Re:You can bypass YouTube ads by adding a dot after the domain
by danShumway on Wednesday June 10, 2020 @05:07PM
(#23482130)
So many problems on the web at least partially stem from the fact that we have still not come up with a fundamentally good way to move money around digitally. There is no equivalent to cash on the web.
- The amount of hoops we jump through to get around the problem that credit card numbers are fundamentally insecure is absurd. Transactions can be arbitrarily canceled up to a month after they happen, and platforms like Paypal will then happily charge you an extra fee for the privilege of reversing the payment.
- Bitcoin was also obviously a dumpster fire in this regard. It's not clear Bitcoin was ever going to be anything but a dumpster fire; the transaction fees were always going to make it terrible for micropayments, and they were baked into the design pretty early.
- GNU Tailor has been occasionally making the rounds for years, but I don't see any kind of timeline for getting real banks to adopt it.
It's a difficult problem.
But I suspect a truly decent micropayments system that didn't suffer from all of the privacy/gatekeeping/transaction-fee problems of credit cards and Paypal would fundamentally change the web.
- The amount of hoops we jump through to get around the problem that credit card numbers are fundamentally insecure is absurd. Transactions can be arbitrarily canceled up to a month after they happen, and platforms like Paypal will then happily charge you an extra fee for the privilege of reversing the payment.
- Bitcoin was also obviously a dumpster fire in this regard. It's not clear Bitcoin was ever going to be anything but a dumpster fire; the transaction fees were always going to make it terrible for micropayments, and they were baked into the design pretty early.
- GNU Tailor has been occasionally making the rounds for years, but I don't see any kind of timeline for getting real banks to adopt it.
It's a difficult problem.
But I suspect a truly decent micropayments system that didn't suffer from all of the privacy/gatekeeping/transaction-fee problems of credit cards and Paypal would fundamentally change the web.