Live data from Hacker News

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

reallifemag.com

71–80 of 183 posts

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

#71

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 res…

The Brave browser is an interesting first stab at this. Another project named Permission.io is also trying to reward users for their time and attention also (disclaimer, I work on it). But ultimately what I find most fascinating about this article is blockchains being applied to all interactions- accessing web pages, doing this on web pages, everything. I'm thinking we'll all have wallets that constantly process micr…

Thank you for that!

Conceptually, I really like the idea of being able to monetise one’s own attention beyond just one’s own time employed.

Ultimately, jt would be super cool to gain a better understanding of one’s own time value beyond just employed work but also leisure and how it might help us to better conceptualise the limited time we have.

Perhaps a less intuitive/instinctive and more quantifiable approach to how we might optimise our time.

Even if the world doesn’t turn into a micropayment dystopia, I would think there’s great scope to utilise strictly voluntary smart contract personal incentives.

Perhaps Jenny Craig turns into a smart contract blockchain platform that unlocks food pellets when the customers performs X. I’m mostly joking.

My first thought is how it might be of value with my kids when it comes to school performance, fitness goals, as well as leisure/fun.

We already do it, but maybe we could do it better.

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

#73
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, spee…

GP is wrong about the security of PoS. It is slightly less secure in favour of being more energy efficient, however it’s not that much more insecure.

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

#75
post #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 100,0…

Are you referring to this Skynet? https://skynet.co/index.html

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

#77

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…

On the other hand, I remember folks setting up peering agreements.

What if that model had taken over?

How about a neighborhood hub where you pay someone to put in a small fiber run from your house and choose a vendor who can run your traffic back and forth from that hub? Or maybe there's a citywide ring network everyone hooks into and you pay for out-of-city data?

Or what if most cellphone data defaulted to wifi first? No cellphone plan required if no cellular connection?

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

#78
> Shermin Voshmgir writes that blockchain “introduces a governance layer that runs on top of the current internet, that allows for two people who do not know or trust each other to reach and settle agreements over the web.”

It allows them to transfer crypto coins between them, but you still have the problem of actually delivering something phisically if it's a physical purchase, and blockchain will not help with that at all... if you settle the transfer when the purchase if agreed upon, the buyer takes a big risk as nothing forces the seller to actually ship. If the settlement is delayed until the buyer confirms delivery, then the buyer takes all the risk as the buyer may choose to not confirm the transaction. Is there anything in blockchain that allows you to solve this problem?

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

#79

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…

> 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 don't really think it would be any different if we paid. L…

That's the thing. Ads will always generate revenue. If you can also get people to pay for your content, great. So then you have two sources of revenue for the same product.

But some services do manage to do without ads; Netflix is the big one that comes to mind. Hulu has an ad-free version if you pay more. Spotify has a free ad-supported plan or a paid ad-free plan. Then you have things in the middle like HBO Max: most (all?) shows have ads before them, but it's an ad promoting another HBO show.

So clearly paid & ad-free is possible. What's not clear to me is why it's possible for some things and not for others.

To use your sports example, perhaps without ads ticket and merchandise prices would have to rise to the point where enough people wouldn't buy them such that it would cause a problem? I don't know what the contribution to revenue is for ticket sales vs. ads.

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

#80
post #63

If only the web was supported by visitors contributing to hosting costs of a visited page directly out of their internet bill, instead of advertisement supporting the web, and visitors paying a flat fee to their ISP regardless of their use. Blogs could be sustained with little readership considering how cheap it is to host a lightweight website that sees little traffic, and larger websites like HN would pay for their…

I really wish micropayments would take off, but psychologically it seems they just don't work. There's a huge chasm between spending $0 and spending even $0.01. The mental effort involved in "taking out your wallet" vs. not doing so is huge.

Meanwhile it seems that most people consider viewing ads to have zero cost to them (whether that's true or not), or use ad-blockers.

Post reply on HN