Users regularly do "pay for their own costs and have an ad-free experience", for example on Youtube, Netflix or The New York Time (5 million paid subscribers in Q2 2021).
Users regularly do "give gas to publishers in response to content they enjoy", for example on Patreon, Twitch or Medium.
There’s a public appetite for all sorts of intellectual property. Popular music is funded by artists who sell parts of their rights to their profits from music and recordings.
As opposed to a patronage model, intellectual property allows for people to engage in the market with their published works.
Intellectual property has lots of problems of course but it is also the model that replaced patronage as we transitioned from the ancien regime into our contemporary politic-economic system.
That all sounds kind of nightmarish. Keep in mind, many live paycheck to paycheck. The prevailing VC-minded attitude that the economy needs market-makers, micro-transactions and “decentralized digital rights management” is just not at all what people need or want currently.
You are in no position to decide what people need or what they should spend their money on.
On the contrary, micro-transactions is the ideal way for regular folks to support content creators in a way that does not take too much from them.
No one struggling wants to pay a platform's minimum support level of $5/month times 20 people whose videos they like. Paying $5/month to 20 people whose videos they like though, that's much easier to handle.
> On the contrary, micro-transactions is the ideal way for regular folks to support content creators in a way that does not take too much from them.
In your idealized theoretical market conditions*, and assuming the tech works currently as I mentioned (it doesn’t in my opinion but that debate has already been had).
You might be right, but not until (another) significant engineering effort is established (unlikely given the state of the economy) and not without the blessing of various nation states.
One of the reasons that I stopped working on such a system [0] is that I realized that there was no way to bootstrap such a system from scratch.
I would like to see the involvement of nation states to facilitate such a system but the political will for having a truly republican system that expands upon copyright, patents, trademarks, et al, for the digital age seems decades away. People are too worried that their political opponents will abuse such a system when in power, even if such a system is probably inevitable.
Why are music publishers paying for future profits from a given work being recorded and distributed on Spotify when people can just go on BitTorrent and get the recording for free?
Is there a lower bound of a market for published works? Are tweets below that bound? Are tweets of video content or photographs below that bound? Perhaps!
Does the current socioeconomic system of Twitter have in impact on ill-informed context free pronouncements? Would a different socioeconomic system encourage different content?
Frankly, it isn't weird to pay to access a scarce resource. Now we're paying with our personal details... paying with other means might turn out better for society.
You can stand in the middle of the wilderness on a soap box distributing pamphlets or you can stand in the town square on a soap box distributing pamphlets.
That it is marginally easier shows that a digital town square is some kind of natural monopoly, doesn’t it?
FWIW, I deleted my Twitter and Facebook accounts in 2016 and it has felt somewhat like I’m living in the digital wilderness, to the benefit of my mental health! There is still a cost to living up yonder in them hills.
Or you could accept progress and decentralisation and use the "centralized" chains instead, which are still much less centralized than anything else in the current web. Unless you love walled gardens, in which case why yes, postgres sounds like a good idea.
They ask you to please not use the blockchain for data storage, as the Bitcoin Core devs told me at a conference in 2014 when I showed them this method of storing ~1k of data:
if I'm being charitable, it means that Musk looked at the problem, saw that it was a terrible idea and pushed it to one side
If I'm not being charitable, he looked at the idea despite the previous experience of the blockchain being useless for all but a tiny application, and still forced people to debate the idea, despite it being patent bollocks
In the published discovery chats of the recent lawsuit it was kind of clear that Musk rejects the idea of blockchain as fundamental tech for any type of social media. But I suppose this doesn't preclude payments etc.
The reason from what I recall was something like "social media on blockchain requires huge tech resources which means centralisation".
Basically the discussions were very similar to HN! Blockchain is totally the wrong thing to build big stuff around it but it has it's uses elsewhere
It would make sense if the goal is to create something that is immutable at all costs: even if illegal content or speech is shared on the platform and there is no right to scrub data. I don’t think that is many people’s goal.
Even Binance doesn't know how it fits together. Personally, I think you are better off doing your brainstorming before you plonk down a wad of cash. Still, they got their headline and maybe a bump in their share price.
Filler article that adds nothing. A different article about Binance’s role in the deal quoted Binance as saying (paraphrasing) we have no idea what musk is doing or thinking, he doesn’t even acknowledge us, we are just along for the ride. Binance may well be forming a Twitter-on-the-blockchain team but it has zero involvement from Twitter — unless something changes.
Is USD a scam? It's based on "faith" but pretty much works. Does that make it legit or a scam? If you have enough bombs and willing to spill enough blood to defend said faith, then it's legit? Crypto is a broad term and you paint it with 1 color: scam!
not really. unless you treat large parts of capitalism a scam. (thats rhetorical by the way)
Binance which lost $570M in one hack, knowingly promoted flawed investments and lied to regulators however, could be described as an unreliable finance partner.
Crypto"currencies" are a scam because they are a negative sum game.
Imagine an empty room. A few people come in with money in their pockets and play a few rounds of a card game. When they leave, since nothing was in the room before and nothing is in there after, it's obvious the total sum of money couldn't change. Some got richer, some got poorer but the total is the same.
If they decided to exchange money for plastic chips to be used during their games and exchange it for money at the end, the same is still true.
However, if someone takes a cut every time chips are moved then that person is guaranteed to win and the players in total are guaranteed to lose. If you have a game where you know who is the winner and who are the loser without knowing anything about the game, I believe it's fair to call that a scam.
No, stocks are not like this because they produce dividends and gold is not like this either because there are consumers (jewelers, electronics industry) who buy gold add value to it and only sell the value added product. With a crypto"currency" none of this happens. You buy coins, sell the same and they just rot ("HODL" in modern parlance) meanwhile. And you lose money on every transaction. Sure, the price change might mean you leave with a monetary profit but it only means a greater fool is now sitting on a larger loss.
This is a very novel scam for many obvious reasons but that doesn't mean it's not a scam.
Users get value out of sending tokens, holding stablecoins, and interacting with smart contracts. The price can go up or down but who cares, if they are using stable tokens or just using ETH to pay gas fees. They might be happy to part with a small amount, paying whoever is facilitating the transfers and helping run the network.
Just like how payment processors work like PayPal. They take a cut on each transaction. The difference with validators in a blockchain is that it’s permissionless.. Anybody in the room can participate and capture a % of these transaction fees.
This is smoke and mirrors. Focus on how much money the totality of current and past coinholders have. It'll be the negative sum of the transaction fees paid. This is all there is.
I don’t understand your logic. Users pay 0.01 ETH for gas fees to perform some action like transfer USDC from A to B. Majority of that fee is burned but some small percentage goes toward a validator for their services. The price of Eth may even depreciate in the days or weeks that follow, leaving the validators with less fiat value than they had when this whole exchange began, and parties A and B are no worse off.
A has mined some coins which B buys for 100 USD. Now A has less than 100 USD because the transaction costed something and B has 0 USD. Together they already lost money. This will only get worse. Let's say B can convince C to buy his coin for 1000 USD from, say, an interest free bank loan. Aye, B has 1000 USD minus transaction fee so they made a profit but C has -1000 USD. Altogether they are short on money.
Take PayPal or Wise. User A sends $100 USD to User B, and the payment network takes a $1 fee. User A now has -$100 USD and User B has $99 USD. If you add -100 + 99 it might seem like money disappears, but that remaining $1 of value has gone to the network as a fee for services rendered, and it was something that both parties were willing to pay.
Even here, both users are short USD, but it is not a "negative sum" system as the users gain some positive value by having the payment processor transfer and secure their funds. If the only metric is how much USD a buyer has left, every visit to the bakery would be a negative sum game.
In the above example, PayPal and Wise are User C. In a permissionless blockchain, User A and B can both also opt to be validators and receive these protocol rewards, so there may not even be a User C that extracts rent on each transaction.
I assume you are not talking about the minority fee that goes to the validators for their services, but the majority fee that is burned in ETH after EIP1559.
When a limited supply token is burned, the total supply is reduced, and assuming that does not decrease the demand, then the value will diffuse to all token holders. If 75% of all PayPal or Wise fees were burned such that all users of PayPal had their account slightly appreciate in value whenever there is significant transactional volume in the network, a lot of users would be pretty into that.
Besides, this is just one way. Bitcoin does not burn fees, so it’s much more like the PayPal and Wise approach, no money leaving circulation.
I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter becomes a crypto-wallet in this way. Everyone with a Twitter account now as a Binance Wallet (or maybe it will have Twitter branding?)
Sort of similar to if you have a Google gmail account, you also have a Calendar account, a Google Drive account, etc.
The point is enough people (not all) put up with providing ID for their phone purchase or their phone number for twitter that a more thorough check for Twitter might be tolerated. Especially if there is a little paypal in there too.
The "know your customer" rules that finance services have to perform are far more stringent than those performed by telcos. Hell, I can walk 5 minutes to the corner shop and buy a PAYG SIM for cash, without giving any personal details.
Binance is extremely competent in helping companies of any kind to use the Blockchain. Their time to market is unmatched in this business. What I have noticed as an observer is that companies can hit the market faster, test their value prop, iterate and execute the next steps on a solid base with the help of a strong partner. Much better than doing it all by themselves reinventing wheels on a daily basis.
It wouldn't make sense to store tweets on a blockchain... It would be too wasteful; this level of redundancy is not needed. But it would be a good idea to implement a blockchain-based payment system which integrates with Twitter somehow.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadWhat does that even mean?
Could users pay for their own costs and have an ad-free experience?
Could users give gas to publishers in response to content they enjoy?
There’s room for a lot of economic incentives!
Could users sell 70% of their tweet revenue for 7 years to another entity that gives them cash up front? Like existing music publishers?
https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish
The intersection of technology and people to define a usable product cannot also be defined as a technology.
Users regularly do "give gas to publishers in response to content they enjoy", for example on Patreon, Twitch or Medium.
The appetite seems there all right.
As opposed to a patronage model, intellectual property allows for people to engage in the market with their published works.
Intellectual property has lots of problems of course but it is also the model that replaced patronage as we transitioned from the ancien regime into our contemporary politic-economic system.
On the contrary, micro-transactions is the ideal way for regular folks to support content creators in a way that does not take too much from them.
No one struggling wants to pay a platform's minimum support level of $5/month times 20 people whose videos they like. Paying $5/month to 20 people whose videos they like though, that's much easier to handle.
In your idealized theoretical market conditions*, and assuming the tech works currently as I mentioned (it doesn’t in my opinion but that debate has already been had).
You might be right, but not until (another) significant engineering effort is established (unlikely given the state of the economy) and not without the blessing of various nation states.
I would like to see the involvement of nation states to facilitate such a system but the political will for having a truly republican system that expands upon copyright, patents, trademarks, et al, for the digital age seems decades away. People are too worried that their political opponents will abuse such a system when in power, even if such a system is probably inevitable.
[0] https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish
Why would I pay for futures on a platform that encourages people to make ill-informed context free pronouncements, with an incredibly short half life?
Is there a lower bound of a market for published works? Are tweets below that bound? Are tweets of video content or photographs below that bound? Perhaps!
Does the current socioeconomic system of Twitter have in impact on ill-informed context free pronouncements? Would a different socioeconomic system encourage different content?
This is more a case of “famous guests on talkshow” than “London’s speakers corner”.
It is marginally easier to get a twitter following. But yoursite + (youtube, facebook, reddit etc.) can build a following too.
FWIW, I deleted my Twitter and Facebook accounts in 2016 and it has felt somewhat like I’m living in the digital wilderness, to the benefit of my mental health! There is still a cost to living up yonder in them hills.
/me a blockchain virgin
This includes, I'm ashamed to say, the French government, who has said that finance regulation rules should be eased for all things crypto.
Guessing the lawyers pointed out that this is rather problematic if someone posts something highly illegal (CP or whatever)
https://github.com/williamcotton/blockcast
if I'm being charitable, it means that Musk looked at the problem, saw that it was a terrible idea and pushed it to one side
If I'm not being charitable, he looked at the idea despite the previous experience of the blockchain being useless for all but a tiny application, and still forced people to debate the idea, despite it being patent bollocks
The reason from what I recall was something like "social media on blockchain requires huge tech resources which means centralisation".
Basically the discussions were very similar to HN! Blockchain is totally the wrong thing to build big stuff around it but it has it's uses elsewhere
Having a cryptographically signed distributed ledger makes a lot of sense to store financial transaction data that should never be edited later.
It makes no sense to store conversations that may be required by courts to be changed or where the author wants to edit an old comment.
not really. unless you treat large parts of capitalism a scam. (thats rhetorical by the way)
Binance which lost $570M in one hack, knowingly promoted flawed investments and lied to regulators however, could be described as an unreliable finance partner.
Imagine an empty room. A few people come in with money in their pockets and play a few rounds of a card game. When they leave, since nothing was in the room before and nothing is in there after, it's obvious the total sum of money couldn't change. Some got richer, some got poorer but the total is the same.
If they decided to exchange money for plastic chips to be used during their games and exchange it for money at the end, the same is still true.
However, if someone takes a cut every time chips are moved then that person is guaranteed to win and the players in total are guaranteed to lose. If you have a game where you know who is the winner and who are the loser without knowing anything about the game, I believe it's fair to call that a scam.
No, stocks are not like this because they produce dividends and gold is not like this either because there are consumers (jewelers, electronics industry) who buy gold add value to it and only sell the value added product. With a crypto"currency" none of this happens. You buy coins, sell the same and they just rot ("HODL" in modern parlance) meanwhile. And you lose money on every transaction. Sure, the price change might mean you leave with a monetary profit but it only means a greater fool is now sitting on a larger loss.
This is a very novel scam for many obvious reasons but that doesn't mean it's not a scam.
Just like how payment processors work like PayPal. They take a cut on each transaction. The difference with validators in a blockchain is that it’s permissionless.. Anybody in the room can participate and capture a % of these transaction fees.
What is negative sum in this example?
A has mined some coins which B buys for 100 USD. Now A has less than 100 USD because the transaction costed something and B has 0 USD. Together they already lost money. This will only get worse. Let's say B can convince C to buy his coin for 1000 USD from, say, an interest free bank loan. Aye, B has 1000 USD minus transaction fee so they made a profit but C has -1000 USD. Altogether they are short on money.
Even here, both users are short USD, but it is not a "negative sum" system as the users gain some positive value by having the payment processor transfer and secure their funds. If the only metric is how much USD a buyer has left, every visit to the bakery would be a negative sum game.
In the above example, PayPal and Wise are User C. In a permissionless blockchain, User A and B can both also opt to be validators and receive these protocol rewards, so there may not even be a User C that extracts rent on each transaction.
When a limited supply token is burned, the total supply is reduced, and assuming that does not decrease the demand, then the value will diffuse to all token holders. If 75% of all PayPal or Wise fees were burned such that all users of PayPal had their account slightly appreciate in value whenever there is significant transactional volume in the network, a lot of users would be pretty into that.
Besides, this is just one way. Bitcoin does not burn fees, so it’s much more like the PayPal and Wise approach, no money leaving circulation.
Sort of similar to if you have a Google gmail account, you also have a Calendar account, a Google Drive account, etc.
Tangentially related, see below for a better idea of “Twitter on the blockchain”:
https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...
They seems to understand the space pretty well and avoid obvious scams, but i would be wary of asking them for security support :/
Such as? There's pretty much no problem that isn't solved better by a solution that doesn't involve a blockchain.