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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

#91

Post by esperent »

kelnos wrote: post #80
asdff wrote: 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.

There's a huge chasm now, for sure. But only when it comes to online spending. In the real world, if someone offered me something useful for 0.01 I'd pay it without a thought (except for wondering why it's so cheap).

If we can get over the initial weirdness and make it completely seamless (as easy as dismissing a cookie banner) I'm sure people would get used to paying a cent for every blog post they read.

On the other hand, if there's a thousand different micropayment platforms each with a different way of getting past the paywall and of adding funds, then I don't think it'll be an easy path to adoption.

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

#92

Post by robertlagrant »

asdff wrote: 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…

> 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

Why would this stop ads? In this case, ads still make you more money; your hosting costs just go down a little.

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

#93

Post by dan-robertson »

asdff wrote: 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…

Doesn’t this just encourage websites to become even more bloated as they are paid by the byte?

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

#94

Post by kortilla »

m463 wrote: post #77
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…

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 firs…

Most of the stuff people do online is non-local though. If any non-negligible amount of traffic was just staying in your local city, ISPs would have already optimized for it with direct local peering. As it stands though, it’s so little traffic that it’s not even worth a circuit in a local IXP.

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

#95

Post by 7952 »

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…

I think the current situation is a state of equilibrium brought about by technical limitations. A typical user has limited bandwidth, and limited storage. That makes the client server model very effective for something like video sharing or a social network and defaults to a particular economic model. But something like messaging can work more like a message queue. The basic storage and bandwidth requirements are low so you just download everything. Facebook, Google and Microsoft (Office 365) benefit hugely from this. But maybe Apple, or Telco's could break this pattern. Sell devices with massive amounts of storage that no one will use on their own. A 1TB IPhone with a good internet connection could make encrypted messaging a possibility for media rich apps or even make P2P possible.

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

#96

Post by krapp »

mschuster91 wrote: post #86
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 essent…

>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.

That would set a precedent that any site with any user supplied content must require intervention and approval by a court before any form of moderation can take place, or at least that all sites must require court approval for their terms of service. which by extension means all speech on the web will be under direct government control. That would include Hacker News and any blog that allows comments.

This is a much greater degree of control over freedom of speech than exists in public spaces in the real world - where people can speak freely generally without government enforced moderation, and in any case websites are not public spaces. So on top of everything else, governments would assert unprecedented control over free enterprise and freedom of association.

And it doesn't matter where you decide to draw the line, perhaps only requiring this level of regulation for sites with a certain number of users, this being Hacker News I shouldn't have to point out the potential slippery slope in having the government decide where that line is drawn.

The situation we're in now is bad, but needing a judge to sign off on every moderation action would be much, much worse.

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

#98

Post by progval »

asdff wrote: 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…

> If only the web was supported by visitors contributing to hosting costs of a visited page directly out of their internet bill

It was one of the ideas behind Project Xanadu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

Discussed in this sub-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217015

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

#99

Post by michaelt »

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…

> the technology for doing micropayments is easy

Is it? Seems to me there are a bunch of questions left unsolved.

For a start, will Visa and Mastercard go along with you using them to make your lower-cost-per-transaction competitor? Won't Apple and Google want to shake you down for their usual 30% ?

If a site gets all its revenue from a micropayment 'partner' won't the partner have massive leverage to alter the deal later and screw the site over?

How do you protect against perverse incentives - like a micropayment of $0.0001 per page encouraging sites to split articles into 20-page slideshows?

Should the payments be automatic or manual? If manual, won't sites get loaded with garish reminders to pay, like youtubers asking for likes and subscribes?

Who will set the rate of payment, and will it vary by media? Should viewing two of Reddit's user-uploaded cat photos cost more than reading one piece of quality investigative journalism? What about super-premium things like pay-per-view sports and computer games?

What sort of records will be kept - will it maintain an itemised list of all the pages I've visited and when, so billing disputes can be resolved?

How will it work for children - can they be given a daily allowance? Will it have loads of parental controls, if I'm happy to pay for some types of content and not others?

Are users going to end up quadruple-paying, where they make a micropayment, watch a youtube ad, watch an ad read by the video creator, and it's a shill video anyway? If you have value-for-money standards, how do they get enforced?

Will people be able to undo their payments if someone hacked their account? What if their kid was using their computer? What if they just thought the article was clickbait and not worth paying for? Can a user view content for free by viewing it then cancelling the charge?

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

#100

Post by Tepix »

potiuper wrote: post #24
reilly3000 wrote: post #20

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.

On the other hand PoS can provide protection against some 51% attacks, go read the Avalanche whitepapers. It can uphold safety (but not liveness) guarantees even when the attacker exceeds 51%.
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