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

l402.org

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

#101

Post by positiveblue »

JohnFen wrote: post #95
giobox wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, the answer is "I do not know"

Now, if I had to guess, this are "a new kind of cookies" so they just took a name that went with it (like they did with biscuits https://www.biscuitsec.org/)

There are many chances that they got he name wrong and they meant Macaron (with one O instead of two). Those are "layered" cookies, which bring some resemblance on how "caveats" can be understood.

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

#102

Post by ianburrell »

nanomonkey wrote: post #91

It's too bad it's built upon the Lightning Network and not using GNU Taler for payment processing.

Does Taler uses local currency instead of its own coin? That is a better solution since I don't think creators or consumers want to use Bitcoin. I think using Bitcoin adds extra friction to process. It sounds like L402 requires buying Bitcoin in wallet.

Creators want to get paid in local currency so they can pay their rent. They probably don't want to speculate in Bitcoin. They want their income to be stable and not vary based on Bitcoin prices. They can automatically convert Bitcoin but that adds an extra step.

Consumers also want to pay in local currency. They don't want the prices to vary with Bitcoin, or their wallet to lose value.

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

#103

Post by Hizonner »

DINKDINK wrote: post #82
throw0101d wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If censorship resistance and reliability are your metrics, there really isn't a serious competitor. Given the public ledger of Bitcoin, I would hardly say it has "censorship resistance". On that metric I would think Monero or some such would be better: * https://www.investopedia.com/tech/five-most-private-cryptocu...

>Given the public ledger of Bitcoin, I would hardly say it has "censorship resistance". Conflates two orthogonal issues: Identifiable payment vectors and publishing preservation / ability to be censored.

Finding and shooting the people publishing certain transactions is a fabulous way of censoring those transactions.

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

#104

Post by Hizonner »

throw10920 wrote: post #50
Hizonner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lighting is built on Bitcoin. Using Lightning encourages Bitcoin, and in fact requires doing transactions on the base Bitcoin chain. In fact, if Lightning-based Web micropayments caught on, it would drive the base transaction volume over the hard cap that's imposed by the current Bitcoin protocol.

And it turns out that Bitcoin's energy usage responds not to the transaction volume, but to the total available miner income: transaction fees plus total block rewards. Rewards still dominate. Driving the transaction volume up is at best not going to reduce them, but the bigger issue is giving the Bitcoin chain a reason to exist.

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

#105

Post by Hizonner »

snapplebobapple wrote: post #58
throw10920 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

no, it's just that there is a subset of environmentalists that are totally unhinged and think they know better than everyone what should and shouldn't get an energy allotment. Rather than calmly advocating for raising the carbon tax until the externalities present in carbon emission are priced (and seeing what uses are actually cut in the face of proper pricing), they take to any social media they can to complain abo…

Goodness, child. What I suggested was that people shouldn't voluntarily support a stupid and wasteful project like Bitcoin (especially when, again, there are alternatives that are superior in every way including carbon).

YOU are the only one talking about coercion. Perhaps that says something about your mindset.

But OK. It turns out I'm not opposed to what you suggest. By all means, let's go ahead and raise carbon taxes high enough to drive emissions down low enough that we all parboil at least a bit later in the game. That should happen regardless of Bitcoin. We can start by raising them above their current median worldwide level of (checks notes) zero. This will, of course, involve overcoming the political obstacles that have kept them from catching on, but sure, great.

I haven't run any numbers, but I'm guessing that any meaningfully effective carbon tax is going to be higher than the Bitcoin block rewards you could get from the electricity the carbon represents... and that such a tax would drive the price of electricity in general up enough that Bitcoin fees would put even Lighting out of reach of most users.

In a sane, functioning market, that would kill Bitcoin, since there are cheaper and more effective alternatives. But I imagine it'd still stick around the way it always has, as a speculative vehicle for would-be rent seekers. Seems like there's no greatest fool out there in the Bitcoin market.

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

#106

Post by Ekaros »

mrguyorama wrote: post #99
jancsika wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pe…

Even more so consumers want things free... Or as cheap as they can get...

Subscriptions are one option when they are less hassle than alternatives.

And they already know where things will end up. Now it might be cents to get something, but soon there will be adds and after that the price will go up. Probably to full units...

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

#107

Post by Ekaros »

wongarsu wrote: post #41
fragmede wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is 1-3$ really a micropayment? I think that is reasonably regular payment. Micropayment would be something like 1-10 cents...

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

#108

Post by fragmede »

mrguyorama wrote: post #99
jancsika wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pe…

so put the 10 cent button in the middle, or at the end of the article?

microtransactions exist within the realm of individual video games already though. spend $10 to get 5000 in-game tokens and 150 tokens gets you better gear.

for the calorie and cost conscious rice eater, why should I pay $10 for a bowl when I'm only going to eat half? per-grain is ridiculous, but a la carte pricing on food isn't. Not everyone is a fan of buffets.

I don't want to pay for a whole newspaper when I'm just reading the whatever section, and micropayments would let me do that. Whether or not that's a good thing for the newspaper is a different question.

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

#109

Post by fewsats »

ianburrell wrote: post #102
nanomonkey wrote: post #91

It's too bad it's built upon the Lightning Network and not using GNU Taler for payment processing.

Does Taler uses local currency instead of its own coin? That is a better solution since I don't think creators or consumers want to use Bitcoin. I think using Bitcoin adds extra friction to process. It sounds like L402 requires buying Bitcoin in wallet. Creators want to get paid in local currency so they can pay their rent. They probably don't want to speculate in Bitcoin. They want their income to be stable and not…

> I don't think creators or consumers want to use Bitcoin. That's right.

> Consumers also want to pay in local currency. Taproot Assets will bridge this.

In Fewsats for example the user prices the services and gets the payouts in $ by default.

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

#110

Post by nanomonkey »

ianburrell wrote: post #102
nanomonkey wrote: post #91

It's too bad it's built upon the Lightning Network and not using GNU Taler for payment processing.

Does Taler uses local currency instead of its own coin? That is a better solution since I don't think creators or consumers want to use Bitcoin. I think using Bitcoin adds extra friction to process. It sounds like L402 requires buying Bitcoin in wallet. Creators want to get paid in local currency so they can pay their rent. They probably don't want to speculate in Bitcoin. They want their income to be stable and not…

I believe the Merchant (Payee) and User (Payer) can choose whatever currency they want to put in their wallet, and it's up to the Exchange to do the conversion. The nice thing is that the payer is anonymous while the merchants account is visible, so it is likely to be accepted by nation states that still want to track taxable transactions.
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