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…
As a fellow human who says “ye gods” so much I have a keyboard shortcut for it, I just want to say how delighted I was to read someone else use the phrase. :)
Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction
171–180 of 183 posts
Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The "community" part is heavily monetized, and isps and wireless carriers are the most profitable companies on the planet with 60% gross margins.
As to the non-local stuff, I've was told that nowadays 1 fiber could handle all of netflix's traffic.
Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with this idea is your premise that you shouldn't have to pay for school meals if you don't have children. Paying for school benefits everyone, even the childless, because it's good for society. The idea of itemized taxes reduces your interaction with others and society down to a capitalist transaction, which is not a healthy foundation for civilization. People are more than their productivity and your sy…
The premise is transparency. People can do whatever they want with that transparency as more informed voters. The only benefit of decreasing transparency in government spending is corruption.
Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with this idea is your premise that you shouldn't have to pay for school meals if you don't have children. Paying for school benefits everyone, even the childless, because it's good for society. The idea of itemized taxes reduces your interaction with others and society down to a capitalist transaction, which is not a healthy foundation for civilization. People are more than their productivity and your sy…
> The problem with this idea is your premise that you shouldn't have to pay for school meals if you don't have children. Nothing about what parent wrote indicates that they are unwilling to pay for school meals, just that they want to know how much it cost them. Much like most people would want to know how much they are paying for socialised cancer treatments or food banks, but generally wouldn't oppose to paying in…
Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 appr…
> The situation we're in now is bad, but needing a judge to sign off on every moderation action would be much, much worse. I had not meant that every moderation action would need a judge, but that every person should have the legal right to appeal and plead their case in front of a judge instead of hitting stone walls.
But nothing social media platforms are doing is illegal. A judge is just going to tell you that you agreed to the platform's terms of service and they have the right, including Section 230 indemnity, to moderate content on their platform.
Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 othe…
> 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). In the real world, though, you won't be getting 247 such requests per hour. And that's the crux of the issue: quantity vs quality.
If you're reading 247 different sources of information in an hour, unless you're doing some kind of heavy research, you're probably overloading your brain in any case. How many blog articles can you read in an hour? Less than ten, probably more like 5, if they're actually worth reading.
Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasn't that decades ago? Times change and sometimes ideas are too new for its times.
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.
Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
The premise is transparency. People can do whatever they want with that transparency as more informed voters. The only benefit of decreasing transparency in government spending is corruption.
Does this view extend to product labels like the California Prop 65 Warning?
Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 individua…
> it would have required efficient, scalable (small to large amounts) international monetary transfers between individuals. That would have caused it to face even bigger barriers to adoption, surely? The UK only just abolished capital controls in 1979: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_Controls_in_the_Unite... The current cryptocurrency system (cryptography itself was subject to arms control until 1991!) relies…
Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction
#180Earlier 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.