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Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let users authenticate NFTs

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Re: Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let users authenticate NFTs

#21

Post by astoor »

seibelj wrote: post #5
chippy wrote: post #2

Anyone else not really suprised. It's like they were actively in search of sharks to jump over for years. The question we should be asking is, what's next or why? I think this is for Only Fans uber-for-porn competition. If only a massive corporation could think beyond their wallet which may people put next to their second favourite organs!

HN will never understand crypto / blockchain. Bitcoin and NFTs are amazing tools with huge potential for monetization of all sorts of digital goods. It has never been a better time to be a digital artist and earn a living. The lack of imagination and "get off my lawn" around here is absurd.

The problem is that HN actually does understand crypto and blockchain. The layperson might believe the myth that NFTs, for example, are "amazing tools with huge potential for monetization of all sorts of digital goods", but most of HN will know the reality - you are "buying" nothing more than a URL in a JSON file (i.e. no legal ownership of anything), almost all artists will lose money (there are over 20M listings on OpenSea and almost every one of those will not sell or sell at a loss to the artist given all the costs in making a listing), and most "investors" will too (unless they are one of the rings of anonymous bidders who collaborate to artificially inflate the price of their selected "artists").

Re: Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let users authenticate NFTs

#22

Post by DylanBohlender »

BTBurke wrote: post #16
seibelj wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN will never understand crypto / blockchain. Bitcoin and NFTs are amazing tools with huge potential for monetization of all sorts of digital goods. It has never been a better time to be a digital artist and earn a living. The lack of imagination and "get off my lawn" around here is absurd.

Here's my question - NYT could charge me $5 and then deduct from my balance on a per-article basis. Do we need crypto to enable those transactions? If micropayments made sense, why haven't they caught on already with the payment infrastructure 99% of people already have? Micropayments via crypto are just payment with extra steps. I'm not for/against either one. I'd just like to see a coherent argument against the ide…

Fees and chargebacks are the ones that usually come to mind. Oftentimes major credit card provider networks set a "minimum" interchange fee to disincentivize small transactions (a chargeback on a ten-cent transaction is often not worth the squeeze from a support/processing perspective).

Basically all major payment networks are facilitated by a middleman of some sort, and that middleman entity usually has operational costs that disincentivize them from offering micropayments.

Your point about a "balance" lands though - nothing stops NYT from making one "big" charge and then deducting from it other than consumer psychology (paying $10 up front can feel different than paying $0.05 at a time, for example).

Re: Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let users authenticate NFTs

#23

Post by orf »

BTBurke wrote: post #16
seibelj wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN will never understand crypto / blockchain. Bitcoin and NFTs are amazing tools with huge potential for monetization of all sorts of digital goods. It has never been a better time to be a digital artist and earn a living. The lack of imagination and "get off my lawn" around here is absurd.

Here's my question - NYT could charge me $5 and then deduct from my balance on a per-article basis. Do we need crypto to enable those transactions? If micropayments made sense, why haven't they caught on already with the payment infrastructure 99% of people already have? Micropayments via crypto are just payment with extra steps. I'm not for/against either one. I'd just like to see a coherent argument against the ide…

Imagine a world where not everyone used the dollar. Then imagine having to support different currencies and ensuring that your price per article stayed in line with currency fluctuations.

Re: Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let users authenticate NFTs

#24

Post by PretzelPirate »

BTBurke wrote: post #16
seibelj wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN will never understand crypto / blockchain. Bitcoin and NFTs are amazing tools with huge potential for monetization of all sorts of digital goods. It has never been a better time to be a digital artist and earn a living. The lack of imagination and "get off my lawn" around here is absurd.

Here's my question - NYT could charge me $5 and then deduct from my balance on a per-article basis. Do we need crypto to enable those transactions? If micropayments made sense, why haven't they caught on already with the payment infrastructure 99% of people already have? Micropayments via crypto are just payment with extra steps. I'm not for/against either one. I'd just like to see a coherent argument against the ide…

I think the answer looks different when you talk about NYT (a large organization most of us probably trust to not steal) vs smaller websites/blogs. I wouldn’t pre-pay some no-name blogger $5 and trust them to charge me properly.

With the pre-pay model, you may even end up with each site dictating it’s own payment terms, which would naturally create opportunities for scammy terms that users don’t understand until their money is gone.

A tipping model incentivized quality content and keeps funds under the user’s control.

In this specific case, it looks like some Strike-related company will have custody of funds, which does defeat the purpose of using a decentralized payment method.

Re: Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let users authenticate NFTs

#25

Post by [deleted] »

DylanBohlender wrote: post #11

Lightning network theoretically makes micropayments possible, and that should be celebrated for enabling new ways of online monetization that the tech world writ large can explore. Imagine if you could buy access to a paywalled news article for $0.02 (on an article-by-article basis) instead of having to purchase a monthly subscription. Or imagine being able to pay $0.10 to watch a particular episode of a show without…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let users authenticate NFTs

#26

Post by PretzelPirate »

astoor wrote: post #21
seibelj wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN will never understand crypto / blockchain. Bitcoin and NFTs are amazing tools with huge potential for monetization of all sorts of digital goods. It has never been a better time to be a digital artist and earn a living. The lack of imagination and "get off my lawn" around here is absurd.

The problem is that HN actually does understand crypto and blockchain. The layperson might believe the myth that NFTs, for example, are "amazing tools with huge potential for monetization of all sorts of digital goods", but most of HN will know the reality - you are "buying" nothing more than a URL in a JSON file (i.e. no legal ownership of anything), almost all artists will lose money (there are over 20M listings on…

Art is one application of NFTs, but NFTs are not specifically made to represent digital art. Gods Unchained cards are a much better use case since there is built-in utility.

Artists can also mint on ImmutableX without paying any fee at all.

Re: Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let users authenticate NFTs

#27

Post by Ekaros »

orf wrote: post #23
BTBurke wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my question - NYT could charge me $5 and then deduct from my balance on a per-article basis. Do we need crypto to enable those transactions? If micropayments made sense, why haven't they caught on already with the payment infrastructure 99% of people already have? Micropayments via crypto are just payment with extra steps. I'm not for/against either one. I'd just like to see a coherent argument against the ide…

Imagine a world where not everyone used the dollar. Then imagine having to support different currencies and ensuring that your price per article stayed in line with currency fluctuations.

Translate the payments to some abstract credits with consistent rate across currencies. Then just forex the money received to euros or dollars or what ever your local currency is.

Actually, there is already a massive platform that does this sort of thing with what really are microtransactions too and even in local currencies, namely Steam.

Re: Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let users authenticate NFTs

#29

Post by fighterpilot »

blhack wrote: post #4

Absolutely incredible news. Micropayments are one of the paths out of advertiser hell and were one of the original dreams of many crypto nerds and advocates. I still think that twitter is pure mind cancer, but I have to give it to Jack on this. Great move, and something I hope gets repeated to the rest of the web. For those who aren’t very familiar with the crypto space: this uses a bitcoin side chain called lightnin…

Do we know why they're not doing it off-chain, similar to the way a crypto exchange will transfer crypto from one user to another off-chain?

Re: Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let users authenticate NFTs

#30

Post by javert »

cwkoss wrote: post #7

Sounds like initial plans are to not take a fee for Bitcoin payments. Which is awesome but a bit surprising. I wonder whether they'll be able to keep this fee-less over the longer term. If/when they start facilitating billions of dollars moving per year, I'd imagine intense pressure from shareholders to take a cut.

They can profit simply by holding bitcoin, which they're increasing demand for.

Bitcoin has always been the kind of thing that rewards insiders.

Companies and government officials can profit just by holding bitcoin and then incentivizing its wider use. It makes more sense to become an insider than to fight bitcoin. Arguably, that's even true for major financial institutions.

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