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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

#131

Post by ethbr0 »

pjc50 wrote: post #59
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 alternative on offer in the 80s definitely did make every transaction a financial transaction: the phone company. We can have a look at what the world might have been without the Internet's decision to build without a billing layer, and indeed to route around billing, without needing a time machine. It would have been a faster version of Prestel and Minitel. Fully centralised, with national borders. All the TOS i…

If payments had been built into the structure of the internet, they could have been done in an optional way. Per memory, that's how the original RFCs looked?

Which means you still would have had free content, as well as paid.

The fascinating historical bit is when you follow the cross-border issue... it would have required efficient, scalable (small to large amounts) international monetary transfers between individuals.

And that would have been as, or more, transformational than the internet.

CoL arbitrage. Individual international mobility. Remittance fee slashing. In the late 1980s. The mind boggles.

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

#132

Post by selfhoster11 »

johbjo wrote: post #82

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 i…

> This is partly why p2p fizzled.

That's news to me. The less legitimate ways of acquiring media seem to be thriving in this day and age, and most are p2p.

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

#133

Post by jokethrowaway »

This is the typical contrast between communist ideals in which everything is "free" - and therefore needs to be paid in some other shape (power, advertising, taxes, someone else paying the bills) - and the real capitalist world made of people who needs incentives to act (whether that's social rewards, economic rewards or hope of some rewards).

Sure, we can go on for a while on air, unpaid work and ideals (look at OSS software), but eventually a market emerges.

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

#134

Post by selfhoster11 »

somebodythere wrote: post #39
db48x wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

This is precisely the problem. I subscribed to some sort of a pay-per-article newspaper site some time ago, and the idea of paying 8-17c per article made me fear committing to reading anything. I ended up dropping it.

Really, "micro" payments are not micro at all! "Micro" should mean a thousandth of a dollar at most, with the assumption that volume will make up for the profit.

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

#135

Post by selfhoster11 »

Animats wrote: post #29
dannyw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It still happens. Google Play is more than happy to charge to your phone bill as an available payment method.

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

#136

Post by Taek »

asdff wrote: post #65
Taek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why not just self host if the goal is to get off something like youtube? Not sure what crypto gets the creator other than the off chance the speculators cause it to surge and the creator with large holdings sees a huge payday. Even then, an opportunity for the creator to gamble is a poor argument, that coin might never bear much fruit compared to a bet that's more certain, like betting on the continued success of the…

Self hosting takes a large amount of effort and can't reach the same uptime guarantees that something like YouTube or Skynet can achieve.

There's nothing about gambling here, the crypto tokens are liquid, you can sell them as you receive them and get fair value for your content.

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

#137

Post by paulcole »

bobwaycott wrote: post #37
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…

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.

From the link in your profile:

https://socialjoey.com/services/advertising/

Your unceasing hatred of the advertising-driven internet led you to profit off of it?

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

#138

Post by selfhoster11 »

ip26 wrote: post #46
somebodythere wrote: post #18

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.

If it was sufficiently cheap, perhaps 1 cent per view, you wouldn’t really have to think about it.

It has to be cheaper than that, thousandths of a dollar at most. A single dollar should last me a long while when I'm out binging for content.

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

#140

Post by selfhoster11 »

veltas wrote: post #76
xg15 wrote: post #72

What do you do in that internet if you are poor?

Probably there would be some kind of limited public or charity service.

Ah yes, let's rely on the mercy of strangers because the system deemed you unworthy of participating on equal footing. How delightful.
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