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

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161–170 of 183 posts

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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that modern social networks essentially act as public space But that's the thing: they aren't public spaces. The number of people which have their content hosted on a private platform is inconsequential to the legal nature of the platform. Social media are very much subject to legal regulations and lawmaking. Calling a space which is governed by a private entity that doesn't represent you / answer to you, as…

> But that's the thing: they aren't public spaces. They are the de-facto places where online discourse is held, and at least German courts have acknowledged that even speech that borders on hate speech is a part of public opinion forming (e.g. https://www.idowa.de/inhalt.gerichtsurteil-nach-sperre-faceb... or https://www.e-recht24.de/news/facebook/11029-neues-facebook-... ). > Calling a space which is governed by a p…

All of your points really arguments that support social media as publications. Or more to the point: they are a means to publish. Or, even more to the point: they could be seen as private publishers hosting the opinions of others in their own online publications. The affordances provided by social media to billions of people as to how they can publish and what they get to see are... really just editorial choices.

Why is that contentious? Because that's exactly the one thing social media try to avoid: being seen as mere publishers. That would have massive implications:

https://socialmediahq.com/if-social-media-companies-are-publ...

It's another argument why treating them as "public spaces" isn't much sensible.

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're already living it. This is just about openly accepting it.

True but it's just not as cool as all the dystopian films made us think it would be

In many ways it's far worse. Kinda like the RM mind parasites.

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

#163
post #142
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. Pay me 50 cents right now with your BAT. You can't. There is no inlet on my end for this BAT without the cruft of me setting up whatever is required. Yet you should be able to, considering we both have computers capable of connecting to each other over the internet. We both have bank accounts or money someplace. I can send you a file with scp trivially right now. Why can't I send you 50 cents over the…

>There is no inlet on my end for this BAT without the cruft of me setting up whatever is required >I can send you a file with scp trivially right now. You'd still have to set up "cruft" for that as well. Generating private keys, enabling port forwarding, configuring sshd, configuring firewall rules. I don't see how setting up some crypto wallet is unreasonable in comparison.

What I was getting at with scp is that every personal computer there is today has some standardized tool along with all needed documentation already built into the device that lets you send a file from point A to point B over the internet. The same isn't true for this BAT, or any other method to send money via the internet.

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

#164
post #89
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

You have invented the "paywall".

The major problem with that is you end up with nothing but clickbait articles where the first part is pointless filler designed to hook you in so you buy the paid version.

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

#165
>"Jaron Lanier’s old idea of an internet based on micropayments has finally arrived, but it has been transformed into an internet of micro-ownership."

The idea of a blockchain is, a defined protocol (like tcp/ip) where everyone can join the mining pool, accept and process payments. The quickest he processes the transactions, and the more transactions one processes, the more profit he gains. An open global competition for transactions. This trait gives the blockchain network incredible resiliency.

Amazon AWS, Ms Azure an' all, are not as resilient as a blockchain network, because not everyone can join and accept tcp requests. The tcp requests are accepted exclusively by the company's computers.

There are cases, in which we want to be absolutely sure the request will arrive to the destination the fastest possible. I.e an oven we control from our mobile phone. We want to be absolutely sure the oven stopped working, i.e the request indeed got to the destination the quickest possible. The information we want to travel with maximum speed and resiliency to errors, is a paid transaction.

The last point is that with a plain tcp packet the company with the server farm, may choose to eat the tcp packet and not turn off the oven. Modeling the control of the oven, with an oven wallet where we sent the paid transaction to the oven, no one intermediary can stop the transaction we send to the oven, so we have an oven in our house which we can control over the internet, with absolutely ownership of the oven and the control of it.

Everything else of the blockchain technology, like NFTs are following afterwards. This kind of internet, is called MetaNet.

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

#166
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am a retiree and I very definitely pay income tax.

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

#167
post #163
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is no inlet on my end for this BAT without the cruft of me setting up whatever is required >I can send you a file with scp trivially right now. You'd still have to set up "cruft" for that as well. Generating private keys, enabling port forwarding, configuring sshd, configuring firewall rules. I don't see how setting up some crypto wallet is unreasonable in comparison.

What I was getting at with scp is that every personal computer there is today has some standardized tool along with all needed documentation already built into the device that lets you send a file from point A to point B over the internet. The same isn't true for this BAT, or any other method to send money via the internet.

Right, and while we're on the topic: it's 2020, and I still can't send a file from computer to computer without going via gmail. Why not?

The exception is Airdrop. But with a Windows computer or Android phone on either end, there's (at best) Bluetooth file transfer which is slow, unreliable and painful. Or there's scp (you get the joke, right?)

The point is, the technical infrastructure exists, but nobody has bothered to implement this simple stuff for ordinary users. A testament to the power of the public goods problem to block even simple, long-overdue improvements?

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

#168
post #88

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…

The attention spans have been shortening since Gutenberg invented the printing if not well before that.

Television ushered the era of contentless spew well before the Internet. The Internet gave more variety than the TV world but indeed devastated the print journalism world that had existed before.

The point is this all part of a long term trend. That said, more media generally means that there is a significant amount of decent content still available but, yeah, the quality of the content produced by journalist institutions continues to decline. You'd need an extreme reversal of overall social trends to change the sound-bite factor here.

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

#169
post #73
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#170
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…

I just draw comics and post them online. Youtube's not involved in any stage of this. I'm pretty much in control of my relationship with my followers without any blockchain already.
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