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

reallifemag.com

31–40 of 183 posts

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

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then maybe crypto isn't actually a feasible technology. Just because people get a dopamine hit from the money they make off it doesn't mean it's good for society when your burning energy the size of a small country to do sub par amounts of transactions per minute.

I've seen crypto be used largely for flash money grabs and little else since the entire thing started and I'm largely convinced that until volatility, speed and energy consumption are fixed it will only remain in that realm until it's inevitably cracked down on by various governments.

Those are some pretty big issues to solve and personally I think ETH is poised with PoS to solve those issues, or so I've been led to believe, and offer utility in those every day transactions but I'm not holding my breath because of issues like that that you've pointed out and people who only view it to be used for that aforementioned money grabs.

When I've used crypto I've used ETH exclusively for my beliefs there, but I'm really not all that convinced this will ever be more than a novelty in current form.

I'm no expert in the field and I don't even generally follow crypto more than the passing news article, but this continues to be my general perception, especially when things like Doge are surging in value with really no discernable economic basis.

Let the crypto hoards now rain down upon me.

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

#32

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…

Maybe a stupid question: PoS means mining will make 0 money instead of a little less, right? Maybe you meant the pruning update, but I'm curious about later this summer. They're turning a 3-body problem of stakeholders (owners, users, and miners) into a 2-body problem (owners, users) which is owned either by early adoption or early wealth, from my amateur viewpoint. I'm not sure that this is a great thing long-term, but I also don't know what alternatives exist for Eth given that PoW has a lot of issues!

I do have a stake in mostly Eth but it is sized for fun.

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

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

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

#35

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…

As a fellow human who says “ye gods” so much I have a keyboard shortcut for it, I just want to say how delighted I was to read someone else use the phrase. :)

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

#36

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…

You can use layer 2 technologies like state channels to boost the efficiency of the market, you don't need every single transaction to happen on-chain. Skynet is a platform that does this already - every upload and download makes between 30 and 300 crypto transactions, including downloads that are only fetching a few kilobytes of data.

It ends up being efficient enough to run at scale. Skynet currently has over 100,000 active users, and is doing something like 300,000,000 crypto transactions per month. This could easily scale another 100x without increasing the energy footprint of the system, and quite possibly 10,000x as well.

The promise of crypto isn't that there won't be any middlemen, it's that you'll be in control of your own relationship with the people you follow. Right now your relationship with the content creators you follow on YouTube is under the management of the YouTube platform itself. YouTube decides what counts as acceptable, what needs to be de-monetized, and what needs to be de-platformed. In the crypto world, those decisions are left in the hands of the content creators and their viewership, which imo creates a much healthier public grounds for free speech.

The best part is that it's all opt-in. If Patreon + YouTube is what works for you, then more power to you; there's no pressure to switch.

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

#37

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 w…

Ye gods, I haven’t heard anyone reference NetZero in ages. My mates and I got everyone we knew to use it. I still remember when, in the midst of us studying and discussing philosophy, we wondered if NetZero was really free or if we were just paying for it with something other than money. Thus began my unceasing hatred of the advertising-driven internet.

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

#38
post #28

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.

This is partially true... for income taxes.

A large number of people do not pay income tax, and this includes retirees, the disabled, students, the very wealthy, etc etc.

There are many types of taxes. And just about everyone pays taxes of some sort.

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

#39
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The payment friction can be taken away, but before every link I click, I would still be thinking to myself: "Is what I'm about to read worth ten cents?"

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

#40
post #7
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.

People who own networks are always frustrated on the relative lack of power they have. There’s always someone who wants a nickel every time you do something.

Facebook really perfected their version of it.

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