It's too bad it's built upon the Lightning Network and not using GNU Taler for payment processing.
L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure
91–100 of 146 posts
Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure
#92Disclaimer: I am the founder of Fewsats, former Lightning Labs employee and owner of the L402.org domain I'd like to clarify a few points and add some context to the discussion. 1) Protocol: While the current implementation of the L402 flow uses macaroons for credentials and Lightning invoices for challenges, the protocol itself is agnostic to these specifics. As long as the challenge has a verifiable "proof of compl…
Unimportant side question: why are they called "macaroons"? I find that a bit offputting in its cutesiness, and the word doesn't even give a hint as to what they are (aside from being a flavor of cookie, I guess).
> aside from being a flavor of cookie, I guess
I suspect you have answered your own question - historically cookies in the browser have been one way to identify and control what a user can access, I'm guessing authors have continued the small baked goods theme in naming their own access token.
Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There was something similar with Coil.com, based on the Web Monetisation API. Basically you paid $5/month, and it was shared on a pro-rata basis between on content you consumed that supported the API. Coil themselves had content lists on their website to discover, but the goal was for the monetisation to happen organically. It failed.
There was also flattr by brokep (one of the Pirate Bay guys), which basically gave you a like button to put on your blog, and your monthly payment was split between all your likes.
Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure
#94Bitcoin is not acceptable in 2024, and Lightning doesn't help. Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody.
> Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody. I'd rather have this than the status quo, which is...Patreon, basically, which is an utterly terrible micropayments platform from both a company-ethics standpoint and a user-experience standpoint. If you're concerned about carbon emissions, then tax energy enough to provide carbon capture to offset those carbon emissions, plus a little on to…
The problem with PoW is that it creates a system where any jurisdiction with uncaptured externalities dominates.
If you have a USA-bitcoin that only accepted blocks by miners verified to be paying real costs for energy, then it would be different. But nobody wants that
If making it "OK" requires global consensus on tax/externality policy, then it isn't ever going to be ok.
Escaping regulation is the point of cryptocurrency.
Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unimportant side question: why are they called "macaroons"? I find that a bit offputting in its cutesiness, and the word doesn't even give a hint as to what they are (aside from being a flavor of cookie, I guess).
> aside from being a flavor of cookie, I guess I suspect you have answered your own question - historically cookies in the browser have been one way to identify and control what a user can access, I'm guessing authors have continued the small baked goods theme in naming their own access token.
Perhaps I needed to be more specific in my question. "It's a flavor of cookie" doesn't satisfy my curiosity. What I really want to know is why a special term was invented for it in the first place.
Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
responding because your first argument is analogous to Sachs' "resource curse," where if you can make money in energy, why do anything else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse it's a good argument, but essentially presumes a nation run by public sector unions and their committees of planners is a desirable end state. 75 years ago dubai was a bunch of tents, and it is now diversifying its economy in a very s…
>but essentially presumes a nation run by public sector unions and their committees of planners is a desirable end state. I get that this is an typical perspective for the HN crowd, but "where do I sign up?" An aspirational goal of civilization is that we should be able to cooperate and efficiently distribute labour, so we aren't all spending all our time trying to outhustle each other. Public sector unions and plann…
inflation doesn't impact the wealthy because their assets are productive and diversified, whereas inflation destroys middle and working classes because their savings are in cash and houses, and there are no productive assets cheap enough or risk adjusted for them to afford other than money market funds.
this exchange we are having reinforces that the objections to PoW and bitcoin are exclusively objections to free and counter-socialist economics, and as a category, their presumptions disqualify them from a basis in reality. if the problem is PoW is not socialist enough, it begs the question in regard to why it should be in the first place- implying it's not actually a thing.
if you model the world as a closed loop, zero-sum, finite redistribution problem, the 10k km container ship journey seems like a risk, but if you have money or something of value, you just hedge it and pick the next supplier.
in markets these are solved problems using futures contracts, and even when it crashes, nobody reverts to cannibalism. I can't say the same for planned economies[1]. Dubai, las vegas, the moon and mars will have similar economies based on currency production whether it's oil or gambling risk or bitcoin, they're the same kind of local resource-based economies.
To put this to rest, there is no niche HN worldview, like most of humanity does to get-by, people who post here generally make stuff. If it weren't it would be Comrade News, where people post about What Is To Be Done, sort of like tumblr and reddit, where nobody does anything and still mainly complains.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...
Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure
#97Earlier 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…
> 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…
> 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.
Nope. Credit cards, in the form of Diner's Club, were invented by Frank McNamara, a millionaire who went to a restaurant for dinner and forgot to bring enough cash. ATMs were conceived by Walter Wriston, CEO of Citibank, because he saw too many people waiting in line at his teller windows for cash. The big push behind FedNow today is from the parts of the U.S. Government that pay out money for tax refunds, medicare, and pensions.
Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure
#98Bitcoin is not acceptable in 2024, and Lightning doesn't help. Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody.
> Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody. I'd rather have this than the status quo, which is...Patreon, basically, which is an utterly terrible micropayments platform from both a company-ethics standpoint and a user-experience standpoint. If you're concerned about carbon emissions, then tax energy enough to provide carbon capture to offset those carbon emissions, plus a little on to…
>Patreon, basically, which is an utterly terrible micropayments platform
What if, hear me out, micropayments are a bad solution in total? I have not seen anyone actually demonstrate that a micropayment based system will result in better production/creation than the patronage system that is working today. Instead it always seems to be driven by hyper-free market woo and ideology, as if that has worked out so far.
Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure
#99Earlier 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…
> 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 bootst…
If micropayments were really that useful to people wanting to USE them, it would be done with steam wallet funds or steam trading cards by now. That pseudo-"payment network" is good enough for illegal casinos yet nobody has ever tried to do micropayments with it, because consumers do not want to pay slices of pennies for everything, because being nickle and dimed is literally a negative idiom
NOBODY wants to pay a penny per grain of rice. People want to pay $10 for a nice bowl full of rice.
VERY FEW CONSUMERS want all news to be stuck behind a five cent paywall before you can even decide whether it's worth that. Consumers WANT to pay for "good journalism" as an abstract service.
Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure
#100Bitcoin is not acceptable in 2024, and Lightning doesn't help. Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody.
Ai friendly protocol, yeah my payment gateway I actually want to be AI resistance