank you for the information. There's obviously a lot more I need to understand regarding crypto, but you helped :)
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by droffel on Monday September 16, 2019 @07:35PM (#20989610)
Monero is the largest privacy-focused cryptocurrency in existence right now, by pretty much every measurable metric. It's also the only (in the top 250 by market cap) cryptocurrency that enforces privacy at the protocol level, by default. You can read more about it at the website below.

https://web.getmonero.org/resources/about/

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by Aaronstotle on Monday September 16, 2019 @05:36PM (#20988815)
Yeah, I'd love to see more websites accept tips in XMR (and see the Monero economy grow overall)
[dead]
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by droffel on Monday September 16, 2019 @05:46PM (#20988891)
It's perfectly on topic here. I would hardly call this shilling.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by en-us on Monday September 16, 2019 @05:46PM (#20988892)
> A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so.

Pretty sure it solves that.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by mNovak on Monday September 16, 2019 @06:13PM (#20989069)
I thought XMR had high transaction fees?
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by boring_twenties on Monday September 16, 2019 @07:36PM (#20989617)
Transaction fees have been a fraction of a penny since the Bulletproofs upgrade in October 2018. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/monero-transactionfees....
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by droffel on Monday September 16, 2019 @06:17PM (#20989097)
Only if you consider $0.002-$0.006 per transaction high. The protocol has been significantly streamlined over the years.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by mrfusion on Monday September 16, 2019 @05:18PM (#20988674)
I mean just buying something without giving them your email or filling out a ton of fields would remove a ton of friction.

I could see myself paying 25 cents to read a NYT article right now as an impulse buy. But how does it even work right now. They’d probably ask for my email, phone, and address. Then I’d have to enter credit card details.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by noxer on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @05:12AM (#20993143)
You have to register at Coil.com You pay with CC or whatever you like to Coil. Your browsers streams money as soon as you visit a site that implements web monetization over IPL. The site doesn't need any info from you it has the address to stream to in the HTML of the site. So your payment is theoretically anonymous ofc the site can still see your IP, fingerprint your browser etc.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by d0gbread on Monday September 16, 2019 @08:45PM (#20990063)
Brave is doing exactly this with BAT on Ethereum but automating the whole thing. You can donate to any website, but you'll also auto-contribute if you choose to have that enabled.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by elcritch on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @04:11AM (#20992818)
I wish brave would just go for a plug-in approach, and partner with some news sites.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by rchaud on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @12:36PM (#20997182)
Major publishers are already in bed with Apple News, which is preinstalled on iPhones and iPads. Brave is my goto mobile browser, but it's slow on desktop and its market share is practically zero.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by elcritch on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @01:03PM (#20997474)
Yah been thinking about trying Apple news. Brave browser really isn’t taking off, that’s why plugins for chrome, Firefox, safari would be better.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by bloopernova on Monday September 16, 2019 @06:44PM (#20989304)
There's probably a different cryptocurrency for each user on HN, certainly enough for people to argue over until the end of time.

Perhaps it's as simple as this:

1) Make adding a box to pay a website in your crypto easier than adding google analytics or facebook share links.

2) Make buying small amount of your crypto easier than anyone else's crypto.

3) Give lots of your crypto away to as many folks as possible to put lots of it into circulation.

4) Provide easy ways for people to buy amazon and walmart gift certs with your crypto. (so web site operators can do something with the coins they receive)

Has anyone done step 1 yet?

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by julien on Monday September 16, 2019 @07:13PM (#20989493)
https://unlock-protocol.com ;) [disclaimer: I made this!]
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by r-w on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @01:37AM (#20991933)
This is really interesting! I was fascinated by the website, joined the Telegram group… and of course got kicked for not sending a message in 60 seconds. Is there any chance I could email you my username and be re-added?
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by julien on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @09:15AM (#20994631)
Sorry, our anti spam bot is wayyy too agressive. We removed it. Please join again (or email me [email protected]). Thanks!
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by bloopernova on Monday September 16, 2019 @07:43PM (#20989662)
OK, you win :) Nice job!
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by julien on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @09:15AM (#20994634)
Thanks ;p
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by greycrasan on Monday September 16, 2019 @04:16PM (#20988138)
Unfortunately the service that is free will always be more popular and ultimately win over more users. People have decided that paying with their privacy is better for them. I really wish paying 10 cents to use the service was the norm, but alas I doubt it will ever happen.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by toast0 on Monday September 16, 2019 @04:31PM (#20988267)
I suspect you're right that people will strongly prefer free over paid, but it's hard to know how many people would pay ten cents for something, because it's not feasible to charge that little. Paypal has a micropayment rate of 5% + five cents (USD), which means if you charge ten cents, you get maybe $0.0045. Plus, you have to do all the billing infrastructure etc.

The economics would be better with a stored balance system, but those are sketchy --- you'd need the balance holder to be someone you trust already; or a credit system where you pay once you've accrued enough content debt to make billing worthwhile, but that's going to be totally scammed.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by aesthesia on Monday September 16, 2019 @04:37PM (#20988312)
"Free" is also a very psychologically special price. Micropayments would make it easier to get over the energy barrier to paying for something, but it's still there. Laboratory experiments (and real-world experience) show that people value the difference between a price of 1 cent and 0 cents much more than the difference between 1 cent and 2 cents.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by cameronbrown on Monday September 16, 2019 @04:49PM (#20988450)
Which is why spreading £10 over thousands of websites is much easier to sell than £0.01 per article. With the later model people become paralised with choice, and the former model has been successful as the backbone for SMS/data infrastructure almost everywhere.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by sgc on Monday September 16, 2019 @07:19PM (#20989517)
It would be nice if there were a reciprocal subscription model. All subscribers to the NYT can also view articles of the LA Times or some other site, but reciprocal logins are tracked and funds are divided accordingly. That way, with some limits, each site could set their price, offer the bonus of visiting other sites, and there would not be the huge barrier to entry of requiring a massive player to aggregate things and wield power over publishers they don't want to accept. It's basically the model of reciprocal agreements used by the postal services around the world.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by rswail on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @04:07AM (#20992796)
It's also the model of internet peering, but it requires an even exchange otherwise the imbalances lead to failure.

As an example, the current dispute where the US is leaving the Universal Postal Union (a month from today) because the exchange is unbalanced due to e-commerce from/to China.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by rahidz on Monday September 16, 2019 @05:40PM (#20988842)
What about your ISP? You already pay them for Internet access, how about adding a "content charge" to that, then have some neutral organization disburse that cash (based on traffic? usage? evenly?) to individual websites who promise no third-party advertising, no tracking, etc.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by wutbrodo on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @11:53AM (#20996681)
> Paypal has a micropayment rate of 5% + five cents (USD), which means if you charge ten cents, you get maybe $0.0045.

You're off by a factor of ten here, it would be 4.5 cents, not half a cent.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by toast0 on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @12:41PM (#20997232)
I certainly am! Unfortunately, it's too late to edit to show what I meant.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by FreeHugs on Monday September 16, 2019 @04:25PM (#20988215)
Fine. Let Facebook be an order of magnitude more popular then my website. I would still be happy to have 240 million monthly users who pay me 10 cent.

Why would I care that FB has 2.4 Billion monthly users and squeezes more then 10cent out of them via ads? That's none of my business.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by manigandham on Monday September 16, 2019 @06:54PM (#20989379)
You can already do whatever you want on your own site, like a paywall instead of ads, so what’s the issue?
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by the8472 on Monday September 16, 2019 @05:28PM (#20988745)
Netflix&Co. are more expensive than bittorrent, and yet the former have gained significant market-share over the latter over the years.

If you want to compete with free you have to offer superior quality and convenience.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by xchaotic on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @03:08AM (#20992471)
And being legal has absolutely nothing to do with it?
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by the8472 on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @05:07AM (#21003491)
That's part of the convenience, no pesky letters.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by mcthrowaway123z on Monday September 16, 2019 @06:21PM (#20989133)
I don't understand why we don't pass a Terms-of-Use tax. Require every Terms agreement to be filed electronically with the state and the end-user to pay 10 cents for that service. I think we need to force their business model to be non-free, especially when they are making people agree to things that have a monetary cost either explicitly or externally.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by peteretep on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @02:53AM (#20992389)
> People have decided that paying with their privacy is better for them

The hell we have, there's just no alternative other than not using what have essentially become utilities at this point. I applaud people for whom not having Facebook and Google and WhatsApp is an option, but it's not for me.

I'd gladly pay a large chunk of cash to have those companies not be doing shady shit with my data and showing me adverts, but that's not an option available to me.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by bobajeff on Monday September 16, 2019 @05:44PM (#20988875)
People decided that paying nothing is better for them. I don't believe most people are even aware of the privacy implications or how that ties into the scheme of not paying anything. It's kind of like how most people don't really know the economics of Casinos.

Doesn't mean people don't value privacy. Just means that people don't value online services and content.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by whiddershins on Monday September 16, 2019 @05:04PM (#20988578)
That may not be true.

I don’t think it’s been well tested, and we should at least try giving people the benefit if the doubt before we give up, in my opinion.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by uncletammy on Monday September 16, 2019 @06:33PM (#20989216)
The answer to this was meant to be Bitcoin, hence the title of the whitepaper "Bitcoin: A peer to peer electronic cash system". Unfortunately there is a lot of money being spent to keep that goal from being realized.

If you really want to see "cash on the internet" I would advise you to do some research and find the cryptocurrency that best resembles it, then help build it. It will be an uphill battle the whole way.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by ilaksh on Monday September 16, 2019 @10:52PM (#20990848)
I think there are a lot of good candidates. Personally I am rooting for Ethereum. But Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Monero, are all good options. Even Bitcoin could be a good option but it seems like you said there are too many people working against that.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by tempsy on Monday September 16, 2019 @04:35PM (#20988294)
Well that is the whole premise of this grant.

Coil, the co-sponsor of this grant, is a company founded by the ex Ripple CTO and trying to do that.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by cpeterso on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @02:27AM (#20992237)
I think Twitter is missing out on a big opportunity for micropayments by letting users "tip" real money when favoriting tweets. Content creators would be incentivized to use Twitter more if they can make money directly from tweeting. More content from more content creators would also attract more users. Content stealing and reposting would be a bigger problem, but you can somewhat address it with text and image matching algorithms and user reports.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by PhilippGille on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @01:50PM (#20998062)
For Twitter there are bots for various cryptocurrencies which you can mention in an answer to a tweet, leading to the original tweeter's wallet being filled. Unfortunately most systems are not decentralized (custodial cryptocurrency wallets) and of course there's no consensus on using a single cryptocurrency.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by tastroder on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @03:03AM (#20992443)
> micropayments by letting users "tip" real money when favoriting tweets. Content creators would be incentivized to use Twitter more if they can make money directly from tweeting.

I'd honestly delete my Twitter account if they introduced that. Twitter as a social media channel is fine (to keep up with creator's content elsewhere and maybe the odd follow-up generated by that content) but there is zero content in my feed I'd be prepared to pay any money for (and that would still hold if it was longer form/mixed media).

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by UncleMeat on Monday September 16, 2019 @06:18PM (#20989101)
There's been dozens of these products. Some have even been supported by Google, Facebook, and Co.

Nobody uses them.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by xur17 on Monday September 16, 2019 @06:39PM (#20989266)
Can you give a few examples?
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by vkou on Monday September 16, 2019 @06:54PM (#20989384)
https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

The gp post is correct. When given the option between an ad, adblock, or tipping, people overwhelmingly choose option #1 or #2.

They then complain about ads, if they chose #1, and about adblock naggers, if they chose #2.

And, of course, all three sets of people lose their mind when they run into a paywall.

There is no non-legislative solution to this problem.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by iaml on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @09:51AM (#20995030)
Google contributor most likely was a failure because they didn't do anything about promoting it. I only learned about it on hn and after it was already dead.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by elcritch on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @04:17AM (#20992852)
Simple, paywall but provide an option to pay a reasonable price for an article, say $0.25 instead of tipping or ads. Of course NYT and all want a sleezy $5 subscription that’ll balloon to $30/mo in three months.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by meerita on Monday September 16, 2019 @05:20PM (#20988685)
I think indie developers shouldn't rely on advertising at all. It's like being adventurer and rely on carrots as food for adventure. You need to find the proper food to do adventure. Same with the developers. Indie developers must do software and provide a service or anything that is valued by a consumer. Anything else is just a waste of time.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by manigandham on Monday September 16, 2019 @06:51PM (#20989362)
Having ads doesn’t mean the context has no value. Otherwise why are you visiting any site with ads?
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by meerita on Monday September 16, 2019 @08:54PM (#20990109)
Indeed. But ads shouldn't be the reason you write software or write about software development.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by manigandham on Monday September 16, 2019 @09:30PM (#20990328)
Who’s doing that? And nobody needs to tell anyone else why they should or shouldn’t do something. Everyone can make their own way and living.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by meerita on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @05:08AM (#20993117)
Sure. I never put that power of choice. I was just stating my opinion. The market will regulate everything without us stopping others to keep doing things for ads.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by snthd on Monday September 16, 2019 @06:27PM (#20989174)
GNU Taler is a WIP for that.

https://taler.net

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by IngvarLynn on Monday September 16, 2019 @08:39PM (#20990021)
>Taler is a pure payment system, not a new crypto-currency. As such, it operates in a traditional banking context. In particular, this means that in order to receive funds via Taler, the merchant must have a regular bank account, and payments can be executed in ordinary currencies such as USD or EUR.

That implies high transaction costs to say the least.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by fhennig on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @08:37AM (#20994226)
Very interesting, thanks for posting.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by jedimastert on Monday September 16, 2019 @06:23PM (#20989152)
> Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have.

If you're referring to the cut AdSense takes out of ad revenue, it's about 30%

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by nine_k on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @08:07PM (#21001305)
Simple? Anonymous? Sounds like a perfect money laundering scheme.

All governments in the world hate cash in hands of citizens. It's hard to track. It can be used for tax evasion, buying illegal stuff, financing of undesirables, any transaction that a government would not approve of, but cannot easily learn about.

Many countries evict cash from daily use, either leaving it for small-scale purchases ("we only accept notes of $20 and below"), or even completely.

The chance of an anonymous online currency to appear is nonzero. The chance of it to be widespread, convenient, and not under constant legal scrutiny is epsilon, for it to last, epsilon squared.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by 205guy on Monday September 16, 2019 @07:15PM (#20989499)
My idea was just to have this integrated into your ISP bill.

I once thought that ISPs should pay for all content, then pass the bill onto users + costs-and-profit. I guess there would need to be separate standardized rates for video, audio, and text, but that creates a ton of regulatory and technical issues. Not the least of which is people don't want to pay. It would be like music licensing essentially, and look how that played out.

So just make it all voluntary like patreon, but integrated into my ISP billing, and give me an app/browser add-on to make payments and track my spending.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by jamesrcole on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @08:50AM (#20994362)
Say there are three people living together in a share house/unit, all sharing the one internet connection. There'd have to be a way to deal with cases like this.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by ryacko on Monday September 16, 2019 @09:43PM (#20990393)
Security issues. Ad fraud is already bad enough.

And small children paying a thousand dollars for an app does reach the news.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by aurbano on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @05:34AM (#20993256)
I started working on this exactly 2 weeks ago, so was pretty surprised to see this post by mozilla just now!

Essentially a very simple browser extension to tip websites, where you load some credit and it gets distributed as you browse (with more nuances obviously, but that is the main idea)

Even if it never amounts to anything it might at least inspire others to start similar projects until something better than ads appears!

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by Schoolmeister on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @06:17AM (#20993413)
Even though it isn't without controversy, Brave browser has this exact feature through use of its BAT token [1].

Basically, you earn BAT either by directly depositing money into your wallet, or by viewing "privacy respecting ads" (herein lies part of the controversy), which let you earn 70% of the ad revenue as BAT. These tokens are then distributed over the content creators who have signed up for the program. The exact distribution depends on how much attention you gave each creator.

[1] https://brave.com/brave-rewards/

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by ryacko on Monday September 16, 2019 @09:48PM (#20990417)
It exists: http://opentransactions.org/wiki/Main_Page

It is, like all crypto currencies, bottlenecked by the issue that it has to be exchanged for hard currency.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by Canada on Monday September 16, 2019 @05:27PM (#20988733)
Yes, if only the powers that be could let go of dictatorial control of our finances.

But that's just not the way it is. Nothing anonymous can be tolerated.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by donohoe on Monday September 16, 2019 @08:36PM (#20989998)
This has been attempted so many times and they all end in obscurity of failure.

Might be about timing. Maybe this time it could be different.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by BubRoss on Monday September 16, 2019 @04:15PM (#20988136)
Cryptocurrency can do this, but Bitcoin artificially keeps the blocksize to 1.6KB/s so people think that small transactions are not practical in a general sense, since they aren't practical there.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by FreeHugs on Monday September 16, 2019 @04:22PM (#20988184)
The throughoutput is only one of the problems. There are more:

1: You need to download and install software to use current cryptocurrencies. And users hate that.

2: Turning Fiat into Bitcoin and vica versa is not easy.

3: It is less private then cash.

4: Volatility of the value. Users would want something pegged to their currency of choice.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by cameronbrown on Monday September 16, 2019 @04:52PM (#20988484)
> You need to download and install software to use current cryptocurrencies. And users hate that.

People already trust companies with their money. If banks supported crypto natively the no-install/web app model works great. The last three points are rendered irrelevant here if banks are able to make the experience easy and guarantee some value.

Those who don't want the protection of a bank are trading off points 1/2/4 for point 3.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by lawn on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @04:54AM (#20993054)
> You need to download and install software to use current cryptocurrencies. And users hate that.

Users don't have a problem installing apps on their phone.

The rest are valid problems, with #2 and #4 being directly linked to low adoption.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by BubRoss on Monday September 16, 2019 @04:51PM (#20988475)
These aren't show stopping problems.

Web pages and browser extensions are pretty low barrier to entry.

Exchanging cost is not too bad, but probably the biggest hurdle still.

Privacy I don't think is a problem here. One random address to another is good enough for these type of transactions.

Pegging to another currency means centralization, though that is acceptable to plenty of people.

You said you wished there was a solution, all I'm saying is there is a clear path to how it could be done.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by stormtv on Monday September 16, 2019 @05:53PM (#20988941)
It wouldn't be the best user experience if you had to wait 10 minutes for confirmation. Also by increasing the size of the blocks you increase the orphan rate due to propagation delay which results in needing more confirmations before a transaction is considered truly immutable. Bitcoin has to have a fee market to incentivize miners so that as block rewards decrease the cost of securing the network doesn't shrink as well.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by lawn on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @04:49AM (#20993033)
You don't have to wait 10 minutes for a confirmation, especially not if we're talking about dollar amounts. Credit card transactions work exactly the same as 0-conf, and we seem to accept them just fine.

> Also by increasing the size of the blocks you increase the orphan rate due to propagation delay which results in needing more confirmations before a transaction is considered truly immutable.

Which happens at around 20 MB. Improvements like Graphene, Xthinner and blocktorrent will drastically reduce the orphan rate allowing for much bigger blocks to be propagated fast enough for the orphan rates to not climb in a relevant fashion.

> Bitcoin has to have a fee market to incentivize miners so that as block rewards decrease the cost of securing the network doesn't shrink as well.

Or Bitcoin needs many more lower fee transactions to compensate. In a couple of decades.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by BubRoss on Monday September 16, 2019 @10:09PM (#20990553)
Bitcoin is never going to solve anyone's problems now. The people who have taken it over have relegated it to a lesson in what not to do. Shorter block times are not a problem and neither are much larger block sizes, both of these things have been proven by other currencies.
Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by pelasgian on Monday September 16, 2019 @05:22PM (#20988700)
I've never had an issue sending small amounts using Bitcoin Cash which has increased the blocksize limit. The guy who took over after Satoshi left also says that Bitcoin Cash is what he was working on for what it's worth. https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/929377620000681984?...

Cash Shuffle and Cash Fusion will also provide the privacy needed for users to safely enjoy Bitcoin Cash.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by mrlala on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @11:26AM (#20996303)
I'm not going to pay for every stupid little thing I do on the internet. And I'm sure there have been attempts at stuff like this, but who really wants this?

I can see it now.. every link I click on here or reddit I have to pay $0.05 to read. Yeah, no thanks. Suddenly the most upvoted things will be ones that people promote to make money on etc.

I already have to pay for every damn thing when I leave my house.. when I'm at my house browsing the internet I would really like to not have to constantly be mindfucked with small purchases every moment.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by wutbrodo on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @12:09PM (#20996874)
> when I'm at my house browsing the internet I would really like to not have to constantly be mindfucked with small purchases every moment.

Do you feel this way about using the toaster, shower, every light switch, turning on the TV, marginal usage of rechargeable electronics, etc? You already make "micropayments" for a million tiny, less-discrete usages of electricity, but have learned to adapt to only getting feedback and adjusting usage at a monthly cadence. Why do you assume this couldn't also be the case for Internet usage?

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by arcturus17 on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @11:39AM (#20996498)
I don't know if I would mind so much donating, say, $20 / month worth of microtransactions to content I really enjoy...

The problem would be the friction of deciding what I reward and what I don't. I don't want to make 200 decisions like that every month in my day to day browsing.

If you bundle it, then it's basically just a subscription (I already pay for, say, the Atlantic).

If you let an algorithm decide for you, then it probably becomes a shitshow.

Maybe there's a genius idea to solve this massive UX problem but I certainly don't see it.

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by mrlala on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @11:46AM (#20996593)
>The problem would be the friction of deciding what I reward and what I don't. I don't want to make 200 decisions like that every month in my day to day browsing.

Yeah that is exactly the problem. It would be like having an ala-carte TV cable where you were charged every time you turned on the TV to watch a certain show. I just wouldn't do it.