There's zero reason to care about Blockstream Bitcoin. If you want the original design of Bitcoin, that's called Bitcoin Cash now. But there are so many alternatives to choose from. Blockstream Bitcoin has the largest market cap, but literally no other advantages.
I can't imagine the situation has gotten better. How many pieces of web content does a person view in a typical day? 50? 100? Imagine making fifty purchase decisions every day. I think anyone would be exhausted.
Well, to be fair, Ted Nelson designed Xanadu so that everything would be automatic. The design called for everyone to have a single verified identity linked to their payment information, and they could both make and receive payments with automatically. If you copied and pasted (or transcluded, rather) content from one document to another, the authorship information would go with it (assuming that nobody cheated), and your viewers would pay both you and that other author when they viewed the resulting document.
I don’t think it would really work, but it wouldn’t be exhausting either. You wouldn’t have to put in your credit card number and address every time you viewed a document.
The payment friction can be taken away, but before every link I click, I would still be thinking to myself: "Is what I'm about to read worth ten cents?"
Definitely. No one would read replies to their own comments either, because they would have to pay back the money they earned when their interlocuter read their comment.
This is precisely the problem. I subscribed to some sort of a pay-per-article newspaper site some time ago, and the idea of paying 8-17c per article made me fear committing to reading anything. I ended up dropping it.
Really, "micro" payments are not micro at all! "Micro" should mean a thousandth of a dollar at most, with the assumption that volume will make up for the profit.
A pay for access to content model would really only work if it were frictionless. If you have to decide before you read, people would simply say no. If you pay after you read, people would probably say no, too.
On the other hand, in the before times, people paid by the minute to a network provider (such as Compuserve, Genie, AOL, etc) as well as to their phone company to get online. I might consider paying per minute to access some high quality journalism... But then again, probably not, I'm cheap.
As a kid, I was very active on Prodigy's message boards. I remember when they added a per-hour charge to access them. It absolutely wiped the boards out; trying to charge for something people have been getting for free, even "free", doesn't fly.
About a decade ago, there was considerable interest in being able to charge content to your cell phone account. Some of that happened, but it never became a big thing, especially once cell phones went flat-rate.
People who own networks are always frustrated on the relative lack of power they have. There’s always someone who wants a nickel every time you do something.
An internet that is drastically less tied to surveillance capitalism, and where participants directly exchange value with each other instead of through privacy intrusions? Sounds perfect to me.
We do exchange value. Real value. I would not read webpages if I did not get value. Webpages would not be offered if those making them did not get value. Even when there was no commercialism on the Internet at all. Or why people do a lot of things without any money involved. Basing everything on "money" is a scourge. Not to mention the height of inefficiency. Our brains have to deal with something very different instead of the thing itself. Which also lead to a general inability to think about actual things - just "spend more money" to solve something, why even think about the actual things? Money-magic thinking.
This isn't strictly true. It's only true if the entity creating the website needs to extract a monetary profit. Plenty of people make websites (and other products) and happily share them in a community. The benefit they draw is in the act of creating and sharing.
Yep. Real communities exist, and when they do we enjoy contributing time and energy to support the group. For better and worse, the opensource ecosystem depends on this community spirit. So does HN and the tech blogging sphere. I don’t take the time to write a blog post for money. I do it because I want to be part of the conversation happening amongst my peers.
Adding explicit commerce to every conversation devalues and corrodes our social bonds.
People do things for free when it benefits them. Relying on people to do things for free as a way to organize society is doomed to failure. The moment you have to do something, whether you want to or not, is when it becomes work. And people don’t want to be required to do things they don’t want to do for free. It has never worked in the history of humanity.
P2P networks and decentralized services have historically suffered because they relied on generous volunteers who donate their time and money (via resource allocation) to benefit the network. Blockchain / crypto is a mechanism to introduce financial elements into p2p networks. The experiment is ongoing, but there has been more advancement in p2p tech in the last 5 years than previous 20.
Money is an abstraction of value. So I don't see how you praise "real value"(whatever that is) on the one hand and disparage monetary valuation as a scourge. Assessing something's value to you on a personal level is functionally no different than attaching a figure to something's worth whether that be in dollars, gold, time, or some other quantity or unit.
Which is greatly overvalued because it gives you the illusion and convenience to use numbers. Which "frees" you from actually thinking about the problem. Everything is a finance problem (and when you understand finance and management you understand everything).
See, I don't understand you either. It makes no sense to me how soooo many intelligent people could fall for something so silly and not see how deep inside a hole they are standing.
Like all models, it's a really great tool for the right job. Humans tend to forget about terms and conditions, when finding something worked well they ignore the fine print.
Thanks, I hate everything about this future internet. Let's just have a world where every single Internet transaction involves burning absurd amounts of energy to perform proof-of-work. It'll be great. Yes, sure, sure, ETH is trying to move to something else less absurdly wasteful, get back to me when that's not being pushed back on by miners who're pissed they'll make less money if that happens.
Not only memes but individuals’ identities can become speculative assets via platforms like Clout Market and BitClout, which allow creators to mint themselves as NFTs.
I especially hate this part of it. Ye gods.
Oh and the part where the current web is dismissed as largely controlled by large corporate entities, with absolutely no words spared as to why the future all-crypto hellscape will be a perfect utopia inherently resistant to the sticky, hungry fingers of corporations, is a good part to hate too. We all thought "Internet 1.0" was going to be gloriously free forever, then corporations stepped in. "Internet 2.0" was gonna save us from them and now we just have new corporations mining our eyeballs for ad profits forever. "Web3 is decentralized and inherently monetized at its core through tokenization" - well that sure looks like a great place to build a middleman who provides part of that service, with their hands out for their take on both sides of every transaction, doesn't it? How much of every "art" "sale" on an NFT platform goes to the platform?
I'll stick to putting my stuff online for free and having enough folks supporting me on Patreon to pay my bills, thanks anyway.
PoS is drastically cheaper to do a 51% attack than PoW as the attack only costs the 51% cost of carry and insignificant transaction fees to enter and leave the position compared to having to organize the purchase of and rental fee for 51% of the hash rate for the target block time.
Then maybe crypto isn't actually a feasible technology. Just because people get a dopamine hit from the money they make off it doesn't mean it's good for society when your burning energy the size of a small country to do sub par amounts of transactions per minute.
I've seen crypto be used largely for flash money grabs and little else since the entire thing started and I'm largely convinced that until volatility, speed and energy consumption are fixed it will only remain in that realm until it's inevitably cracked down on by various governments.
Those are some pretty big issues to solve and personally I think ETH is poised with PoS to solve those issues, or so I've been led to believe, and offer utility in those every day transactions but I'm not holding my breath because of issues like that that you've pointed out and people who only view it to be used for that aforementioned money grabs.
When I've used crypto I've used ETH exclusively for my beliefs there, but I'm really not all that convinced this will ever be more than a novelty in current form.
I'm no expert in the field and I don't even generally follow crypto more than the passing news article, but this continues to be my general perception, especially when things like Doge are surging in value with really no discernable economic basis.
https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000219ab540356cbb839cbe0... shows the current total value staked for ETH2 at about $10B USD (4M ETH); 51% is $5.1B USD (2M ETH) with around 115M ETH in existence. Aave has about 0.6M ETH available to loan out at 0.76% APR (https://app.aave.com/reserve-overview/ETH-0xc02aaa39b223fe8d...)
This is about a 0.01% interest rate per hr (8760 compound periods per yr) https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/financial/periodi...
Assuming the rest of the (1.4M) ETH to be staked could be obtained by loaning and converting from other staked Aave assets currently totaling at around $7.5B USD for the same rate and same period, then the interest fee for a 1 hr 2M ETH loan is: $5.1B USD * 0.0001 = $5(10)K USD. Over 50 hedge funds have the $6.375B USD or more in assets (https://www.pionline.com/interactive/largest-hedge-fund-mana...) that could provide for Aave's max LTV of 80% to borrow the $5.1B USD of ETH. Alternatively, a PoW attack on ETH assuming NiceHash, which currently only has 7% of the total ETH hash rate available, rates for 1 hr is ~$2M USD (https://www.crypto51.app note out of date figures). So, relatively the current ETH2 PoS attack cost is around 4 times smaller than the ETH PoW attack cost or an absolute difference of about $1.5M USD, which seems like a drastic difference in cost, but YMMV, especially considering your relationship with Cardano.
Another case considering the requirement that the existing 51% could not be loaned would require just over doubling the outstanding staked assets, which is more than Aave's current $7.5B available to loan, to a total staked ETH2 of $20B USD again assuming no previously controlled stake. But, assuming the same the interest rate, the fee for a 1 hr 4M ETH loan is: $10B USD * 0.0001 = $1M USD. Still, half the amount compared to the PoW.
On the other hand PoS can provide protection against some 51% attacks, go read the Avalanche whitepapers. It can uphold safety (but not liveness) guarantees even when the attacker exceeds 51%.
The differentiating factor here will ultimately be about quantifying how much energy is spent, and therefore how "official" such an interaction is. Less energy = very unofficial, a lot of energy = very official. This has a lot of implications, but also makes the quality of data much more apparent and therefore allows markets to openly buy and sell on such metrics. This is already done, but very opaquely and you're not being paid for it. In other words we're already burning energy to verify the quality of data in one form or another.
As an aside this also reflects how money is now arriving at a point where it's more closely reflecting its nature as a measure of stored energy. This also has interesting implications for organization, and how money is spent.
Maybe a stupid question: PoS means mining will make 0 money instead of a little less, right? Maybe you meant the pruning update, but I'm curious about later this summer. They're turning a 3-body problem of stakeholders (owners, users, and miners) into a 2-body problem (owners, users) which is owned either by early adoption or early wealth, from my amateur viewpoint. I'm not sure that this is a great thing long-term, but I also don't know what alternatives exist for Eth given that PoW has a lot of issues!
I do have a stake in mostly Eth but it is sized for fun.
As a fellow human who says “ye gods” so much I have a keyboard shortcut for it, I just want to say how delighted I was to read someone else use the phrase. :)
I think I need to up my shortcut game, I just have shortcuts for shit like "the basic advice I have given out on the Illustrator subreddit several thousand times" and "my website". :)
You can use layer 2 technologies like state channels to boost the efficiency of the market, you don't need every single transaction to happen on-chain. Skynet is a platform that does this already - every upload and download makes between 30 and 300 crypto transactions, including downloads that are only fetching a few kilobytes of data.
It ends up being efficient enough to run at scale. Skynet currently has over 100,000 active users, and is doing something like 300,000,000 crypto transactions per month. This could easily scale another 100x without increasing the energy footprint of the system, and quite possibly 10,000x as well.
The promise of crypto isn't that there won't be any middlemen, it's that you'll be in control of your own relationship with the people you follow. Right now your relationship with the content creators you follow on YouTube is under the management of the YouTube platform itself. YouTube decides what counts as acceptable, what needs to be de-monetized, and what needs to be de-platformed. In the crypto world, those decisions are left in the hands of the content creators and their viewership, which imo creates a much healthier public grounds for free speech.
The best part is that it's all opt-in. If Patreon + YouTube is what works for you, then more power to you; there's no pressure to switch.
Why not just self host if the goal is to get off something like youtube? Not sure what crypto gets the creator other than the off chance the speculators cause it to surge and the creator with large holdings sees a huge payday. Even then, an opportunity for the creator to gamble is a poor argument, that coin might never bear much fruit compared to a bet that's more certain, like betting on the continued success of the global economy, which has managed to pay off even in a global pandemic.
I just draw comics and post them online. Youtube's not involved in any stage of this. I'm pretty much in control of my relationship with my followers without any blockchain already.
> Yes, sure, sure, ETH is trying to move to something else less absurdly wasteful, get back to me when that's not being pushed back on by miners who're pissed they'll make less money if that happens.
ETH proof of stake is already live since December 1st, 2020, and it runs as a separate chain at the moment. There will be a "docking process" in which the state of the current proof of work chain will be moved to use this new chain's consensus algorithm. This cannot be stopped by miners. https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-2-0-beacon-chain-goes-live...
The Internet as we know it was built on the back of someone else's free.
I am older than most of the crew here and can remember when the majority of the telnetting and IRCing we did was against .edu domains, using the disk space of a Sparc 1, sucking up someone else's bandwidth. In February of 1993, someone very much like Don Draper woke, inexplicably but smiling, with the first morning erection in years as the <img> tag was invented; banner ads slouched towards CERN to be born. NetZero told us that the Internet should be free. Email, free of expensive stamps, flew 'round the world. And Advertisers and Spammers and the Attention Economy held illimitable dominion over all.
We have paid an enormous price for the "free" Internet and that price has been hidden from us through layers of affiliates and misdirection and double-Irish. Rudderless algorithms decide whether your fame career has any kind of money associated with it and for precisely how long. When the axe descends, the only sentence can be "You have violated the ToS."
I am not sure what the alternative would look like, but for anyone with complaints about the current situation, it is important to examine just how we got here.
Ye gods, I haven’t heard anyone reference NetZero in ages. My mates and I got everyone we knew to use it. I still remember when, in the midst of us studying and discussing philosophy, we wondered if NetZero was really free or if we were just paying for it with something other than money. Thus began my unceasing hatred of the advertising-driven internet.
The free structure of the Internet was the only way it could have appeared and is still the only way most of it can operate, for good or for ill.
Even more, people attacking the free part tend to evoke an image of all the other manipulative parts of modern media vanishing if people somehow pay. But the Wall Street Journal and to a lesser extent the New York Times, do their best to be paid but it's the same sort of product, trying to eyeballs. Spotify has a paid and an advertisement based service. It's the same service. Media, free or not, is based on attention. In fact, in the present and earlier eras, advertising gave more money than subscriptions for all the subscription based magazines - subscriptions are valuable to show advertisers your loyal customs.
What's the solution for the problematic of modern media? I could recommend this text but it takes concentrated reading to get through.
Before the web, newspapers, magazines and other media could afford writers, editors and journalists, and the effect of the web was for print media to gut its infrastructure and budgets in favor of intern bloggers and clickbait because it couldn't be free and afford to compete with random no-budget sites and Twitter feeds otherwise. The news used to be worth paying for, and for some reason people seem to have convinced themselves that the media was never better than it is now, but before everything was on the web, it really was better.
The free web has democratized media and publishing in many radical and transformative ways, but in the process of unseating the old media gatekeepers has also completely destroyed the quality of journalism and long-form content, worldwide.
"Destroyed" may be a too strong word. It may currently be a little hidden below the layer of all the crap out there, but good journalism is not dead and once reasonable payment models have beeb worked out, it can easily come back.
Mind you that this has not been going on for that long. 15-20 years maybe. In the bigger picture, that's nothing.
15 to 20 years is long enough to affect journalists’ ability to provide for their family and save for retirement, and signal to other possible high caliber journalists that journalism is not a viable path for them.
Confirmed: I've spent a long time trying to start a career in journalism in the UK and it is simply not possible. Freelance rates have hit close to zero unless you already know editors in person. Jobs are increasingly scarce as newspaper staffs shrink. Local papers which once had fifty employees will now have ten or fifteen. The descent has been brutal, the result is the foreseeable end of journalism as a fully fledged profession. Well, for those who don't know editors personally.
We have dramatically fewer journalists now, but a great deal more news. There's more noise now but there's also more of what journalists traditionally did. It isn't great if you relied on journalism specifically to pay the bills but the rest of the system doesn't seem to have suffered too bad.
How are fewer journalists accomplishing more journalism? It’s a very time intensive, travel intensive task with high risks.
The idea that a system is fine in which the creators have little means to earn money is crazy to me. Lots of places will just go without the deep, investigative journalism we might have benefited from in the recent past.
> Mind you that this has not been going on for that long. 15-20 years maybe. In the bigger picture, that's nothing.
We're all impatient, though. 15 years is about how long I'm an adult. 20 years is about how long I'm able to make use of news. If the way out of this mess is going to take another 20 years, it's not going to be of much use to me :). "In the long run" is good, but "within the productive lifetime of people concerned about it" would be best.
I'm not sure that's the whole story. I feel that political leadership really woke up to how the cult of personality and limited attention spans could be used to manipulate the message for the masses.
It started much earlier in the US I believe but came into full swing in the UK with Tony Blair's Labour. [0] you can be sure she wasn't the only one, just someone that got caught.
News media in particular has become so polarised and only really feeds into it's own respective echo chambers, to the point where it's all but useless as an impartial presentation of facts and opinions.
There is still some great instructional and educational content on Web and it feels for the moment all of these issues are still limited to news and entertainment.
The attention spans have been shortening since Gutenberg invented the printing if not well before that.
Television ushered the era of contentless spew well before the Internet. The Internet gave more variety than the TV world but indeed devastated the print journalism world that had existed before.
The point is this all part of a long term trend. That said, more media generally means that there is a significant amount of decent content still available but, yeah, the quality of the content produced by journalist institutions continues to decline. You'd need an extreme reversal of overall social trends to change the sound-bite factor here.
The internet was born as a military R&D program and remains one today. What is the "free" web? What is the "free" structure of the internet? I assume "free" is not used here to mean "fault-tolerant" or "capable of routing around failed nodes"
The alternative on offer in the 80s definitely did make every transaction a financial transaction: the phone company.
We can have a look at what the world might have been without the Internet's decision to build without a billing layer, and indeed to route around billing, without needing a time machine. It would have been a faster version of Prestel and Minitel. Fully centralised, with national borders. All the TOS issues would still be there, except that because the billing system knows your address abusing your account could get you prosecuted.
If payments had been built into the structure of the internet, they could have been done in an optional way. Per memory, that's how the original RFCs looked?
Which means you still would have had free content, as well as paid.
The fascinating historical bit is when you follow the cross-border issue... it would have required efficient, scalable (small to large amounts) international monetary transfers between individuals.
And that would have been as, or more, transformational than the internet.
CoL arbitrage. Individual international mobility. Remittance fee slashing. In the late 1980s. The mind boggles.
The current cryptocurrency system (cryptography itself was subject to arms control until 1991!) relies on being able to use a credit card to transfer real money to a (usually foreign) exchange, do some transactions, and then receive a wire back with the real money. All of which are products of the Internet itself.
It would have! But the other way to look at it is that the benefit of the internet was so great over what came before, that it might have had a chance of succeeding!
> We have paid an enormous price for the "free" Internet and that price has been hidden from us through layers of affiliates and misdirection and double-Irish. Rudderless algorithms decide whether your fame career has any kind of money associated with it and for precisely how long. When the axe descends, the only sentence can be "You have violated the ToS."
I don't really think it would be any different if we paid. Look at sports for example. That's paid via subscriptions, tickets, merchandise, state sponsorship and so on, but it's still just as plastered with ads as the Internet. I think anywhere exploitation is possible, it will happen. If we paid, it'd just make some people even richer than they are now.
That's the thing. Ads will always generate revenue. If you can also get people to pay for your content, great. So then you have two sources of revenue for the same product.
But some services do manage to do without ads; Netflix is the big one that comes to mind. Hulu has an ad-free version if you pay more. Spotify has a free ad-supported plan or a paid ad-free plan. Then you have things in the middle like HBO Max: most (all?) shows have ads before them, but it's an ad promoting another HBO show.
So clearly paid & ad-free is possible. What's not clear to me is why it's possible for some things and not for others.
To use your sports example, perhaps without ads ticket and merchandise prices would have to rise to the point where enough people wouldn't buy them such that it would cause a problem? I don't know what the contribution to revenue is for ticket sales vs. ads.
> But some services do manage to do without ads; Netflix is the big one that comes to mind.
There’s a metric ton of ads in Netflix, they’re built into the content. All the extra time in a car chase focusing on the car logo and the characters talking about a car’s feature are not part of the plot.
I find it even worse than ad breaks, since the content itself gets worse, and you waste your time. Although, I know TV networks were doing heavy product placement even before streaming came around, so they had ad breaks, ads in the show, and subscriber revenue.
You answered your own question in your opening paragraph. People will keep pushing ads as long as they can get away with it.
Despite what marketeers say, having no advertisements is a huge differentiator for a service, and people is willing to pay extra for it. But it won't happen in markets where it's difficult for new players to enter. I'm not familiar with sports broadcasting but I can bet this is the case.
It's the same with Apple's current shift to privacy, or Microsoft's doings in open-source. Sure, they know privacy and OSS is the ethical thing to do, but they're not doing it because it's "right". They're doing it to gain customers. If either Apple or Microsoft became monopolies you can bet they would cease doing privacy/OSS it overnight.
> I'm not familiar with sports broadcasting but I can bet this is the case.
I wasn't thinking just broadcasting but also venues, jerseys and everything. Look at a typical NASCAR or football game, ads are everywhere at the event.
I think you're right though. There has to be competition or regulation, otherwise they can get away with it and as you both say they will.
On the other hand, I remember folks setting up peering agreements.
What if that model had taken over?
How about a neighborhood hub where you pay someone to put in a small fiber run from your house and choose a vendor who can run your traffic back and forth from that hub? Or maybe there's a citywide ring network everyone hooks into and you pay for out-of-city data?
Or what if most cellphone data defaulted to wifi first? No cellphone plan required if no cellular connection?
Most of the stuff people do online is non-local though. If any non-negligible amount of traffic was just staying in your local city, ISPs would have already optimized for it with direct local peering. As it stands though, it’s so little traffic that it’s not even worth a circuit in a local IXP.
It's a chicken-and-egg thing, methinks. When I started using the Internet in the early 00's, it was over a metered connection - but my ISP had a FTP server with content where traffic was unmetered, so people could download music and movies even on a meager data cap of 500MB (cheapest plan - I have fond memories of exceeding every metered plan by 2X, causing surcharges until my parents finally caved in and went for unmetered.)
This was later replaced by a private BitTorrent tracker as the government briefly tried to crack down on piracy a few years later; traffic between peers in that tracker was unmetered as well, as they were all clients of the same ISP.
This introduced a lot of people in my city to torrenting; a few more years down the road, data caps were relaxed and eventually removed, another ISP's local tracker evolved into the nationwide filesharing platform that my peers still cherish. (Sure, Hollywood got screwed, but there was minimal value they could extract from our market in the first place, considering the vastly different standard of living.)
Of course, I hear the ISP landscape in the USA is a little different; and with worldwide content streaming services like Netflix and Spotify being paid monthly, usage patterns have surely changed. Maybe today's equivalent would be local ISPs playing the privacy card and providing self-hosted encrypted NextCloud instances?
I'm not sure what percentage of local traffic would this amount to, but it's not that difficult to imagine a world where the atomization of society driven by the non-locality of the Internet is offset by the fact that your cloud services are at least hosted in the same jurisdiction as yourself, and where the Web serves as an augmentation to local communities. (My dark Balkan side does not discount the possibility of walking into one's ISP's office and kicking their asses for fucking with one's connectivity or data, legal consequences notwithstanding - good luck pulling that on Comcast, or flying to Dublin or Frankfurt or wherever to kick Google's ass!)
Maybe it's a little difficult to imagine how this can be competitive to the current globalized landscape though. It would effectively go against the interests of the same entities that fund the underlying infrastructural development, and besides political pushback (e.g. my ISP contract prevents me from redistributing the connection to my neighbors, although I hear this scheme is nonetheless widespread elsewhere) there might also be purely technical scaling issues (such as the existing technology simply being poorly adapted to whatever novel model of organizing connectivity eventually sticks.)
This is true. We are being psychologically manipulated by extraordinarily skilled operators to redirect our attention from our family, friends, and local community toward these non-local (more lucrative) concerns. This makes the manipulators a vast amount of money.
Maybe we should think about the associated negative externalities and act accordingly.
Peering agreements (and the eventual imbalance of them as the internet reorganized) is largely what led to the situation that we call "net neutrality".
> When the axe descends, the only sentence can be "You have violated the ToS."
> I am not sure what the alternative would look like, but for anyone with complaints about the current situation, it is important to examine just how we got here.
One alternative could be to restore the authority of the processes that societies have evolved over the last two hundred years - courts. Given that modern social networks essentially act as public space, a gateway between the digital and meatspace world, they should also be regulated by independent authorities.
>One alternative could be to restore the authority of the processes that societies have evolved over the last two hundred years - courts. Given that modern social networks essentially act as public space, a gateway between the digital and meatspace world, they should also be regulated by independent authorities.
That would set a precedent that any site with any user supplied content must require intervention and approval by a court before any form of moderation can take place, or at least that all sites must require court approval for their terms of service. which by extension means all speech on the web will be under direct government control. That would include Hacker News and any blog that allows comments.
This is a much greater degree of control over freedom of speech than exists in public spaces in the real world - where people can speak freely generally without government enforced moderation, and in any case websites are not public spaces. So on top of everything else, governments would assert unprecedented control over free enterprise and freedom of association.
And it doesn't matter where you decide to draw the line, perhaps only requiring this level of regulation for sites with a certain number of users, this being Hacker News I shouldn't have to point out the potential slippery slope in having the government decide where that line is drawn.
The situation we're in now is bad, but needing a judge to sign off on every moderation action would be much, much worse.
> The situation we're in now is bad, but needing a judge to sign off on every moderation action would be much, much worse.
I had not meant that every moderation action would need a judge, but that every person should have the legal right to appeal and plead their case in front of a judge instead of hitting stone walls.
At least in Germany, you can file a c&d order ("Abmahnung") without ever having to see a court. Seeing a court is the escalation option in case the counter party does not react to your Abmahnung.
And besides: that access to legal protection is what taxes and court fees are paying for!
Making every moderation decision potentially liable to lawsuits is functionally no different than require a judge to sign off on every decision, since it creates the incentive for everyone to litigate every decision they disagree with, no matter how small.
But nothing social media platforms are doing is illegal. A judge is just going to tell you that you agreed to the platform's terms of service and they have the right, including Section 230 indemnity, to moderate content on their platform.
> Given that modern social networks essentially act as public space
But that's the thing: they aren't public spaces. The number of people which have their content hosted on a private platform is inconsequential to the legal nature of the platform. Social media are very much subject to legal regulations and lawmaking.
Calling a space which is governed by a private entity that doesn't represent you / answer to you, as "public" is a contradiction. The worst you can do is persist this notion to a point where enough people believe they are public spaces. That's the most direct way of legitimizing their dominance in modern telecommunication networks.
> That's the most direct way of legitimizing their dominance in modern telecommunication networks.
In Germany, telecommunications providers are actually banned from terminating your access by law (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tkg_2004/__45k.html); the only exceptions are non-payment and spoofing fraud. The reason for this is that access to telecommunication networks is seen as a vital basic right to participate in society.
All of your points really arguments that support social media as publications. Or more to the point: they are a means to publish. Or, even more to the point: they could be seen as private publishers hosting the opinions of others in their own online publications. The affordances provided by social media to billions of people as to how they can publish and what they get to see are... really just editorial choices.
Why is that contentious? Because that's exactly the one thing social media try to avoid: being seen as mere publishers. That would have massive implications:
I think the current situation is a state of equilibrium brought about by technical limitations. A typical user has limited bandwidth, and limited storage. That makes the client server model very effective for something like video sharing or a social network and defaults to a particular economic model. But something like messaging can work more like a message queue. The basic storage and bandwidth requirements are low so you just download everything. Facebook, Google and Microsoft (Office 365) benefit hugely from this. But maybe Apple, or Telco's could break this pattern. Sell devices with massive amounts of storage that no one will use on their own. A 1TB IPhone with a good internet connection could make encrypted messaging a possibility for media rich apps or even make P2P possible.
> A 1TB IPhone with a good internet connection [...] P2P possible
Battery life would be terrible. Personally, I'm still waiting for the coupling of mobile and "personal servers".
Micro servers at the exclusive use of one person, in an attractive form factor, made easy to use. Products that you can buy in an electronics store, such as a smartphone or a laptop.
I may be in this age group or I may have just used the same technologies around the same time period. When people say the internet is "free" it carries, typically, one of two meanings:
- Free from control. Governments are a tricky thing. You trust them until you don't; especially if your country has a history of distrust for authority.
- Free as in beer. This was always more of an illusion than anything. The IRC servers you spoke of had to be networked and hosted. The services had to be developed and reworked over the years. People had to staff the network to keep it free from abuse. The networks were never free, but they also never had aims to monetize.
Our friends in marketing and the people who run dubious spam businesses recognized that people are drawn to free and made a business case out of it. You can't fix people being drawn to free, but you can fix the definition of what it means to say you offer a "free" service. For instance, what Facebook and Google provide isn't free - they broker your data in exchange for nifty services. What if you had to say that, and weren't allowed to use the word free?
I don't think the future lies in non-freedom, I think it lies in gatekeeping what it means to be free.
The Brave browser is an interesting first stab at this. Another project named Permission.io is also trying to reward users for their time and attention also (disclaimer, I work on it).
But ultimately what I find most fascinating about this article is blockchains being applied to all interactions- accessing web pages, doing this on web pages, everything. I'm thinking we'll all have wallets that constantly process micropayments everywhere we go, money going out, and coming back in, continuously.
Conceptually, I really like the idea of being able to monetise one’s own attention beyond just one’s own time employed.
Ultimately, jt would be super cool to gain a better understanding of one’s own time value beyond just employed work but also leisure and how it might help us to better conceptualise the limited time we have.
Perhaps a less intuitive/instinctive and more quantifiable approach to how we might optimise our time.
Even if the world doesn’t turn into a micropayment dystopia, I would think there’s great scope to utilise strictly voluntary smart contract personal incentives.
Perhaps Jenny Craig turns into a smart contract blockchain platform that unlocks food pellets when the customers performs X. I’m mostly joking.
My first thought is how it might be of value with my kids when it comes to school performance, fitness goals, as well as leisure/fun.
We already do it, but maybe we could do it better.
The ideas expressed in this article should be applied to government. Everything in government should be a financial transaction. I should be able to see a list of what my federal income tax dollars pay for as a percentage of my tax contributions down to the 0.1% mark. Those assessments should be based on the real money government pays not the estimated funds that float around a bill or a budget.
My thinking is that if people actually saw what they are paying for they would advocate for different policies because it feels great to spend other peoples’ money from some magical endless pool of money on programs that at the surface make us feel good.
The US federal budget's spending allocations, both upfront and actual, are publicly available (https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/budget). You know how much money you pay in taxes. This is not difficult to figure out if you were actually interested.
That is not an itemized receipt of what I pay. The accounting arithmetic to produce such is nontrivial. Asking any nontrivial calculation of the general public may as well be fantasy.
For example it would be great to receive a receipt indicating that I paid $10.12 for school meal programs (0.31% of my tax contributions) if I don’t have children in school.
The problem with this idea is your premise that you shouldn't have to pay for school meals if you don't have children. Paying for school benefits everyone, even the childless, because it's good for society. The idea of itemized taxes reduces your interaction with others and society down to a capitalist transaction, which is not a healthy foundation for civilization. People are more than their productivity and your system has no way of accounting for that.
The premise is transparency. People can do whatever they want with that transparency as more informed voters. The only benefit of decreasing transparency in government spending is corruption.
> The problem with this idea is your premise that you shouldn't have to pay for school meals if you don't have children.
Nothing about what parent wrote indicates that they are unwilling to pay for school meals, just that they want to know how much it cost them. Much like most people would want to know how much they are paying for socialised cancer treatments or food banks, but generally wouldn't oppose to paying in the first place.
What actions can you take with that information? Which voters are making their candidate choices down to the dollars and cents level of school lunch (or any single issue) funding?
This all feels much dumber than my perhaps quixotic dream of, get everyone on something like Peertube plus Patreon. I.e. Pay/Tip people who make good stuff. We're not going to arrest you if you don't pay, but you're a jerk if you don't.
Right, the technology for doing micropayments is easy; you just create a "wallet" that people periodically top up with some minimum charge like $10 or $20, and then have websites hook into an API to debit from it. (Venmo, Square Cash, etc. are nearly already set up to do this, and I bet Apple and Google would easily get into that game as well.) But people just don't want to pay. Viewership would drop like a rock if a ad-supported publication were to instead charge even 1 cent per article.
You also have a first-mover disadvantage. No one wants to be the first blog or small newspaper that starts charging in this way, because people will just go elsewhere. To be effective, everyone would have to agree to magically enable this simultaneously.
The major problem with that is you end up with nothing but clickbait articles where the first part is pointless filler designed to hook you in so you buy the paid version.
Is it? Seems to me there are a bunch of questions left unsolved.
For a start, will Visa and Mastercard go along with you using them to make your lower-cost-per-transaction competitor? Won't Apple and Google want to shake you down for their usual 30% ?
If a site gets all its revenue from a micropayment 'partner' won't the partner have massive leverage to alter the deal later and screw the site over?
How do you protect against perverse incentives - like a micropayment of $0.0001 per page encouraging sites to split articles into 20-page slideshows?
Should the payments be automatic or manual? If manual, won't sites get loaded with garish reminders to pay, like youtubers asking for likes and subscribes?
Who will set the rate of payment, and will it vary by media? Should viewing two of Reddit's user-uploaded cat photos cost more than reading one piece of quality investigative journalism? What about super-premium things like pay-per-view sports and computer games?
What sort of records will be kept - will it maintain an itemised list of all the pages I've visited and when, so billing disputes can be resolved?
How will it work for children - can they be given a daily allowance? Will it have loads of parental controls, if I'm happy to pay for some types of content and not others?
Are users going to end up quadruple-paying, where they make a micropayment, watch a youtube ad, watch an ad read by the video creator, and it's a shill video anyway? If you have value-for-money standards, how do they get enforced?
Will people be able to undo their payments if someone hacked their account? What if their kid was using their computer? What if they just thought the article was clickbait and not worth paying for? Can a user view content for free by viewing it then cancelling the charge?
All similar measure miss the fact that current model allow you to charge differently at individual level, and how great an enabler it is. 10s of eyeball/mind time of Bill Gates is very different from that of a student in Africa, but both are able to access same content and hyper-targeting ensures both pay as per their ability.
It has been greatest "socialist" force of our times. A billion may have been spammed with junk/polarising content, but millions are getting real value/upliftment from free Youtube/Google/FB.
No it doesn't. Pay me 50 cents right now with your BAT. You can't. There is no inlet on my end for this BAT without the cruft of me setting up whatever is required. Yet you should be able to, considering we both have computers capable of connecting to each other over the internet. We both have bank accounts or money someplace. I can send you a file with scp trivially right now. Why can't I send you 50 cents over the command line? It remains an unsolved problem.
>There is no inlet on my end for this BAT without the cruft of me setting up whatever is required
>I can send you a file with scp trivially right now.
You'd still have to set up "cruft" for that as well. Generating private keys, enabling port forwarding, configuring sshd, configuring firewall rules. I don't see how setting up some crypto wallet is unreasonable in comparison.
What I was getting at with scp is that every personal computer there is today has some standardized tool along with all needed documentation already built into the device that lets you send a file from point A to point B over the internet. The same isn't true for this BAT, or any other method to send money via the internet.
Right, and while we're on the topic: it's 2020, and I still can't send a file from computer to computer without going via gmail. Why not?
The exception is Airdrop. But with a Windows computer or Android phone on either end, there's (at best) Bluetooth file transfer which is slow, unreliable and painful. Or there's scp (you get the joke, right?)
The point is, the technical infrastructure exists, but nobody has bothered to implement this simple stuff for ordinary users. A testament to the power of the public goods problem to block even simple, long-overdue improvements?
Because there is no widespread electronic equivalent to cash for any currency that does not expose the receiver to expensive issues such chargebacks, disputes, and the legal systems in various countries.
If only the web was supported by visitors contributing to hosting costs of a visited page directly out of their internet bill, instead of advertisement supporting the web, and visitors paying a flat fee to their ISP regardless of their use.
Blogs could be sustained with little readership considering how cheap it is to host a lightweight website that sees little traffic, and larger websites like HN would pay for their hosting and on top of that maybe even have some funds to hire another dang. All of this could come without any advertisement, without dark patterns, tracking, tapping into our subconcious or primitive brain, and all the other evil genius ideas to come out of the advertisement industry. I can't help but think that this would create a better and perhaps less hostile place for everyone.
> [...] and larger websites like HN would pay for their hosting and on top of that maybe even have some funds to hire another dang. All of this could come without any advertisement, without dark patterns, tracking, tapping into our subconcious or primitive brain, and all the other evil genius ideas to come out of the advertisement industry
As long as more traffic still means more profit there would still be plenty incentive for websites to engage in evil tactics against their users, in order to ensure that the users spend as much time as possible on that site.
I too want a web without advertising, but I don’t believe for a second that all of the problems associated with advertising will go away even if advertising itself did. Some problems might disappear, others not, and new problems will appear in the place of problems that did disappear.
After all, there are very many people out there who have gotten really good at coming up with evil tactics. These people would still be out there, and in demand, even if advertising disappeared.
I would say that hosting a blog has an effectively zero monetary cost, that is, not distinguishable from the noise floor of daily spending, like an extra latte. For static blogs, even several completely free options exist.
The real cost of maintaining a blog is the time one spends to compose, edit, proofread, sometimes illustrate a blog post. And no, you don't think about a post only while you're working in it; you think in background, too.
This cost can hardly be remunerated by every reader paying a few cents, unless your readership is in tens of thousands at least, and the money allow you to actually free up some time for writing.
> This cost can hardly be remunerated by every reader paying a few cents, unless your readership is in tens of thousands at least, and the money allow you to actually free up some time for writing.
Extrapolating further, people spend orders of magnitude more time, bandwidth, and server-side CPU resources for everything else they do on the internet: Scrolling JPEGs on social media sites, streaming gigabytes of Netflix movies.
Sending a 100KB blog post page to someone might take 0.00001% as many resources as streaming a 2-hour Netflix movie. If servers were paid according to resources used, blog authors would receive virtually nothing relative to all the multimedia based services.
I just want a tipjar system. I put a small amount in it for the month. And whenever I read a good article I can tipjar it.
Alternatively maybe something that was on dragon’s den BBC : https://gener8ads.com/ , where you get paid for seeing ads or can opt to be completely anonymous.
I really wish micropayments would take off, but psychologically it seems they just don't work. There's a huge chasm between spending $0 and spending even $0.01. The mental effort involved in "taking out your wallet" vs. not doing so is huge.
Meanwhile it seems that most people consider viewing ads to have zero cost to them (whether that's true or not), or use ad-blockers.
There's a huge chasm now, for sure. But only when it comes to online spending. In the real world, if someone offered me something useful for 0.01 I'd pay it without a thought (except for wondering why it's so cheap).
If we can get over the initial weirdness and make it completely seamless (as easy as dismissing a cookie banner) I'm sure people would get used to paying a cent for every blog post they read.
On the other hand, if there's a thousand different micropayment platforms each with a different way of getting past the paywall and of adding funds, then I don't think it'll be an easy path to adoption.
I mean I'd assume it would work similar to pay as you go data, in that you just get charged in the background. Not sure how you'd deal with sites trying to bill their users a ton without the users finding out though - maybe they need to click a button to continue every certain number of requests or amount of data used.
I don't see such requests, no. But they happen every time I turn on the water or anything electrical. They are completely seamless and I get feedback at the end of every month whereby I can think, hmm, I should be more careful to turn off the AC when I'm going out. But on a daily basis I don't have to think about it much. This is what I mean by seamless.
If you're reading 247 different sources of information in an hour, unless you're doing some kind of heavy research, you're probably overloading your brain in any case. How many blog articles can you read in an hour? Less than ten, probably more like 5, if they're actually worth reading.
> If only the web was supported by visitors contributing to hosting costs of a visited page directly out of their internet bill, instead of advertisement supporting the web
Why would this stop ads? In this case, ads still make you more money; your hosting costs just go down a little.
Sadly by paying sites for views whether by advertising or directly from the user you encourage maximizing "engagement" so end up with all the dark patterns, click bait and tracking regardless. Free to play games are a great example of good and bad ways this ends up.
I think the incentives would still be similar in that world. Your goal would be to maximize payment. It you’re paid per view, you’re incentivized to maximize views. Low-grade clickbait would possibly be even worse. If you’re paid by duration of time on a page, you’d maximize engagement/ addictiveness, etc.
* Spam - It will be to expensive to send massive amounts of mail if you pay for it.
* Robocalls - If there is a high cost calling you, then robo calls are discouraged.
* Paid Journalists/News
* Paid Content creators
> Shermin Voshmgir writes that blockchain “introduces a governance layer that runs on top of the current internet, that allows for two people who do not know or trust each other to reach and settle agreements over the web.”
It allows them to transfer crypto coins between them, but you still have the problem of actually delivering something phisically if it's a physical purchase, and blockchain will not help with that at all... if you settle the transfer when the purchase if agreed upon, the buyer takes a big risk as nothing forces the seller to actually ship. If the settlement is delayed until the buyer confirms delivery, then the buyer takes all the risk as the buyer may choose to not confirm the transaction. Is there anything in blockchain that allows you to solve this problem?
It might be worth taking a look at Mattereum [0] as an example of work in this area.
Much of their work has been on how to make smart-contract based 'ownership tokens' (akin to NFTs) enforceable in existing courts in as many global jurisdictions as possible. They believe that they've found a way to make their arbitration system enforceable "in 150+ countries via the 1958 New York Arbitration Convention" [1].
Vinay Gupta ('hexayurt' on HN [2]) is co-founder and CEO and may be able to enlighten further.
No. The reason d'etre for the centralised platforms is that they are accountable to the major rights holding companies. That's all. One can speculate why this is so important for society, but ostensibly it is to protect the rights of Universal, Disney, etc.
Accountability becomes impossible with decentralization, and small decentralized distributors can be easily intimidated with copyright-related legislation. This is partly why p2p fizzled.
Internet change will require political change, such as rolling back various copyright legislation. For example, limiting to 20 years (like patents) and several others. The consequences of this would be to erase the book-value of the rights holding companies.
But decentralized media can not be held accountable to society/politics like for example Youtube. I suspect this is the underlying political motivation, not so much charity to Disney.
> One can speculate why this is so important for society, but ostensibly it is to protect the rights of Universal, Disney, etc
It is not difficult for me to speculate that it is due to people’s desire to get paid for their time and effort. The people working at Universal (Comcast) and Disney have the option of doing their own thing and trying to get people to pay for it outside of centralized platforms. That they do not seems to indicate it is not a viable option.
That is not to say anything about unnecessarily long copyright terms, that is a separate issue.
Content creators are not the beneficiaries of the current copyright legislation, which enables accumulation of large catalogues of old works that can be used to strong-arm central platforms to act as gatekeepers (for lack of a better word.)
Living independently from patreon and youtube is the dream of most content creators. Whether it is currently viable isn't an argument in favour of current copyright legislation.
> Content creators are not the beneficiaries of the current copyright legislation
On average, they seem to be doing better than people trying to earn money from Patraeon and YouTube. They might not be the intended or primary beneficiary of current copyright legislation, but they are a beneficiary of their employers earning money due to the copyright legislation (however disproportionate).
> Whether it is currently viable isn't an argument in favour of current copyright legislation
Yes, that’s what I was hoping to convey by ending my comment stating current copyright lengths are a separate issue.
> The more decentralized apps of Web3 will not necessarily look and feel different ...
This scares me. Right now every smart contract needs to be audited, but If the front-end is running fully-featured Javascript, it can connect everywhere so there will be a need to audit also client-side. What If it's "leaking" data into 3rd parties. I hope for a better future than the current chaos.
It would be great If browsers have some kind of extra sandboxing, so the end-user could set that only some blockchains can be used and block everything else. Right now we can do something like that with trackers.
Unfortunately, I think it would be naive to assume that this would have any effect on advertisements in the long run. They would just also add in ads eventually because it's more money so why not.
Who wants to pay for every transaction? Not the consumer! It's a wet dream of economists, libertarians and dataminers so that everything is deterministic , discrete and measurable.
I hate the idea of wrapping all interactions into transactions. It flies in the face of an idea that might I want to give something away for free. I would then presumably need to package this into a transaction for 0 cents. Economy is part of life, but we also interact on biological, spiritual and emotional planes which may be driven by different economies.
It's the logical conclusion to neoliberalism though. We're already coerced to view our personal time as a finite resource we "spend" on activities and to constantly consider our return on investment, to optimize our leisure time for maximum enjoyment and recovery. Even friendships and relationships are thought of as transactional and talked about in terms of how much you get out for what you put in. And anyway how is your side hustle going? Do you really need to binge another show on Netflix when you could be writing that pitch deck?
Yes, not everybody does that and not everybody does that to the fullest extent, but it's the same ideology just applied to every last facet of interaction.
Of course this isn't how the web started. The Internet was built on military technology and first settled by scientists, amateurs and aspiring tech nerds. Everything was free because it seemed obvious that "information wants to be free", which really just meant charging for bytes more than it cost to generate, store and transfer them (i.e. deriving "surplus value" or "profit" if you want) seemed like a rip-off even when commercial BBSes started popping up. If you wanted to put an edge on it, you could even call the early web a form of "primitive communism".
But there's no reason to bring politics into discussions of technology of course. Running websites costs money and how else are people supposed to turn a profit on providing a service if we don't find better ways for them to charge visitors for access?
I understand this perspective. To me your example clearly points out where neoliberalism has its limits. What strikes me is how linear this thinking is. In real life we need to receive a mixture of good and bad examples to truly advance our experience, whereas this model seems like it would be a stream of mini pseudo-advancements packaged in transactional wrapping to maximize creator's benefit. Saying that, I am also aware that many existing ways of monetization already work like that.
I think existing internet contains both the commercial and benevolent 'free, no strings attached' models and to me it strikes a good balance.
This is the typical contrast between communist ideals in which everything is "free" - and therefore needs to be paid in some other shape (power, advertising, taxes, someone else paying the bills) - and the real capitalist world made of people who needs incentives to act (whether that's social rewards, economic rewards or hope of some rewards).
Sure, we can go on for a while on air, unpaid work and ideals (look at OSS software), but eventually a market emerges.
>"Jaron Lanier’s old idea of an internet based on micropayments has finally arrived, but it has been transformed into an internet of micro-ownership."
The idea of a blockchain is, a defined protocol (like tcp/ip) where everyone can join the mining pool, accept and process payments. The quickest he processes the transactions, and the more transactions one processes, the more profit he gains. An open global competition for transactions. This trait gives the blockchain network incredible resiliency.
Amazon AWS, Ms Azure an' all, are not as resilient as a blockchain network, because not everyone can join and accept tcp requests. The tcp requests are accepted exclusively by the company's computers.
There are cases, in which we want to be absolutely sure the request will arrive to the destination the fastest possible. I.e an oven we control from our mobile phone. We want to be absolutely sure the oven stopped working, i.e the request indeed got to the destination the quickest possible. The information we want to travel with maximum speed and resiliency to errors, is a paid transaction.
The last point is that with a plain tcp packet the company with the server farm, may choose to eat the tcp packet and not turn off the oven. Modeling the control of the oven, with an oven wallet where we sent the paid transaction to the oven, no one intermediary can stop the transaction we send to the oven, so we have an oven in our house which we can control over the internet, with absolutely ownership of the oven and the control of it.
Everything else of the blockchain technology, like NFTs are following afterwards. This kind of internet, is called MetaNet.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadI don’t think it would really work, but it wouldn’t be exhausting either. You wouldn’t have to put in your credit card number and address every time you viewed a document.
Really, "micro" payments are not micro at all! "Micro" should mean a thousandth of a dollar at most, with the assumption that volume will make up for the profit.
On the other hand, in the before times, people paid by the minute to a network provider (such as Compuserve, Genie, AOL, etc) as well as to their phone company to get online. I might consider paying per minute to access some high quality journalism... But then again, probably not, I'm cheap.
Facebook really perfected their version of it.
If you’re not paying, you’re the product. Ads are a bigger scourge than “basing everything on money” which is just value made fungible.
Adding explicit commerce to every conversation devalues and corrodes our social bonds.
P2P networks and decentralized services have historically suffered because they relied on generous volunteers who donate their time and money (via resource allocation) to benefit the network. Blockchain / crypto is a mechanism to introduce financial elements into p2p networks. The experiment is ongoing, but there has been more advancement in p2p tech in the last 5 years than previous 20.
Which is greatly overvalued because it gives you the illusion and convenience to use numbers. Which "frees" you from actually thinking about the problem. Everything is a finance problem (and when you understand finance and management you understand everything).
See, I don't understand you either. It makes no sense to me how soooo many intelligent people could fall for something so silly and not see how deep inside a hole they are standing.
Like all models, it's a really great tool for the right job. Humans tend to forget about terms and conditions, when finding something worked well they ignore the fine print.
Not only memes but individuals’ identities can become speculative assets via platforms like Clout Market and BitClout, which allow creators to mint themselves as NFTs.
I especially hate this part of it. Ye gods.
Oh and the part where the current web is dismissed as largely controlled by large corporate entities, with absolutely no words spared as to why the future all-crypto hellscape will be a perfect utopia inherently resistant to the sticky, hungry fingers of corporations, is a good part to hate too. We all thought "Internet 1.0" was going to be gloriously free forever, then corporations stepped in. "Internet 2.0" was gonna save us from them and now we just have new corporations mining our eyeballs for ad profits forever. "Web3 is decentralized and inherently monetized at its core through tokenization" - well that sure looks like a great place to build a middleman who provides part of that service, with their hands out for their take on both sides of every transaction, doesn't it? How much of every "art" "sale" on an NFT platform goes to the platform?
I'll stick to putting my stuff online for free and having enough folks supporting me on Patreon to pay my bills, thanks anyway.
I've seen crypto be used largely for flash money grabs and little else since the entire thing started and I'm largely convinced that until volatility, speed and energy consumption are fixed it will only remain in that realm until it's inevitably cracked down on by various governments.
Those are some pretty big issues to solve and personally I think ETH is poised with PoS to solve those issues, or so I've been led to believe, and offer utility in those every day transactions but I'm not holding my breath because of issues like that that you've pointed out and people who only view it to be used for that aforementioned money grabs.
When I've used crypto I've used ETH exclusively for my beliefs there, but I'm really not all that convinced this will ever be more than a novelty in current form.
I'm no expert in the field and I don't even generally follow crypto more than the passing news article, but this continues to be my general perception, especially when things like Doge are surging in value with really no discernable economic basis.
Let the crypto hoards now rain down upon me.
As an aside this also reflects how money is now arriving at a point where it's more closely reflecting its nature as a measure of stored energy. This also has interesting implications for organization, and how money is spent.
I do have a stake in mostly Eth but it is sized for fun.
It ends up being efficient enough to run at scale. Skynet currently has over 100,000 active users, and is doing something like 300,000,000 crypto transactions per month. This could easily scale another 100x without increasing the energy footprint of the system, and quite possibly 10,000x as well.
The promise of crypto isn't that there won't be any middlemen, it's that you'll be in control of your own relationship with the people you follow. Right now your relationship with the content creators you follow on YouTube is under the management of the YouTube platform itself. YouTube decides what counts as acceptable, what needs to be de-monetized, and what needs to be de-platformed. In the crypto world, those decisions are left in the hands of the content creators and their viewership, which imo creates a much healthier public grounds for free speech.
The best part is that it's all opt-in. If Patreon + YouTube is what works for you, then more power to you; there's no pressure to switch.
There's nothing about gambling here, the crypto tokens are liquid, you can sell them as you receive them and get fair value for your content.
Unlikely.
They probably mean Skynet by Sia[0], which is (according to their website):
> Decentralized Internet for a Free Future
> Skynet is a content and application hosting platform bringing decentralized storage to users, creators and app developers.
[0]: https://siasky.net/
ETH proof of stake is already live since December 1st, 2020, and it runs as a separate chain at the moment. There will be a "docking process" in which the state of the current proof of work chain will be moved to use this new chain's consensus algorithm. This cannot be stopped by miners. https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-2-0-beacon-chain-goes-live...
I am older than most of the crew here and can remember when the majority of the telnetting and IRCing we did was against .edu domains, using the disk space of a Sparc 1, sucking up someone else's bandwidth. In February of 1993, someone very much like Don Draper woke, inexplicably but smiling, with the first morning erection in years as the <img> tag was invented; banner ads slouched towards CERN to be born. NetZero told us that the Internet should be free. Email, free of expensive stamps, flew 'round the world. And Advertisers and Spammers and the Attention Economy held illimitable dominion over all.
We have paid an enormous price for the "free" Internet and that price has been hidden from us through layers of affiliates and misdirection and double-Irish. Rudderless algorithms decide whether your fame career has any kind of money associated with it and for precisely how long. When the axe descends, the only sentence can be "You have violated the ToS."
I am not sure what the alternative would look like, but for anyone with complaints about the current situation, it is important to examine just how we got here.
Which is fine. I think you're getting downvoted because you made their turn of phrase seem like a bad thing.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26938769
https://socialjoey.com/services/advertising/
Your unceasing hatred of the advertising-driven internet led you to profit off of it?
Even more, people attacking the free part tend to evoke an image of all the other manipulative parts of modern media vanishing if people somehow pay. But the Wall Street Journal and to a lesser extent the New York Times, do their best to be paid but it's the same sort of product, trying to eyeballs. Spotify has a paid and an advertisement based service. It's the same service. Media, free or not, is based on attention. In fact, in the present and earlier eras, advertising gave more money than subscriptions for all the subscription based magazines - subscriptions are valuable to show advertisers your loyal customs.
What's the solution for the problematic of modern media? I could recommend this text but it takes concentrated reading to get through.
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/
The free web has democratized media and publishing in many radical and transformative ways, but in the process of unseating the old media gatekeepers has also completely destroyed the quality of journalism and long-form content, worldwide.
Mind you that this has not been going on for that long. 15-20 years maybe. In the bigger picture, that's nothing.
The idea that a system is fine in which the creators have little means to earn money is crazy to me. Lots of places will just go without the deep, investigative journalism we might have benefited from in the recent past.
Replaced by noise, as you say.
We're all impatient, though. 15 years is about how long I'm an adult. 20 years is about how long I'm able to make use of news. If the way out of this mess is going to take another 20 years, it's not going to be of much use to me :). "In the long run" is good, but "within the productive lifetime of people concerned about it" would be best.
It started much earlier in the US I believe but came into full swing in the UK with Tony Blair's Labour. [0] you can be sure she wasn't the only one, just someone that got caught.
News media in particular has become so polarised and only really feeds into it's own respective echo chambers, to the point where it's all but useless as an impartial presentation of facts and opinions.
There is still some great instructional and educational content on Web and it feels for the moment all of these issues are still limited to news and entertainment.
[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/1588323.stm
Television ushered the era of contentless spew well before the Internet. The Internet gave more variety than the TV world but indeed devastated the print journalism world that had existed before.
The point is this all part of a long term trend. That said, more media generally means that there is a significant amount of decent content still available but, yeah, the quality of the content produced by journalist institutions continues to decline. You'd need an extreme reversal of overall social trends to change the sound-bite factor here.
We can have a look at what the world might have been without the Internet's decision to build without a billing layer, and indeed to route around billing, without needing a time machine. It would have been a faster version of Prestel and Minitel. Fully centralised, with national borders. All the TOS issues would still be there, except that because the billing system knows your address abusing your account could get you prosecuted.
Which means you still would have had free content, as well as paid.
The fascinating historical bit is when you follow the cross-border issue... it would have required efficient, scalable (small to large amounts) international monetary transfers between individuals.
And that would have been as, or more, transformational than the internet.
CoL arbitrage. Individual international mobility. Remittance fee slashing. In the late 1980s. The mind boggles.
That would have caused it to face even bigger barriers to adoption, surely? The UK only just abolished capital controls in 1979: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_Controls_in_the_Unite...
The current cryptocurrency system (cryptography itself was subject to arms control until 1991!) relies on being able to use a credit card to transfer real money to a (usually foreign) exchange, do some transactions, and then receive a wire back with the real money. All of which are products of the Internet itself.
I don't really think it would be any different if we paid. Look at sports for example. That's paid via subscriptions, tickets, merchandise, state sponsorship and so on, but it's still just as plastered with ads as the Internet. I think anywhere exploitation is possible, it will happen. If we paid, it'd just make some people even richer than they are now.
But some services do manage to do without ads; Netflix is the big one that comes to mind. Hulu has an ad-free version if you pay more. Spotify has a free ad-supported plan or a paid ad-free plan. Then you have things in the middle like HBO Max: most (all?) shows have ads before them, but it's an ad promoting another HBO show.
So clearly paid & ad-free is possible. What's not clear to me is why it's possible for some things and not for others.
To use your sports example, perhaps without ads ticket and merchandise prices would have to rise to the point where enough people wouldn't buy them such that it would cause a problem? I don't know what the contribution to revenue is for ticket sales vs. ads.
There’s a metric ton of ads in Netflix, they’re built into the content. All the extra time in a car chase focusing on the car logo and the characters talking about a car’s feature are not part of the plot.
I find it even worse than ad breaks, since the content itself gets worse, and you waste your time. Although, I know TV networks were doing heavy product placement even before streaming came around, so they had ad breaks, ads in the show, and subscriber revenue.
Despite what marketeers say, having no advertisements is a huge differentiator for a service, and people is willing to pay extra for it. But it won't happen in markets where it's difficult for new players to enter. I'm not familiar with sports broadcasting but I can bet this is the case.
It's the same with Apple's current shift to privacy, or Microsoft's doings in open-source. Sure, they know privacy and OSS is the ethical thing to do, but they're not doing it because it's "right". They're doing it to gain customers. If either Apple or Microsoft became monopolies you can bet they would cease doing privacy/OSS it overnight.
I wasn't thinking just broadcasting but also venues, jerseys and everything. Look at a typical NASCAR or football game, ads are everywhere at the event.
I think you're right though. There has to be competition or regulation, otherwise they can get away with it and as you both say they will.
Most ( if not all ) bad things starts from very good intentions.
What if that model had taken over?
How about a neighborhood hub where you pay someone to put in a small fiber run from your house and choose a vendor who can run your traffic back and forth from that hub? Or maybe there's a citywide ring network everyone hooks into and you pay for out-of-city data?
Or what if most cellphone data defaulted to wifi first? No cellphone plan required if no cellular connection?
This was later replaced by a private BitTorrent tracker as the government briefly tried to crack down on piracy a few years later; traffic between peers in that tracker was unmetered as well, as they were all clients of the same ISP.
This introduced a lot of people in my city to torrenting; a few more years down the road, data caps were relaxed and eventually removed, another ISP's local tracker evolved into the nationwide filesharing platform that my peers still cherish. (Sure, Hollywood got screwed, but there was minimal value they could extract from our market in the first place, considering the vastly different standard of living.)
Of course, I hear the ISP landscape in the USA is a little different; and with worldwide content streaming services like Netflix and Spotify being paid monthly, usage patterns have surely changed. Maybe today's equivalent would be local ISPs playing the privacy card and providing self-hosted encrypted NextCloud instances?
I'm not sure what percentage of local traffic would this amount to, but it's not that difficult to imagine a world where the atomization of society driven by the non-locality of the Internet is offset by the fact that your cloud services are at least hosted in the same jurisdiction as yourself, and where the Web serves as an augmentation to local communities. (My dark Balkan side does not discount the possibility of walking into one's ISP's office and kicking their asses for fucking with one's connectivity or data, legal consequences notwithstanding - good luck pulling that on Comcast, or flying to Dublin or Frankfurt or wherever to kick Google's ass!)
Maybe it's a little difficult to imagine how this can be competitive to the current globalized landscape though. It would effectively go against the interests of the same entities that fund the underlying infrastructural development, and besides political pushback (e.g. my ISP contract prevents me from redistributing the connection to my neighbors, although I hear this scheme is nonetheless widespread elsewhere) there might also be purely technical scaling issues (such as the existing technology simply being poorly adapted to whatever novel model of organizing connectivity eventually sticks.)
Maybe we should think about the associated negative externalities and act accordingly.
Narrator: "They didn't"
If we had that much foresight pollution wouldn't be an issue that is attempting to destroy us.
The "community" part is heavily monetized, and isps and wireless carriers are the most profitable companies on the planet with 60% gross margins.
As to the non-local stuff, I've was told that nowadays 1 fiber could handle all of netflix's traffic.
> I am not sure what the alternative would look like, but for anyone with complaints about the current situation, it is important to examine just how we got here.
One alternative could be to restore the authority of the processes that societies have evolved over the last two hundred years - courts. Given that modern social networks essentially act as public space, a gateway between the digital and meatspace world, they should also be regulated by independent authorities.
That would set a precedent that any site with any user supplied content must require intervention and approval by a court before any form of moderation can take place, or at least that all sites must require court approval for their terms of service. which by extension means all speech on the web will be under direct government control. That would include Hacker News and any blog that allows comments.
This is a much greater degree of control over freedom of speech than exists in public spaces in the real world - where people can speak freely generally without government enforced moderation, and in any case websites are not public spaces. So on top of everything else, governments would assert unprecedented control over free enterprise and freedom of association.
And it doesn't matter where you decide to draw the line, perhaps only requiring this level of regulation for sites with a certain number of users, this being Hacker News I shouldn't have to point out the potential slippery slope in having the government decide where that line is drawn.
The situation we're in now is bad, but needing a judge to sign off on every moderation action would be much, much worse.
I had not meant that every moderation action would need a judge, but that every person should have the legal right to appeal and plead their case in front of a judge instead of hitting stone walls.
And besides: that access to legal protection is what taxes and court fees are paying for!
But nothing social media platforms are doing is illegal. A judge is just going to tell you that you agreed to the platform's terms of service and they have the right, including Section 230 indemnity, to moderate content on their platform.
But that's the thing: they aren't public spaces. The number of people which have their content hosted on a private platform is inconsequential to the legal nature of the platform. Social media are very much subject to legal regulations and lawmaking.
Calling a space which is governed by a private entity that doesn't represent you / answer to you, as "public" is a contradiction. The worst you can do is persist this notion to a point where enough people believe they are public spaces. That's the most direct way of legitimizing their dominance in modern telecommunication networks.
They are the de-facto places where online discourse is held, and at least German courts have acknowledged that even speech that borders on hate speech is a part of public opinion forming (e.g. https://www.idowa.de/inhalt.gerichtsurteil-nach-sperre-faceb... or https://www.e-recht24.de/news/facebook/11029-neues-facebook-...).
> Calling a space which is governed by a private entity that doesn't represent you / answer to you, as "public" is a contradiction.
It is not, even in the meatspace. Spaces that are open to the public yet governed by private entities are also covered under the freedom of assembly (e.g. airports, see https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/bverfg-zur-versamml... or train stations, see https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.gerichtsurteil-zum...).
> That's the most direct way of legitimizing their dominance in modern telecommunication networks.
In Germany, telecommunications providers are actually banned from terminating your access by law (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tkg_2004/__45k.html); the only exceptions are non-payment and spoofing fraud. The reason for this is that access to telecommunication networks is seen as a vital basic right to participate in society.
Why is that contentious? Because that's exactly the one thing social media try to avoid: being seen as mere publishers. That would have massive implications:
https://socialmediahq.com/if-social-media-companies-are-publ...
It's another argument why treating them as "public spaces" isn't much sensible.
Battery life would be terrible. Personally, I'm still waiting for the coupling of mobile and "personal servers".
Micro servers at the exclusive use of one person, in an attractive form factor, made easy to use. Products that you can buy in an electronics store, such as a smartphone or a laptop.
- Free from control. Governments are a tricky thing. You trust them until you don't; especially if your country has a history of distrust for authority.
- Free as in beer. This was always more of an illusion than anything. The IRC servers you spoke of had to be networked and hosted. The services had to be developed and reworked over the years. People had to staff the network to keep it free from abuse. The networks were never free, but they also never had aims to monetize.
Our friends in marketing and the people who run dubious spam businesses recognized that people are drawn to free and made a business case out of it. You can't fix people being drawn to free, but you can fix the definition of what it means to say you offer a "free" service. For instance, what Facebook and Google provide isn't free - they broker your data in exchange for nifty services. What if you had to say that, and weren't allowed to use the word free?
I don't think the future lies in non-freedom, I think it lies in gatekeeping what it means to be free.
The key idea for me is 1 request for 1 page. It's a stripped down markdown with no images allowed.
Although even then some clients are trying to support embedding images which goes against the protocol.
That would effectively convert every device/internet interaction into an individualised financial transaction which is not necessarily a good thing.
But many people budget poorly when it comes to finances, and many people budget worse when it comes to attention and time.
I fear a THX1138-like future, but in many respects we are already living it, but we aren’t able to easily enough take advantage of it.
But ultimately what I find most fascinating about this article is blockchains being applied to all interactions- accessing web pages, doing this on web pages, everything. I'm thinking we'll all have wallets that constantly process micropayments everywhere we go, money going out, and coming back in, continuously.
Can't say I like it, but maybe it's more fair?
Conceptually, I really like the idea of being able to monetise one’s own attention beyond just one’s own time employed.
Ultimately, jt would be super cool to gain a better understanding of one’s own time value beyond just employed work but also leisure and how it might help us to better conceptualise the limited time we have.
Perhaps a less intuitive/instinctive and more quantifiable approach to how we might optimise our time.
Even if the world doesn’t turn into a micropayment dystopia, I would think there’s great scope to utilise strictly voluntary smart contract personal incentives.
Perhaps Jenny Craig turns into a smart contract blockchain platform that unlocks food pellets when the customers performs X. I’m mostly joking.
My first thought is how it might be of value with my kids when it comes to school performance, fitness goals, as well as leisure/fun.
We already do it, but maybe we could do it better.
My thinking is that if people actually saw what they are paying for they would advocate for different policies because it feels great to spend other peoples’ money from some magical endless pool of money on programs that at the surface make us feel good.
A large number of people do not pay income tax, and this includes retirees, the disabled, students, the very wealthy, etc etc.
There are many types of taxes. And just about everyone pays taxes of some sort.
For example it would be great to receive a receipt indicating that I paid $10.12 for school meal programs (0.31% of my tax contributions) if I don’t have children in school.
Nothing about what parent wrote indicates that they are unwilling to pay for school meals, just that they want to know how much it cost them. Much like most people would want to know how much they are paying for socialised cancer treatments or food banks, but generally wouldn't oppose to paying in the first place.
Yes, transactional issues are a thing, 25 cents doesn't work well with VISA etc. but never underestimate people's willingness to 'not want to pay'.
That was always the 'big issue' and that has not changed.
You also have a first-mover disadvantage. No one wants to be the first blog or small newspaper that starts charging in this way, because people will just go elsewhere. To be effective, everyone would have to agree to magically enable this simultaneously.
The major problem with that is you end up with nothing but clickbait articles where the first part is pointless filler designed to hook you in so you buy the paid version.
Is it? Seems to me there are a bunch of questions left unsolved.
For a start, will Visa and Mastercard go along with you using them to make your lower-cost-per-transaction competitor? Won't Apple and Google want to shake you down for their usual 30% ?
If a site gets all its revenue from a micropayment 'partner' won't the partner have massive leverage to alter the deal later and screw the site over?
How do you protect against perverse incentives - like a micropayment of $0.0001 per page encouraging sites to split articles into 20-page slideshows?
Should the payments be automatic or manual? If manual, won't sites get loaded with garish reminders to pay, like youtubers asking for likes and subscribes?
Who will set the rate of payment, and will it vary by media? Should viewing two of Reddit's user-uploaded cat photos cost more than reading one piece of quality investigative journalism? What about super-premium things like pay-per-view sports and computer games?
What sort of records will be kept - will it maintain an itemised list of all the pages I've visited and when, so billing disputes can be resolved?
How will it work for children - can they be given a daily allowance? Will it have loads of parental controls, if I'm happy to pay for some types of content and not others?
Are users going to end up quadruple-paying, where they make a micropayment, watch a youtube ad, watch an ad read by the video creator, and it's a shill video anyway? If you have value-for-money standards, how do they get enforced?
Will people be able to undo their payments if someone hacked their account? What if their kid was using their computer? What if they just thought the article was clickbait and not worth paying for? Can a user view content for free by viewing it then cancelling the charge?
It has been greatest "socialist" force of our times. A billion may have been spammed with junk/polarising content, but millions are getting real value/upliftment from free Youtube/Google/FB.
>I can send you a file with scp trivially right now.
You'd still have to set up "cruft" for that as well. Generating private keys, enabling port forwarding, configuring sshd, configuring firewall rules. I don't see how setting up some crypto wallet is unreasonable in comparison.
The exception is Airdrop. But with a Windows computer or Android phone on either end, there's (at best) Bluetooth file transfer which is slow, unreliable and painful. Or there's scp (you get the joke, right?)
The point is, the technical infrastructure exists, but nobody has bothered to implement this simple stuff for ordinary users. A testament to the power of the public goods problem to block even simple, long-overdue improvements?
Maybe the Fed’s new system will allow for it:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...
Blogs could be sustained with little readership considering how cheap it is to host a lightweight website that sees little traffic, and larger websites like HN would pay for their hosting and on top of that maybe even have some funds to hire another dang. All of this could come without any advertisement, without dark patterns, tracking, tapping into our subconcious or primitive brain, and all the other evil genius ideas to come out of the advertisement industry. I can't help but think that this would create a better and perhaps less hostile place for everyone.
As long as more traffic still means more profit there would still be plenty incentive for websites to engage in evil tactics against their users, in order to ensure that the users spend as much time as possible on that site.
I too want a web without advertising, but I don’t believe for a second that all of the problems associated with advertising will go away even if advertising itself did. Some problems might disappear, others not, and new problems will appear in the place of problems that did disappear.
After all, there are very many people out there who have gotten really good at coming up with evil tactics. These people would still be out there, and in demand, even if advertising disappeared.
The real cost of maintaining a blog is the time one spends to compose, edit, proofread, sometimes illustrate a blog post. And no, you don't think about a post only while you're working in it; you think in background, too.
This cost can hardly be remunerated by every reader paying a few cents, unless your readership is in tens of thousands at least, and the money allow you to actually free up some time for writing.
Extrapolating further, people spend orders of magnitude more time, bandwidth, and server-side CPU resources for everything else they do on the internet: Scrolling JPEGs on social media sites, streaming gigabytes of Netflix movies.
Sending a 100KB blog post page to someone might take 0.00001% as many resources as streaming a 2-hour Netflix movie. If servers were paid according to resources used, blog authors would receive virtually nothing relative to all the multimedia based services.
Alternatively maybe something that was on dragon’s den BBC : https://gener8ads.com/ , where you get paid for seeing ads or can opt to be completely anonymous.
Meanwhile it seems that most people consider viewing ads to have zero cost to them (whether that's true or not), or use ad-blockers.
If we can get over the initial weirdness and make it completely seamless (as easy as dismissing a cookie banner) I'm sure people would get used to paying a cent for every blog post they read.
On the other hand, if there's a thousand different micropayment platforms each with a different way of getting past the paywall and of adding funds, then I don't think it'll be an easy path to adoption.
In the real world, though, you won't be getting 247 such requests per hour. And that's the crux of the issue: quantity vs quality.
If you're reading 247 different sources of information in an hour, unless you're doing some kind of heavy research, you're probably overloading your brain in any case. How many blog articles can you read in an hour? Less than ten, probably more like 5, if they're actually worth reading.
Why would this stop ads? In this case, ads still make you more money; your hosting costs just go down a little.
It was one of the ideas behind Project Xanadu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
Discussed in this sub-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217015
get fucked
* Spam - It will be to expensive to send massive amounts of mail if you pay for it. * Robocalls - If there is a high cost calling you, then robo calls are discouraged. * Paid Journalists/News * Paid Content creators
It allows them to transfer crypto coins between them, but you still have the problem of actually delivering something phisically if it's a physical purchase, and blockchain will not help with that at all... if you settle the transfer when the purchase if agreed upon, the buyer takes a big risk as nothing forces the seller to actually ship. If the settlement is delayed until the buyer confirms delivery, then the buyer takes all the risk as the buyer may choose to not confirm the transaction. Is there anything in blockchain that allows you to solve this problem?
Much of their work has been on how to make smart-contract based 'ownership tokens' (akin to NFTs) enforceable in existing courts in as many global jurisdictions as possible. They believe that they've found a way to make their arbitration system enforceable "in 150+ countries via the 1958 New York Arbitration Convention" [1].
Vinay Gupta ('hexayurt' on HN [2]) is co-founder and CEO and may be able to enlighten further.
[0] https://mattereum.com/
[1] https://mattereum.com/2021/04/01/mattereum-product-walkthrou...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hexayurt | https://twitter.com/leashless
Accountability becomes impossible with decentralization, and small decentralized distributors can be easily intimidated with copyright-related legislation. This is partly why p2p fizzled.
Internet change will require political change, such as rolling back various copyright legislation. For example, limiting to 20 years (like patents) and several others. The consequences of this would be to erase the book-value of the rights holding companies.
But decentralized media can not be held accountable to society/politics like for example Youtube. I suspect this is the underlying political motivation, not so much charity to Disney.
It is not difficult for me to speculate that it is due to people’s desire to get paid for their time and effort. The people working at Universal (Comcast) and Disney have the option of doing their own thing and trying to get people to pay for it outside of centralized platforms. That they do not seems to indicate it is not a viable option.
That is not to say anything about unnecessarily long copyright terms, that is a separate issue.
Living independently from patreon and youtube is the dream of most content creators. Whether it is currently viable isn't an argument in favour of current copyright legislation.
On average, they seem to be doing better than people trying to earn money from Patraeon and YouTube. They might not be the intended or primary beneficiary of current copyright legislation, but they are a beneficiary of their employers earning money due to the copyright legislation (however disproportionate).
> Whether it is currently viable isn't an argument in favour of current copyright legislation
Yes, that’s what I was hoping to convey by ending my comment stating current copyright lengths are a separate issue.
That's news to me. The less legitimate ways of acquiring media seem to be thriving in this day and age, and most are p2p.
This scares me. Right now every smart contract needs to be audited, but If the front-end is running fully-featured Javascript, it can connect everywhere so there will be a need to audit also client-side. What If it's "leaking" data into 3rd parties. I hope for a better future than the current chaos.
It would be great If browsers have some kind of extra sandboxing, so the end-user could set that only some blockchains can be used and block everything else. Right now we can do something like that with trackers.
Who wants to pay for every transaction? Not the consumer! It's a wet dream of economists, libertarians and dataminers so that everything is deterministic , discrete and measurable.
Yes, not everybody does that and not everybody does that to the fullest extent, but it's the same ideology just applied to every last facet of interaction.
Of course this isn't how the web started. The Internet was built on military technology and first settled by scientists, amateurs and aspiring tech nerds. Everything was free because it seemed obvious that "information wants to be free", which really just meant charging for bytes more than it cost to generate, store and transfer them (i.e. deriving "surplus value" or "profit" if you want) seemed like a rip-off even when commercial BBSes started popping up. If you wanted to put an edge on it, you could even call the early web a form of "primitive communism".
But there's no reason to bring politics into discussions of technology of course. Running websites costs money and how else are people supposed to turn a profit on providing a service if we don't find better ways for them to charge visitors for access?
I think existing internet contains both the commercial and benevolent 'free, no strings attached' models and to me it strikes a good balance.
Sure, we can go on for a while on air, unpaid work and ideals (look at OSS software), but eventually a market emerges.
The idea of a blockchain is, a defined protocol (like tcp/ip) where everyone can join the mining pool, accept and process payments. The quickest he processes the transactions, and the more transactions one processes, the more profit he gains. An open global competition for transactions. This trait gives the blockchain network incredible resiliency.
Amazon AWS, Ms Azure an' all, are not as resilient as a blockchain network, because not everyone can join and accept tcp requests. The tcp requests are accepted exclusively by the company's computers.
There are cases, in which we want to be absolutely sure the request will arrive to the destination the fastest possible. I.e an oven we control from our mobile phone. We want to be absolutely sure the oven stopped working, i.e the request indeed got to the destination the quickest possible. The information we want to travel with maximum speed and resiliency to errors, is a paid transaction.
The last point is that with a plain tcp packet the company with the server farm, may choose to eat the tcp packet and not turn off the oven. Modeling the control of the oven, with an oven wallet where we sent the paid transaction to the oven, no one intermediary can stop the transaction we send to the oven, so we have an oven in our house which we can control over the internet, with absolutely ownership of the oven and the control of it.
Everything else of the blockchain technology, like NFTs are following afterwards. This kind of internet, is called MetaNet.