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Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

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Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#21

Post by at_a_remove »

The Internet as we know it was built on the back of someone else's free.

I am older than most of the crew here and can remember when the majority of the telnetting and IRCing we did was against .edu domains, using the disk space of a Sparc 1, sucking up someone else's bandwidth. In February of 1993, someone very much like Don Draper woke, inexplicably but smiling, with the first morning erection in years as the tag was invented; banner ads slouched towards CERN to be born. NetZero told us that the Internet should be free. Email, free of expensive stamps, flew 'round the world. And Advertisers and Spammers and the Attention Economy held illimitable dominion over all.

We have paid an enormous price for the "free" Internet and that price has been hidden from us through layers of affiliates and misdirection and double-Irish. Rudderless algorithms decide whether your fame career has any kind of money associated with it and for precisely how long. When the axe descends, the only sentence can be "You have violated the ToS."

I am not sure what the alternative would look like, but for anyone with complaints about the current situation, it is important to examine just how we got here.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#22

Post by thevardanian »

egypturnash wrote: post #14

Thanks, I hate everything about this future internet. Let's just have a world where every single Internet transaction involves burning absurd amounts of energy to perform proof-of-work. It'll be great. Yes, sure, sure, ETH is trying to move to something else less absurdly wasteful, get back to me when that's not being pushed back on by miners who're pissed they'll make less money if that happens. Not only memes but i…

The differentiating factor here will ultimately be about quantifying how much energy is spent, and therefore how "official" such an interaction is. Less energy = very unofficial, a lot of energy = very official. This has a lot of implications, but also makes the quality of data much more apparent and therefore allows markets to openly buy and sell on such metrics. This is already done, but very opaquely and you're not being paid for it. In other words we're already burning energy to verify the quality of data in one form or another.

As an aside this also reflects how money is now arriving at a point where it's more closely reflecting its nature as a measure of stored energy. This also has interesting implications for organization, and how money is spent.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#24

Post by potiuper »

reilly3000 wrote: post #20
egypturnash wrote: post #14

Thanks, I hate everything about this future internet. Let's just have a world where every single Internet transaction involves burning absurd amounts of energy to perform proof-of-work. It'll be great. Yes, sure, sure, ETH is trying to move to something else less absurdly wasteful, get back to me when that's not being pushed back on by miners who're pissed they'll make less money if that happens. Not only memes but i…

Why not proof of stake?

PoS is drastically cheaper to do a 51% attack than PoW as the attack only costs the 51% cost of carry and insignificant transaction fees to enter and leave the position compared to having to organize the purchase of and rental fee for 51% of the hash rate for the target block time.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#25

Post by chriselles »

What I would find useful is a tool that accurately overlays what my attention & time costs & earns me.

That would effectively convert every device/internet interaction into an individualised financial transaction which is not necessarily a good thing.

But many people budget poorly when it comes to finances, and many people budget worse when it comes to attention and time.

I fear a THX1138-like future, but in many respects we are already living it, but we aren’t able to easily enough take advantage of it.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#26

Post by db48x »

somebodythere wrote: post #18
dannyw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't that decades ago? Times change and sometimes ideas are too new for its times.

I can't imagine the situation has gotten better. How many pieces of web content does a person view in a typical day? 50? 100? Imagine making fifty purchase decisions every day. I think anyone would be exhausted.

Well, to be fair, Ted Nelson designed Xanadu so that everything would be automatic. The design called for everyone to have a single verified identity linked to their payment information, and they could both make and receive payments with automatically. If you copied and pasted (or transcluded, rather) content from one document to another, the authorship information would go with it (assuming that nobody cheated), and your viewers would pay both you and that other author when they viewed the resulting document.

I don’t think it would really work, but it wouldn’t be exhausting either. You wouldn’t have to put in your credit card number and address every time you viewed a document.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#27

Post by austincheney »

The ideas expressed in this article should be applied to government. Everything in government should be a financial transaction. I should be able to see a list of what my federal income tax dollars pay for as a percentage of my tax contributions down to the 0.1% mark. Those assessments should be based on the real money government pays not the estimated funds that float around a bill or a budget.

My thinking is that if people actually saw what they are paying for they would advocate for different policies because it feels great to spend other peoples’ money from some magical endless pool of money on programs that at the surface make us feel good.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#28

Post by scarmig »

austincheney wrote: post #27

The ideas expressed in this article should be applied to government. Everything in government should be a financial transaction. I should be able to see a list of what my federal income tax dollars pay for as a percentage of my tax contributions down to the 0.1% mark. Those assessments should be based on the real money government pays not the estimated funds that float around a bill or a budget. My thinking is that i…

Realistically, large numbers of people pay little to no tax, and so the amount they "pay" for every service will be small, if not zero or negative.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#29

Post by Animats »

dannyw wrote: post #7
Animats wrote: post #3

This was part of the Xanadu dream. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. Turned out there was no real market for that.

Wasn't that decades ago? Times change and sometimes ideas are too new for its times.

About a decade ago, there was considerable interest in being able to charge content to your cell phone account. Some of that happened, but it never became a big thing, especially once cell phones went flat-rate.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#30

Post by austincheney »

scarmig wrote: post #28
austincheney wrote: post #27

The ideas expressed in this article should be applied to government. Everything in government should be a financial transaction. I should be able to see a list of what my federal income tax dollars pay for as a percentage of my tax contributions down to the 0.1% mark. Those assessments should be based on the real money government pays not the estimated funds that float around a bill or a budget. My thinking is that i…

Realistically, large numbers of people pay little to no tax, and so the amount they "pay" for every service will be small, if not zero or negative.

I have unpopular opinions about that as well.
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