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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

#81

Post by kelnos »

jollybean wrote: post #51

Except for the part where people don't pay for stuff . Yes, transactional issues are a thing, 25 cents doesn't work well with VISA etc. but never underestimate people's willingness to 'not want to pay'. That was always the 'big issue' and that has not changed.

Right, the technology for doing micropayments is easy; you just create a "wallet" that people periodically top up with some minimum charge like $10 or $20, and then have websites hook into an API to debit from it. (Venmo, Square Cash, etc. are nearly already set up to do this, and I bet Apple and Google would easily get into that game as well.) But people just don't want to pay. Viewership would drop like a rock if a ad-supported publication were to instead charge even 1 cent per article.

You also have a first-mover disadvantage. No one wants to be the first blog or small newspaper that starts charging in this way, because people will just go elsewhere. To be effective, everyone would have to agree to magically enable this simultaneously.

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

#82

Post by johbjo »

No. The reason d'etre for the centralised platforms is that they are accountable to the major rights holding companies. That's all. One can speculate why this is so important for society, but ostensibly it is to protect the rights of Universal, Disney, etc.

Accountability becomes impossible with decentralization, and small decentralized distributors can be easily intimidated with copyright-related legislation. This is partly why p2p fizzled.

Internet change will require political change, such as rolling back various copyright legislation. For example, limiting to 20 years (like patents) and several others. The consequences of this would be to erase the book-value of the rights holding companies.

But decentralized media can not be held accountable to society/politics like for example Youtube. I suspect this is the underlying political motivation, not so much charity to Disney.

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

#83

Post by milansuk »

> The more decentralized apps of Web3 will not necessarily look and feel different ...

This scares me. Right now every smart contract needs to be audited, but If the front-end is running fully-featured Javascript, it can connect everywhere so there will be a need to audit also client-side. What If it's "leaking" data into 3rd parties. I hope for a better future than the current chaos.

It would be great If browsers have some kind of extra sandboxing, so the end-user could set that only some blockchains can be used and block everything else. Right now we can do something like that with trackers.

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

#84

Post by amanaplanacanal »

brabel wrote: post #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…

Some sort of escrow layer? Out in the real world you would use a trusted third party for that.

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

#85

Post by nosianu »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #15
nosianu wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do exchange value. Real value. I would not read webpages if I did not get value. Webpages would not be offered if those making them did not get value. Even when there was no commercialism on the Internet at all. Or why people do a lot of things without any money involved. Basing everything on "money" is a scourge. Not to mention the height of inefficiency. Our brains have to deal with something very different inst…

Money is an abstraction of value. So I don't see how you praise "real value"(whatever that is) on the one hand and disparage monetary valuation as a scourge. Assessing something's value to you on a personal level is functionally no different than attaching a figure to something's worth whether that be in dollars, gold, time, or some other quantity or unit.

> Money is an abstraction of value

Which is greatly overvalued because it gives you the illusion and convenience to use numbers. Which "frees" you from actually thinking about the problem. Everything is a finance problem (and when you understand finance and management you understand everything).

See, I don't understand you either. It makes no sense to me how soooo many intelligent people could fall for something so silly and not see how deep inside a hole they are standing.

Like all models, it's a really great tool for the right job. Humans tend to forget about terms and conditions, when finding something worked well they ignore the fine print.

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

#86

Post by mschuster91 »

at_a_remove wrote: post #21

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…

> 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.

One alternative could be to restore the authority of the processes that societies have evolved over the last two hundred years - courts. Given that modern social networks essentially act as public space, a gateway between the digital and meatspace world, they should also be regulated by independent authorities.

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

#87

Post by bodski »

brabel wrote: post #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…

It might be worth taking a look at Mattereum [0] as an example of work in this area.

Much of their work has been on how to make smart-contract based 'ownership tokens' (akin to NFTs) enforceable in existing courts in as many global jurisdictions as possible. They believe that they've found a way to make their arbitration system enforceable "in 150+ countries via the 1958 New York Arbitration Convention" [1].

Vinay Gupta ('hexayurt' on HN [2]) is co-founder and CEO and may be able to enlighten further.

[0] https://mattereum.com/

[1] https://mattereum.com/2021/04/01/mattereum-product-walkthrou...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hexayurt | https://twitter.com/leashless

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

#88

Post by krapp »

joe_the_user wrote: post #50
at_a_remove wrote: post #21

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…

The free structure of the Internet was the only way it could have appeared and is still the only way most of it can operate, for good or for ill. Even more, people attacking the free part tend to evoke an image of all the other manipulative parts of modern media vanishing if people somehow pay. But the Wall Street Journal and to a lesser extent the New York Times, do their best to be paid but it's the same sort of pr…

Before the web, newspapers, magazines and other media could afford writers, editors and journalists, and the effect of the web was for print media to gut its infrastructure and budgets in favor of intern bloggers and clickbait because it couldn't be free and afford to compete with random no-budget sites and Twitter feeds otherwise. The news used to be worth paying for, and for some reason people seem to have convinced themselves that the media was never better than it is now, but before everything was on the web, it really was better.

The free web has democratized media and publishing in many radical and transformative ways, but in the process of unseating the old media gatekeepers has also completely destroyed the quality of journalism and long-form content, worldwide.

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

#89

Post by johbjo »

kelnos wrote: post #81
jollybean wrote: post #51

Except for the part where people don't pay for stuff . Yes, transactional issues are a thing, 25 cents doesn't work well with VISA etc. but never underestimate people's willingness to 'not want to pay'. That was always the 'big issue' and that has not changed.

Right, the technology for doing micropayments is easy; you just create a "wallet" that people periodically top up with some minimum charge like $10 or $20, and then have websites hook into an API to debit from it. (Venmo, Square Cash, etc. are nearly already set up to do this, and I bet Apple and Google would easily get into that game as well.) But people just don't want to pay. Viewership would drop like a rock if a…

Just have a part of the article+ads visible on a news site, then show the rest without ads after a click on 'see the rest for $0.01'.

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

#90

Post by ganafagol »

krapp wrote: post #88
joe_the_user wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The free structure of the Internet was the only way it could have appeared and is still the only way most of it can operate, for good or for ill. Even more, people attacking the free part tend to evoke an image of all the other manipulative parts of modern media vanishing if people somehow pay. But the Wall Street Journal and to a lesser extent the New York Times, do their best to be paid but it's the same sort of pr…

Before the web, newspapers, magazines and other media could afford writers, editors and journalists, and the effect of the web was for print media to gut its infrastructure and budgets in favor of intern bloggers and clickbait because it couldn't be free and afford to compete with random no-budget sites and Twitter feeds otherwise. The news used to be worth paying for, and for some reason people seem to have convince…

"Destroyed" may be a too strong word. It may currently be a little hidden below the layer of all the crap out there, but good journalism is not dead and once reasonable payment models have beeb worked out, it can easily come back.

Mind you that this has not been going on for that long. 15-20 years maybe. In the bigger picture, that's nothing.

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