It means there's an easy way to "pay" for "premium" content in very small forms. Like "here's 15 cents for letting me read this article." No ads, no subscription and sending all your personal info, no email spam. I think if it works, it will change everything.

Here's an interesting article from 2003 about microtransactions that argues the main issue is actually mental burden of paying for hundreds of tiny things every day, ie. "mental transaction costs". https://web.archive.org/web/20031202032448/http://www.shirky...

The concept seems to first appear in Nick Szabo's paper in 1999:

https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-...

Things like Brave's Basic Attention Token seem to solve this problem in the sense that it's completely automatic based on the amount of time spent on each site. But then you have to use Brave, and you have to use BAT...

In my case, most of the money would go to YouTube, Reddit and HN. (I think Brave actually has a way to send the money to individual creators on a site rather than to the site itself. But I haven't used it personally.)

There is no reason for that to be baked into the browser. That can absolutely be a cross-browser/platform layer that won't need to worry about dying as a walled garden with no visitors.

Lightning Network and Bitcoin are inherently interoperable.

Just because one browser bakes it in, it doesn't mean the resources created are limited to being accessed through that browser.

I agree with you for the end product, but it seems like a fine idea to push integration as far as you can in the alpha phase to see what's necessary.

The cost for the average Bitcoin transaction is a lot higher than 15 cents. And likely to go higher as transaction fees make a higher and higher portion of miners' reward. The power use involved in mining "coin" does not simply pay for itself.

Lightning mitigates high transaction fees by pooling.

I agree with long term concerns as block rewards decrease, though, which is why I prefer Monero’s tail emission to Bitcoin’s model.

Part of the brilliance of block rewards is it actually does pay for itself. Miners are rewarded for their efforts, and the reward amount varies based on the needs of the network.

At least that’s been true for the past decade, prior to getting towards the supply cap. It’ll be extremely interesting to see how miners behave as the rewards decrease in reality vs in theory. My personal belief is that the lack of tail emission and resultant price increase will keep bitcoin alive indefinitely, but make it more and more static overtime, even with stuff like lightning, and turn it into a kind of reserve note. This is not a novel theory and is what many are seeing happening.

I’m most bullish on Monero long term/think it’s extremely under-appreciated as a viable means for the mind of decentralized uncensorable micro-transactions people in the space all fantasize about.

no not for lightning network. fees right now are 1 Satoshi or about $0.04 USD.

1 Satoshi today is well under $0.01 USD. Maybe you meant $0.004 USD?

it’s actually worth $0.0004 USD or 0.04 cents

whoops, yes sorry, percent conversion error. 0.04 cents

I feel like this is overly idealistic, it will be $1.99 with ads and personal info harvesting and spam. Why wouldn’t you?

I'm sure some will want to do that, sure. Especially the marketing driven blogs/sites.

But they'll be competing against people that don't do that, so unless their content is really really good and unique, they'll lose in the market and either adapt or die. Maybe some mega celebrities could pull that off, but it would be pretty rare.

I mean, they could easily be doing that right now. $1.99 is high enough that the problem of micro payments isn't really a problem at that price. But they don't because it would be a terrible strategy...

> But they'll be competing against people that don't do that,

That's already the case, yet there is no way to escape. We need to go back to browsers that don't take over our computer (harvest personal info etc).

> That's already the case

How is anybody accepting micro payments currently? What technology do they use?

The closest thing to micropayments deployed at scale right now seems to be youtube superchats, which use traditional banking stuff.

I believe there are people creating micropayment superchat like systems for crypto, but its difficult when its not integrated into the browser/not integrated into content as well as it is with youtube.

Brave has a pretty cool tipping feature that I’ve used a handful of times, but it’s not integrated into the user experience in a way that people actually use/very few people seem to know about it or use it.

I don't mean micropayments, I mean we have an ad infested surveillance web competing with an informative web, but because of how browsers work, the mere presence of informative sites doesn't much help escaping from the ads and surveillance. The problem is browsers enabling the surveillance and we should back away from that. Gemini had the right motivation, but made what I'd call newbie errors. I'd rather have something about like HTML3.

Aperture[1] is an http 402 reverse proxy that implements the LSAT[2] protocol. It’s already used in production but not yet well known.

I’m curious to know how it could be more widely adopted. Maybe a Flask integration? Other ideas?

1: https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture

2: https://lsat.tech

uhm, to pay for things without using your credit card?

I remember when web3 used to mean opposing the de facto requirement to pay for the information. This goes against my principles.

I totally disagree. When you visit a website, you're imposing a cost on the website owner because they have to pay for bandwidth and servers to process your request. In my view, crypto has always been about incentive alignment. Filecoin doesn't really work, but their idea was that when requesting a file a small fee to you pay the person who serves it to you. Overall this makes more sense to me than having some guy pay to host the file himself and hope that he decides to keep doing that until the end of time.

Who creates/curates the information? They gotta eat...

Not everything has to be commercial. And in fact, most of the good stuff — e.g. HN comments — are not commercial.

I don’t mind paying for certain things, but the crypto trend is very much pay to play.

> Not everything has to be commercial.

HN comments aren't free to host though. There is compute involved. How are they paying for that compute?

If it is out of boredom and good will, that's cool. But I very much am keeping that in mind when I comment here. I don't expect a hobby site to stay up long term because they'll just shut it down when it stops being fun.

If HN is paying for this from advertisements and job postings, well there is your answer. It is commercial.

Any way you want to stretch it, HN is not pay-to-play.

I am not against commerce; I am against a pay-to-play internet.

You can’t get around the fact that HN is pay to play too though. that is my point.

You aren’t paying a fraction of a cent to post comments, but you’re paying in other ways. You just prefer the business model of HN, but i find the fraction of a cent model to be more straightforward and clear.

You can't win this argument, hackernews isn't "pay to play". You are currently playing with it and you didn't pay even a microtransaction. Why do you keep saying it is pay to play? For whatever reason HN providers are doing it as a free service and you aren't paying anything.

HN sells me as their audience to advertisers right?

Would you say that Youtube is “free” as well?

Many people would simply prefer a more transparent / straight forward business model and I don’t think they are wrong for having that preference.

You either don't know what "pay to play" means, or you're being disingenuous.

Have you heard the phrase “time is money”?

I would say that Youtube is pay to play as well. You’re just paying with your attention to their advertisers.

I don’t think this logic is misplaced. HN has the same business model as all “free” tech platforms, doesn’t it?

http 402: payment required

You shouldn’t necessarily want it built into the browser but you might want it built into the internet so that you can avoid the layers of fees, commissions and surveillance capitalism.

For better or worse, for most people the browser is the internet right now.