Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

l402.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 146 posts

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

#41

Post by wongarsu »

fragmede wrote: post #36
Animats wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true. Probably not. They've been proposed all the way back to Chaum's DigiCash, but no micropayment system has ever really taken off. Not just crypto schemes. Schemes to put micropayments on your cellular phone bill were a flop. Even 976 numbers never got traction outside of dial-a-porn and have mostly died out. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people…

The number of installs of adblocking software would seem to contradict you. Consumers are cheap and don't want to pay for things, but they also don't want to watch ads. They also don't want 15 $10 subscriptions to things they barely use. But they also want to support creators. So there's some intersection point where people are willing to put some money in, and receive fewer and less aggressive advertisements in exch…

You could also argue that Patreon is a successful micropayment platform, with most subscriptions being in the $1-$3 range.

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

#42

Post by jancsika »

Animats wrote: post #32
roughly wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it" "Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true. "I don't see modern payment networks doing anything to get there" - this is also true. Neither of those imply we must solve this problem with Bitcoin, and neither of them contradict OP's statement. Bitcoin is slow, energy inefficient, and a shit transaction currency because of philosophies built i…

> "Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true. Probably not. They've been proposed all the way back to Chaum's DigiCash, but no micropayment system has ever really taken off. Not just crypto schemes. Schemes to put micropayments on your cellular phone bill were a flop. Even 976 numbers never got traction outside of dial-a-porn and have mostly died out. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people…

> They've been proposed all the way back to Chaum's DigiCash, but no micropayment system has ever really taken off.

If it's true that Chaum fucked up the deal to have it shipped with Windows 95, then this is a bad example.

Not saying it was ever "desperately needed." But being on everyone's computer by default, somebody would surely have found a use for it. Probably gambling, which is more than sufficient for bootstrapping.

Then it's a race: does the consequent acceleration of malware become such a nasty pain point that Microsoft just removes Digicash from the Windows 98 installer? Or does pets.com accept it as payment first, and it therefore becomes entrenched? :)

1: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/genesis-files-how-david-...

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

#43

Post by kordlessagain »

Hizonner wrote: post #19
swagmoose wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, I do. If you really want micropayments, then use one of the newer, better base systems that do the same things better on every metric, including not ripping through half a percent of the electricity generated in the world. Even if Bitcoin were the only choice available, micropayments aren't needed desperately enough to justify the climate impact. But in fact it's not.

Micropayments, especially when coupled with authentication for APIs, are desperately needed for AI calls (think tokens). And, mining costs have nothing to do with validating payments, so it doesn't cost more to run transactions over Lightning.

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

#44

Post by kordlessagain »

roughly wrote: post #20
swagmoose wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"We must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it" "Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true. "I don't see modern payment networks doing anything to get there" - this is also true. Neither of those imply we must solve this problem with Bitcoin, and neither of them contradict OP's statement. Bitcoin is slow, energy inefficient, and a shit transaction currency because of philosophies built i…

The commenter has constructed a strawman argument by misrepresenting the original position on L402 and Lightning Network payments. They conflate issues with the base Bitcoin network with the Lightning Network, which L402 actually uses.

Strawman arguments against Bitcoin often stem from a combination of factors: the complexity and rapid evolution of the technology, widespread misunderstandings fueled by media simplification, resistance to financial system changes, and a lack of technical knowledge among critics. These issues are compounded by confirmation bias, lingering associations with Bitcoin's controversial past, and sometimes vested interests in traditional systems. Overcoming these strawman arguments requires ongoing education and clear communication about Bitcoin's current capabilities and limitations.

Also, Lighting is capable of using other blockchains.

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

#45

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

nemomarx wrote: post #27
fragmede wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why not just put the addresses in the metadata of the content? Like credits at the end of a movie, except you can send money to it.

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

#47

Post by constantlm »

dinobones wrote: post #7

Lightning network is mostly dead. Someone should do this but for the thriving L2 ETH ecosystem.

Actually, while amount of nodes have not grown, capacity of lightning has steadily been growing. https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning

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

#48

Post by hakfoo »

fragmede wrote: post #36
Animats wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true. Probably not. They've been proposed all the way back to Chaum's DigiCash, but no micropayment system has ever really taken off. Not just crypto schemes. Schemes to put micropayments on your cellular phone bill were a flop. Even 976 numbers never got traction outside of dial-a-porn and have mostly died out. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people…

The number of installs of adblocking software would seem to contradict you. Consumers are cheap and don't want to pay for things, but they also don't want to watch ads. They also don't want 15 $10 subscriptions to things they barely use. But they also want to support creators. So there's some intersection point where people are willing to put some money in, and receive fewer and less aggressive advertisements in exch…

The answer is federation. Don't try to sell me "subscribing to one specific blog", sell me a sensibly curated and rich network.

People might be willing to pay $10 per month for a broad spectrum of quality content, but they don't want to spend 13 cents for a given arbitrary single article. It's an annoying decision burden, even if you try to shunt it away from them with delayed end-of-month billing (constant fear of a surprise $300 bill) or a prepaid-credit scheme (where you have to still check your balance regularly).

It has to be unmetered at the moment of use -- no surprise paywall popping back up-- and it has to cover enough content that you're not reliant on "if we lose our #1 draw, the entire platform falls over".

The perfect prototype was basically the Japanese phone-book manga magazine. If you liked one or two series consistently, it was enough to justify buying the book, and since you already paid, you may as well explore the other 18 series in there to see if there's something you like.

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

#49

Post by roughly »

Animats wrote: post #32
roughly wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it" "Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true. "I don't see modern payment networks doing anything to get there" - this is also true. Neither of those imply we must solve this problem with Bitcoin, and neither of them contradict OP's statement. Bitcoin is slow, energy inefficient, and a shit transaction currency because of philosophies built i…

> "Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true. Probably not. They've been proposed all the way back to Chaum's DigiCash, but no micropayment system has ever really taken off. Not just crypto schemes. Schemes to put micropayments on your cellular phone bill were a flop. Even 976 numbers never got traction outside of dial-a-porn and have mostly died out. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people…

> no micropayment system has ever really taken off

This is true, but it's not really the same thing as "we don't need micropayments" and "there's no configuration that would work for micropayments." Hell, ad networks are basically micropayment networks, just not for consumers, and the current economic configuration of "everything is free, we just sell all your personal data" is pretty new, so it's not like we haven't already invented new economics for the internet.

> All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. Not from consumers wanting to send them.

Well, yes, but that's every kind of payment in the world - in just about every transaction in the economy, it's the people producing the thing that want money for the thing, not the consumers who want to pay them.

Less glibly, the current economic arrangement of the internet is eight shades of fucked. Nobody's getting paid for their work, content on the internet has sprinted to the lowest, shittiest, clickbaitiest denominator, social networks are incentivized to tear society apart so people spend more time hate-scrolling, and GenAI is coming to hoover up any of the remaining scraps individuals could've possibly been getting for their content. The fuckup of the last 50-odd years of economic policy is the monomaniacal focus on the individual as a consumer and the absolute exclusion of the individual as a producer from policy. If you want a good economy, you need to pay people for things.

The good news is there's a revitalization of just fucking paying people for things - Patreon's a good example, there's a whole lot of new writer-owned sites making good enough money to be sustainable (defector, autopian, 404media, etc), and generally there seems to be a much larger appetite for paying for things than the last 20 years of the internet would have lead one to believe.

I genuinely believe that a system in which users could easily pay small amounts of money for content they're enjoying and producers could easily get compensated for their work on reasonable terms without the friction of building a durable (subscription) relationship and without the machinery in the middle taking 30% from both sides would be transformative. We're nowhere near it, but man, we sure have tried the other ways, and they're all pretty crap.

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

#50

Post by throw10920 »

Hizonner wrote: post #19
swagmoose wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, I do. If you really want micropayments, then use one of the newer, better base systems that do the same things better on every metric, including not ripping through half a percent of the electricity generated in the world. Even if Bitcoin were the only choice available, micropayments aren't needed desperately enough to justify the climate impact. But in fact it's not.

> including not ripping through half a percent of the electricity generated in the world.

Lightning network consumes half of the energy on the planet?

Because L402 pretty clearly states that it uses Lightning and not plain Bitcoin. Using the power consumption of all Bitcoin would be deceptive and dishonest.

Post reply on HN