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L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

l402.org

21–30 of 146 posts

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#21

Bitcoin is not acceptable in 2024, and Lightning doesn't help. Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody.

50% of what you say is 100% correct.

Bitcoin was hijacked and corrupted on purpose with injected hacks like "segwit" and rbf. So you are 100% right, BTC is broken and LN doesn't help.

But POW BITCOIN, as designed and built originally actually works fine at Visa-level scale while maintaining low fees. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) still functions as Bitcoin perfectly well, it just doesn't have the "crypto-bro" idiots pushing it as an investment.

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#22

Bitcoin is not acceptable in 2024, and Lightning doesn't help. Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody.

Do you think you're being reasonable in saying that? I think micropayments are desperately needed, and I don't see modern payment networks doing anything to get there

Bitcoin Cash works for small payments as Bitcoin was originally designed to do.

Artificially limiting the block size to try and push fees up as high as possible is simply not a good designe choice that was added long after Satoshi left.

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#23

Bitcoin is not acceptable in 2024, and Lightning doesn't help. Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody.

50% of what you say is 100% correct. Bitcoin was hijacked and corrupted on purpose with injected hacks like "segwit" and rbf. So you are 100% right, BTC is broken and LN doesn't help. But POW BITCOIN, as designed and built originally actually works fine at Visa-level scale while maintaining low fees. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) still functions as Bitcoin perfectly well, it just doesn't have the "crypto-bro" idiots pushing it…

> But POW BITCOIN, as designed and built originally actually works fine at Visa-level scale while maintaining low fees.

Do you have a citation for this? The reported transaction figures are orders of magnitude smaller than VISA, and cost more.

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#25

Calling this "the missing piece" oversells what it's a missing piece of . I'm not really interested in participating in something like this until other missing pieces are present also. Most notably, content should be able to cite its sources and I should be able to verify that payment is being split and sent to those sources directly. Sending it all to whoever maintains the server and trusting them to pass it on to t…

I'm not a crypto maximalist or even optimist, but it'd be interesting to see a version of this with smart contracts - when you rehost content and collect payments, a percent goes back to whoever you rehosted from, and on from there; when you cite a work and collect payments, a percent goes back to whoever you cited, and so on from there to whoever they cited. There's a long way to go to get there, and there's no enforcement against, well, let's call it the NFT jpeg problem, but it's at least an interesting structure that I think would improve the economic incentives of the internet.

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#26

Is lightning network open source and a non-profit? How can we put our trust in L402? Can it go bankrupt? Can it be corrupted? Can it go down?

It is a for profit company, software is closed source.

Then

Can it go bankrupt? Yes

Can it be corrupted? Yes

Can it go down? Yes

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#27

Calling this "the missing piece" oversells what it's a missing piece of . I'm not really interested in participating in something like this until other missing pieces are present also. Most notably, content should be able to cite its sources and I should be able to verify that payment is being split and sent to those sources directly. Sending it all to whoever maintains the server and trusting them to pass it on to t…

In cryptocurrency, if you don't trust the person you're paying, you can check the program being called and its outputs and see the previous runs of the program distributing the currency to other accounts.

How do I know the accounts of all the people involved in creating it or etc? That feels like a lot of burden on the consumer of the media. Maybe if you had inspection tools that helped automate that lookup, or some sort of DNS esque catalog of addresses?

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#28

Is lightning network open source and a non-profit? How can we put our trust in L402? Can it go bankrupt? Can it be corrupted? Can it go down?

Yes, the spec is open and contributed to by the main implementations, all open source.

https://github.com/lightning/bolts

https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd

https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning

https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair

https://github.com/lightningdevkit/rust-lightning

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#30

Bitcoin is not acceptable in 2024, and Lightning doesn't help. Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody.

The customer for this L402 protocol is obviously a media network, especially ebooks, and plausibly an alternative to spotify, applemusic and closer to the bandcamp model, content providers of all kinds who are currently subject to the chokepoint of payment processors. Emerging use cases would be domain specific LLMs trained on proprietary data sets in health, legal, accounting, and other professions. What it needs is a new there there on the other side of it.

The objection to PoW is thinly veiled objection to tying it to physical value instead of policy. The objection would be the same for gold. What they object to is physical constraints on political authorities, and these sort of "bitcoin bad!" comments should not be admitted to spoil serious discourse.

The economic case for PoW is that it converts any source of energy anywhere in the solar system to transferrable stored value. It would make a lot of space based energy harvesting projects economically viable, but also remote hydro projects that can't transmit electricity long distances, but can absolutely provide compute as an economic service from long distances and make the a local hydro system economically viable. PoW tokenizes electricity via compute. It's a very elegant idea, and the opposite of environmentally unsustainable because it actually rationalizes the price of electricity with endogenous demand.

The same people objecting to bitcoin micropayments schemes also object to nuclear because it would actually solve the zero-sum problem narratives they want to sustain and manage. These views are not without controversy, and personally I reject them on principle.

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