L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by Hizonner » Tue, Jul 16, 2024, 7:39 PM UTC

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…

At that time, "micropayments" meant payments on the order of less than a cent. Chaum's system didn't try to do that.

I don't know exactly what "micropayments" means to people now. I get the impression it's more on the order of a dollar. But DigiCash really wasn't even meant to do large volumes of payments that small. I don't think a system like that has ever really been tried.

It's true that any kind of pay-per-use would be a hard, hard sell, though. Who wants to have to think about whether every click is worth the nickel it's going to cost? But it's also true that people don't like to buy subscriptions. So now we're in advertising hell. Which nobody likes either, to the point where a double digit percentage of users are blocking ads.

I think advertising took off because there was no coordination problem; nobody had to ask the consumer about whether to deploy it. And for larger payments everybody already had credit cards, so there was no onboarding issue.

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

#112

Post by ballofrubber » Tue, Jul 16, 2024, 7:48 PM UTC

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.

PoW makes green energy investments possible. Today. https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/_b_Green_...

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

#113

Post by throw0101d » Tue, Jul 16, 2024, 8:56 PM UTC

DINKDINK wrote: post #80

throw0101d wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? Using wasted energy at scale doesn't seem to cause significant CO2 emissions […] There is no such thing as "wasted energy". The fact that cryptocurrency mining exists means there is load on the grid, which needs to be given supply. If that load/demand goes away, then the supply can be reduced or shutdown. I.e. , if there is no demand the power would not be generated in the first place.

>There is no such thing as "wasted energy". Your argument's basis is detached from reality: https://orientalnewsng.com/global-gas-flare-heightened-by-15... Thankfully, there are market participants who are capturing this previously-wasted energy and putting it to use: https://hashrateindex.com/blog/flared-gas-bitcoin-mining-101...

How many coins were mined in 2023? How many transactions were completed in 2023? What percentage of each used this so-called "wasted energy"? 100%? 75? 35? Other?

And in 2022? In 20221?

How about the miners that are using coal plants?

* https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...

* https://www.indystar.com/story/news/environment/2023/12/05/c...

Is that using "wasted energy"?

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

#114

Post by throw10920 » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 1:47 AM UTC

Hizonner wrote: post #104

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.

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 inc…

> Lighting is built on Bitcoin

So, your 1% figure was Bitcoin in general, not Lightning, and you intentionally used the wrong value to be misleading.

> Using Lightning encourages Bitcoin, and in fact requires doing transactions on the base Bitcoin chain

...which is irrelevant to the fact that you intentionally used extremely misleading language in order to deceive readers into thinking that the same technology that powers L402 consumes 0.5% of the world's energy.

> 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.

What does "caught on" mean? Show us the math, because you clearly can't be trusted to be truthful.

> 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.

I don't see any problems with any of this.

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

#115

Post by throw10920 » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 1:48 AM UTC

Hizonner wrote: post #105

snapplebobapple wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ta…

> Goodness, child.

> Perhaps that says something about your mindset.

This is extremely inappropriate for HN and clearly against the guidelines. Please don't do it.

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

#116

Post by jancsika » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 2:15 AM UTC

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…

Nobody wanted to sit in a cubicle all day playing Minesweeper, either.

But it shipped with Windows, so they did. :)

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

#117

Post by throw10920 » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 2:45 AM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #98

throw10920 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> What if, hear me out, micropayments are a bad solution in total?

Micropayments are clearly theoretically better than a patronage model, and there's very little evidence to suggest that they're either bad or good, so no, there's no reason to believe that they're a bad solution.

> I have not seen anyone actually demonstrate that a micropayment based system

This is a fallacious argument. It simply makes no sense - there's a metric ton of historical evidence that good ideas can fail to materialize either because the technology doesn't exist yet, or because of cultural factors immaterial to the validity of the idea.

> Instead it always seems to be driven by hyper-free market woo and ideology, as if that has worked out so far.

This statement is anti-capitalist drivel without any substance or intelligence behind it, meant to manipulate, with very little truth behind even the implication that micropayments are "hyper-free market" constructs, and a repetition of the earlier fallacy that "not currently successful = bad idea".

Micropayments are a pretty clearly better system than patronage. It scales better (smaller creators are more accurately rewarded for what they produce, instead of the largest creators getting a disproportionately large fraction of revenue), it's fairer to the creators (as their work gets directly rewarded, instead of them effectively having to beg for patronage), it's more sustainable (as creators are rewarded for all of the content that they've produced, instead of just the most recent), it's less guilt-inducing for consumers (who don't need to worry about whether or not their $1/month donation is "fair"), it naturally rate-limits consumers and helps them quantify and/or limit their entertainment time and/or spending, and it allows consumers to "own" their media more.

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

#118

Post by theamk » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 3:37 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #16

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #13

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.

You are forgetting the most important cryptocurrency rule: all this works as long as it's all on-chain and real world is not involved.

No amount of smart contracts or bitcoin magic can prevent me from taking someone's work (say by web scraping), stripping all attribution of original author, putting it on my server, charging people for it, and pocketing all the money.

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

#119

Post by solarkraft » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:47 AM UTC

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…

> Creators want to get paid in local currency

> Consumers also want to pay in local currency

... which are often times different, so there has to be some kind of conversion step (not saying that it should be bitcoin).

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

#120

Post by retardretard » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 10:42 AM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #87

positiveblue wrote: post #65

Disclaimer: 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).

https://research.google/pubs/macaroons-cookies-with-contextu...