What’s so comical about this is that common-standard digital-first micropayments is THE use case pitch for cryptocurrencies. They had a… decade-and-a-half head start (?) and didn’t make that work beyond a random array of digital tokens too expensive to purchase anything with, managed via many easily-forged browser extensions.
ML existed since the middle of the last century but has only really found its legs as of late, but I didn’t see a lot of people make fun of it for not being perfect within a decade.
Fair point, but machine learning has also been creating value thru all of that time. There were products that used machine learning in the late 90s for many things. DeepBlue!
I think you’re thinking of LLMs which only became possible with the shear amount of conversational data we have today. They obviously share a linage with ML, but it’s a form of training that was impossible several years prior. You can’t say that IBM DeepBlue was an early LLM and measure the timelines like that.
If you know of any watershed moment for crypto that needs to happen, I would love to hear it! I just don’t see anything happening on the horizon.
I’ve been getting and continue to get value from crypto for a multitude of uses. There’s tons of people using it actively, so I just wonder why you choose to ignore that.
A lot more than the very marginal value ML did for its first decades of existence. DeepBlue came many decades after the field came into being.
And I’m very aware of LLM and the different types of ML. It still stands that it was very marginal for decades. But it would be easy to write some dismissive comment in the 80s that the only thing it’s done is play chess for millions of dollars - exactly like crypto haters do today despite it being a completely nascent field.
Fair! I know there’s lots of wallet activity on any of the big chains right now. I’m a little suspicious of that representing real economic activity (filling the role of a currency, used as units of exchange) and maybe a bit more convinced it’s a casino poker chip ledger. It seems like the simple majority of people trade and transact out of their exchange, to my knowledge.
If that simile of ML is like crypto is true, you stand to be quite rich! So best of luck! Best comments have net 0 right, so hopefully you’ll think of me and this thread when you’re a trillionaire eh? ;)
ML was not marginal for decades. It's been in regular use in a number of fields for decades. The current hype is an artifact of someone putting fun interface in front of an ML system. Hype around generative imagery and LLMs is new, not the technologies themselves.
Crypto has been around for nearly a decade and a half and has been really useful for malware and scammers and not much else. It's fundamentally broken as a currency because most coins are designed to be deflationary so they behave like securities. It's fundamentally broken for micro transactions because transactions are ridiculously expensive and slow by design.
AI and machine learning has had several decades to mature—and it had multiple “winters” where interest and funding waned.
It’s possible in 60 years we might see similar leaps from distributed ledgers, zero knowledge proofs, verifiable computation, fully homomorphic encryption, and other tech being spearheaded by the crypto sector.
It’s always possible! I’m no fortune teller. Many people have been wrong and maybe one day I’ll be laughing at my naivety. But for my own projects for the foreseeable future as measured right now, I’ll avoid. I just don’t see it becoming more than poker chips at your exchange of choice.
None of those things were invented or really developed by the "crypto sector" merely utilized by it. That's not a bad thing but it's disingenuous the crypto sector is really advancing any state of the art. It's implementing existing technologies mostly to facilitate scams and tax evasion.
All of these are primarily being funded and advanced by crypto. “Distributed ledger technology” hardly existed before blockchains/Bitcoin. Similar story with ZKP, which has gone from academic theory to real-world application (see: ZKSNARK) in the last decade primarily from blockchain research and funding streams.
Aren’t zero knowledge proofs cryptographic signatures? I might be missing something, but that’s very much been in active use as part of any flavour RSA cryptography going back decades.
Distributed ledger technology, though yes that is clearly a blockchain technology that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Fair point.
> Aren’t zero knowledge proofs cryptographic signatures?
No -- at least not in the sense that RSA uses. Zero knowledge proofs verify computation not data. The zero knowledge property means you can verify a computation ran without revealing its input. Some researchers call it "moon math."
There is a max comment depth for me for some reason so I cannot reply to graypegg directly...
ZK-proofs are more advanced than just cryptographic signatures. The important point is being able to prove something without revealing the proof itself. Classic example is proving that you have a solution to a sudoku board without revealing the solution.
Most ZK proofs actually rely on proving something with some probability. That means I don't prove to you with 100% certainty that I know the sudoku solution, but rather the chance of me lying about knowing a solution is < 0.00000001%. Traditionally, zk proofs required many iterations to justify the probability of the proof. Blockchain use cases advanced research in "succinct" proofs. If you search for ZKSNARK, ZKPLONK, and ZKSTARK you will find some examples.
To compare to a cryptographic signature, I can use classic cryptography to prove that I know a value by sharing a signed hash of that value. However, you can only verify my proof when I reveal the pre-image. Doing the proof entirely on encrypted data is homomorphic encryption, and modern zk proofs make use of homomorphic encryption to prove things about arbitrary computation.
The comparison of incubation periods, adoption curves etc between crypto to ML cannot take us very far.
The reason is that "ML" (as a proxy for algorithmic processing of a variety of data) is not particularly adversarial to pre-existing technologies. While this is not entirely true (there is always a hidden or explicit tension between automation and expert assessments) by-and-large this tension can be managed. The new tech gets bolted on the old.
In contrast crypto sought to overthrow all pre-existing monetary and financial system technology with proposals that are naive, half-baked and ignore (or reinvent in unacknowledged manner) vital aspects.
The practical implication is that crypto cannot carve a legitimate niche and keep iterating.
The main outcome of a lot of wasted energy (in all senses) is to point out that indeed, digitization opens up the way to evolve the financial system.
So much we knew, but now it has been drilled into the heads of large swaths of politicos, regulators, bankers etc that are completely tech illiterate.
which kind of proves the point that crypto wasn't about the everyday person making daily transactions. it was a pipe dream of a way to handle large amounts of money while minimizing the fees/taxes associated with fiat monies.
if crypto was about the everyday person, it would have been made useful
> What’s so comical about this is that common-standard digital-first micropayments is THE use case pitch for cryptocurrencies
I had been following BTC since ~2009 (when a CS PhD friend of mine at uni introduced me to it, as his research project was on distributed ledgers) - but from the very start it was made clear to me that projects like Bitcoin would never be suitable for microtransactions due to the reasons that became clear to everyone since then: at the values of microtransactions (i.e. under $3 USD) the cost of committing that transaction within reasonable time-frame for a microtransaction (say, less than a minute for a mobile-game IAP purchase) is simply prohibitive and makes the legacy incumbent card networks (Visa, Mastercard, etc) seem like nimble, customer-pleasing startups.
Well said. It’s a fine line right? I’m not cheering on Visa and Mastercard. But they really do have the most customer pleasing product. If I’m betting with my own money and projects on the future of something, hard to drift towards the “universal crypto adoption”.
What's comical is when people assume that upending established financial systems, such as centuries-old fiat currencies and banks, should be a walk in the park. Such transformation doesn't merely involve introducing a disruptive technology, but necessitates overcoming many legal and societal challenges.
If you'd have told anyone in 2009 that an open source decentralized currency would eventually become a trillion dollar market, or that it would be recognized as legal tender in some countries, no one would have believed you. Yet here we are with people complaining about how it hasn't yet obsoleted the US dollar.
Totally fair, it’s obviously a bit of a “no true scotsman” argument for me to move the goals posts to “crypto is only a success if it replaces X”.
However if im making bets for my own projects, with my own money, I’m not seeing the incentives for the sort of massive change to actually happen. Love it or hate it, you can’t just burn down the world and start over, so something has to be aligned with the gate keepers to make this work. I don’t think it is. Without adoption it’s ceases to be valuable to those outside the magic circle, which means it’s not worth adopting.
Crypto gets actual real (non-trading/non-gambling) usage in parts of LatAm.
This blog post[1] from Vitalik explains a little:
> Unlike wealthy countries like the United States, where financial transactions are easy to make and 8% inflation is considered extreme, in Argentina and many other countries around the world, links to global financial systems are more limited and extreme inflation is a reality every day. Cryptocurrency often steps in as a lifeline
Some of the users are on battle tested decentralized solutions like Ethereum and its rollups. Others transact through centralized exchanges because fees are cheaper. And others use more centralized blockchain networks such as Tron to avoid high fees. On one hand, using central exchanges doesn't match up to the decentralized promise of the blockchain. On the other hand, it's cool to see people using crypto without caring that it's crypto. They just want to have access to more stable currencies for payments and transactions!
I've seen this myself, from talking to LatAm businesses and from a friend in Argentina.
> Stripe conducted a pilot with an early implementation of SPC and, in March 2020 reported that, compared to one-time passcodes (OTP), SPC authentication led to an 8% increase in conversions at the same time checkout was 3 times faster.
Edit: looks like I made a fool of myself. I didn’t know about Apples other implementation of a similar feature.
It seems nice but I think Apple will never implement this for Safari, even if standardized. It’d bypass their AppStore and make the web even more “app-like”, which they already aren’t crazy about.
No one is disputing that this is a new standard. The dispute is that Apple wouldn’t support it because it would take away from some hypothetical App Store revenue. Apple
already supports the existing standard showing the argument doesn’t hold.
Article & spec mention privacy issues re: connecting users to payments, that seemingly would allow someone to pay for an app subscription without going through the store, since the payment receiver gets user details
This is possible already with Apple-supported Payment Request API (and even without those APIs, like just logging into a website). This is how Netflix on iOS works, which is explicitly supported (though with stupid cavets) by Apple.
The existing one, you click on a button on the web and it takes you through the same Apple Pay process flow that you go through when you pay in app with Apple Pay for something like Uber.
In app purchases - Apple takes 30% for electronic goods in the App Store
Apple Pay - Apple charges standard credit card fees on the web or via the App Store.
As mentioned above, you can use Apple Pay in app if you sell physical goods.
The user’s info is sent with the existing Payments Request API. If you use Apple Pay on the web, it will send your name and address if requested for shipping physical goods.
SPC does not handle payments, it handles authentication. SPC is designed to work in scenarios like Plaid and 3D Secure, not for what Apple Pay (or the app store) does.
I believe SPC comes out of the Authn working group.
> This specification defines an API that enables the use of strong authentication methods in payment flows on the web. It aims to provide the same authentication benefits and user privacy focus as [webauthn-3] with enhancements to meet the needs of payment processing.
Some people like to save and invest instead of spending every single cent they have.
We'd be a much more stable society if the majority of the population wasn't one paycheck away from being financially ruined.
37% of Americans don't have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency[0]. That percentage goes up as the amount goes up and a $400 emergency is easy to hit - medical bill, moving expense, car repair, etc. It becomes 68% at $1,000[1].
Saving and investing are not realistic options for you if you're living paycheck to paycheck. That's why it's called that, because you have no money left over after paying for your necessities. Sometimes you don't even get to cover all your bills and you start racking up debt or are forced to be clever with frugality (read: giving up recurring payments like healthcare).
Saving money is basically buying into the baning industry’s narrative of a fat bank account, or of borrowing money in order to pay it off for 30 years.
Now investing is another story! Buy durable things with your cash that hold value over time!
Right, because people don't use credit cards for the additional protection, points or miles. It's because they are all borrowing money they don't have.
And billionares who borrow money because it's tax efficient must all be secretly broke too. /s
> Right, because people don't use credit cards for the additional protection, points or miles.
I actually don't know, because I'm not American. Over here just having a credit card draws questions about one's financial stability and responsibility.
At the end of the day it's really not your money you're spending like that. I mean - it's in the name even. You'll have to pay it back eventually.
> At the end of the day it's really not your money you're spending like that. I mean - it's in the name even. You'll have to pay it back eventually.
Eventually in this case is in less than 50 days. In the 15 or so years that I've been using credit cards, I have never once failed to pay off the bill in full before the due date. And the miles and points I've accrued have saved me significant amount of money.
> Over here just having a credit card draws questions about one's financial stability and responsibility.
I am really curious to know where in the world that is. Even if that is the general perception, it is unlikely to be actually true. Even in Germany, the rich use credit cards at a higher rate than the poor. That is a pattern you'll see replicated the world over. Getting approved for a premium credit card requires one to have a demonstably good income and credit score. So, having such a card is an indicator of strong financial stability and responsibility.
> So, having such a card is an indicator of strong financial stability and responsibility.
Yeah, such a card, not any card. Over here the most popular type of debt is one taken to purchase consumer goods like appliances and electronics in installments, mortgages are second.
Upper-middle class people and higher just buy things cash. There's no benefit in stretching this out if you can afford not to and any, even accidental, delay might hurt one's credit score - not worth it.
The GP's point was that counting someone using credit cards as living paycheck to paycheck is flawed. Especially moreso in a country that had high credit card penetration.
Your contention might be true in Poland. But that most definitely is not universal.
Investments are not very liquid on the time scale of less than a day. It's very often not about having to borrow money, it's about being able to leave less money sitting idle in your bank account.
That’s what I ask all the 401k nerds. You could literally die next week. Sure seems like a great way to live; when you’re young and in your prime, live below your means to max out your 401k, which there’s a fair risk you won’t live to see or enjoy, or… just stop hoarding money and live your life (I’m not saying be financially ignorant or irresponsible).
17.27% of men don’t live to age 60, and another ~6%, or 23.57% of men overall, don’t make it to age 65.[1] For reference, one must typically be age 59.5 before they can withdraw from their 401k without penalty.
So, if you save for 40 years, live below your means so you can maybe have a chance at enjoying all that money you’ve socked away. Pretty crazy to think that nearly a quarter of us won’t live to see or use the money beyond 5 or 6 years after retirement.
As someone who spends quite a bit of his time counting the sand in the hourglass that is one of his relatives' retirement funds...
There's no definite win-strategy here. It is possible to die young. It is possible to outlive your savings and live a miserable final years. We can't guarantee a happy solution.
(Well, TBF, we could decrease the misery of the one option by deeply funding social security, not to sustain it but to raise to a higher standard of living than previous generations ever knew because we currently live in a world with a higher productive capacity than previous generations ever knew. So I'm speaking of transient political reality and not concrete laws of the universe.)
There are a few ways you can withdraw from your 401k early without penalty. The best is probably Roth conversion laddering, which requires that you plan your withdrawals 5 years ahead of time. If you have a spouse and children, then it also makes sense to consider what will help you best set them up for a good life; you might not get to benefit much from that savings, but maybe your children will be able to avoid starting their adulthood as debt/rent slaves.
Interesting you cite Social Security, the mandatory pyramid scheme that every American pays into and many/most retirees rely on for income. If you die before you retire, you get nothing from Social Security. If you have a 401k and die before using all the money in it, your beneficiaries (the people who inherit your stuff when you die) keep it; nothing like that happens to your Social Security benefits.
> If you die before you retire, you get nothing from Social Security. If you have a 401k and die before using all the money in it, your beneficiaries (the people who inherit your stuff when you die) keep it; nothing like that happens to your Social Security benefits.
Social security has both death and survivors benefits, actually.
> 17.27% of men don’t live to age 60, and another ~6%, or 23.57% of men overall, don’t make it to age 65.[1] For reference, one must typically be age 59.5 before they can withdraw from their 401k without penalty.
You are making the almost certainly mistaken assumption that the population of men who "live below [their] means to max out [their] 401k" are representative of the overall population of American men with regards to life expectancy.
That friction could use some lubrication, at least in Europe. I loathe outdated/misconfigured card payment terminals outright declining payments that go over the 100€ cumulative total on contactless.
The better configured ones just ask for a PIN and that's it. But there are many which just decline the transaction, leaving both me and the shopkeeper frustrated requiring me to "try again".
That's not my experience, it lasts many more times for me and it says "INSERT CARD". Which is also what it says when you haven't got money to cover the payment.
Yeah, I think it's based on an amount instead of times. I have been to my local shop for months and they never asked for card yet. Each time spending like £3-4
I think this would add friction on the whole, adding an authentication step to transactions where you currently just type in your card number and hit submit. It reduces friction compared to an alternative where you confirm transactions with SMS codes, but I don't think that is very common.
Whew. I saw the word crypto… and figured that the W3C is running a ponzi scam. No one is above ridicule the moment I see crypto involved! It has no good use cases and that’s final
Interesting that this is built on top of FIDO/webauthn.
I'm still somewhat worried about webauthn but recent news around it has (imo) been moving in a more positive direction and I'm less worried about it than I used to be. So I would really love to be cautiously optimistic about this.
Assuming webauthn turns out well, this seems to be a pretty natural and pretty useful extension.
W3C should standardize cookie policy banners, and popups. This monstrosity of a feature should have always been a browser feature, not a burden for web developers.
I never understood why websites are required to inform about cookies if it's acutally the browsers who store the cookies on the device and send them back to the server.
How about a domain.tld/.well-known/cookies.txt file that contains a description about each cookie-key and then let the browser provide the UI for displaying that information and being configurable on which individual cookies to store for how long? (and for example discard all cookies that are not described in the cookies.txt file)
Because it's not just about cookies. There are two laws at play, the GDPR and the ePrivacy directive. It's a mix of cookies, local storage, allowing the browser to load third party tracking scripts after information/consent, and data processing taking place on the server side. Simply solving cookies won't make the banners go away.
Websites are legally required (both e-privacy directive and GDPR) to inform users (at least those from the EU) about what user information they store/track. This pertains to cookies as well as any other methods of doing so. Since they're the ones doing that, it makes sense that they're the ones with the legal obligation. It just so happens that just about every website decided to make this incredibly obnoxious, instead of respecting their visitors.
As a legal professor said (paraphrased): it was amazing to see an entire industry come together to undermine legislation.
Why are websites required to inform a user about data tracking and required to ask for consent in a custom implemented, not-machine-readable dialog/poup. The user can not even check if the tracking is actually disabled once they clicked "decline" or "only accept technical required cookies".
Why not require websites to provide that information on a per-file/per-cookie/per-localstorage-key level.
Then browser could block all js-files/cookies/storage-entries that have now proper description included (eg, in an http-header for files, or a robots.txt-like cooies.txt file, or as standardized comment at the top of a js file).
Currently there are extension like no-script taht block everything, but how about allowing/requirig site-owners to annotate files with tracking meta data in order to be unblocked?
They are not. They are required to inform and ask for the user’s consent to process their information. They have to provide a way to retract that consent at any time too. How they do it is mostly beyond the scope of the legislation. They have to provide some points of contact but that’s about it.
It's not clear to me from the article how this is supposed to work.
My favourite payment system is still the Dutch iDeal: marchant creates a payment request, redirects the user to their own bank, the user uses thhe bank's authorization system to authorize the payment, informs the merchant that payment is successful, and then redirects the user back to the merchant who now knows the transaction is successful, without having to know anything about how the user paid.
How is this going to integrate with my banking app, though? I quite like the Apple Pay or iDeal approaches. I don't really want my browser to confirm payments to be honest.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadhttps://www.w3.org/2023/06/pressrelease-spc-cr.html.en
https://developer.chrome.com/articles/secure-payment-confirm...
I think you’re thinking of LLMs which only became possible with the shear amount of conversational data we have today. They obviously share a linage with ML, but it’s a form of training that was impossible several years prior. You can’t say that IBM DeepBlue was an early LLM and measure the timelines like that.
If you know of any watershed moment for crypto that needs to happen, I would love to hear it! I just don’t see anything happening on the horizon.
A lot more than the very marginal value ML did for its first decades of existence. DeepBlue came many decades after the field came into being.
And I’m very aware of LLM and the different types of ML. It still stands that it was very marginal for decades. But it would be easy to write some dismissive comment in the 80s that the only thing it’s done is play chess for millions of dollars - exactly like crypto haters do today despite it being a completely nascent field.
If that simile of ML is like crypto is true, you stand to be quite rich! So best of luck! Best comments have net 0 right, so hopefully you’ll think of me and this thread when you’re a trillionaire eh? ;)
Crypto has been around for nearly a decade and a half and has been really useful for malware and scammers and not much else. It's fundamentally broken as a currency because most coins are designed to be deflationary so they behave like securities. It's fundamentally broken for micro transactions because transactions are ridiculously expensive and slow by design.
It’s possible in 60 years we might see similar leaps from distributed ledgers, zero knowledge proofs, verifiable computation, fully homomorphic encryption, and other tech being spearheaded by the crypto sector.
Distributed ledger technology, though yes that is clearly a blockchain technology that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Fair point.
No -- at least not in the sense that RSA uses. Zero knowledge proofs verify computation not data. The zero knowledge property means you can verify a computation ran without revealing its input. Some researchers call it "moon math."
ZK-proofs are more advanced than just cryptographic signatures. The important point is being able to prove something without revealing the proof itself. Classic example is proving that you have a solution to a sudoku board without revealing the solution.
Most ZK proofs actually rely on proving something with some probability. That means I don't prove to you with 100% certainty that I know the sudoku solution, but rather the chance of me lying about knowing a solution is < 0.00000001%. Traditionally, zk proofs required many iterations to justify the probability of the proof. Blockchain use cases advanced research in "succinct" proofs. If you search for ZKSNARK, ZKPLONK, and ZKSTARK you will find some examples.
To compare to a cryptographic signature, I can use classic cryptography to prove that I know a value by sharing a signed hash of that value. However, you can only verify my proof when I reveal the pre-image. Doing the proof entirely on encrypted data is homomorphic encryption, and modern zk proofs make use of homomorphic encryption to prove things about arbitrary computation.
The reason is that "ML" (as a proxy for algorithmic processing of a variety of data) is not particularly adversarial to pre-existing technologies. While this is not entirely true (there is always a hidden or explicit tension between automation and expert assessments) by-and-large this tension can be managed. The new tech gets bolted on the old.
In contrast crypto sought to overthrow all pre-existing monetary and financial system technology with proposals that are naive, half-baked and ignore (or reinvent in unacknowledged manner) vital aspects.
The practical implication is that crypto cannot carve a legitimate niche and keep iterating.
The main outcome of a lot of wasted energy (in all senses) is to point out that indeed, digitization opens up the way to evolve the financial system.
So much we knew, but now it has been drilled into the heads of large swaths of politicos, regulators, bankers etc that are completely tech illiterate.
if crypto was about the everyday person, it would have been made useful
I had been following BTC since ~2009 (when a CS PhD friend of mine at uni introduced me to it, as his research project was on distributed ledgers) - but from the very start it was made clear to me that projects like Bitcoin would never be suitable for microtransactions due to the reasons that became clear to everyone since then: at the values of microtransactions (i.e. under $3 USD) the cost of committing that transaction within reasonable time-frame for a microtransaction (say, less than a minute for a mobile-game IAP purchase) is simply prohibitive and makes the legacy incumbent card networks (Visa, Mastercard, etc) seem like nimble, customer-pleasing startups.
If you'd have told anyone in 2009 that an open source decentralized currency would eventually become a trillion dollar market, or that it would be recognized as legal tender in some countries, no one would have believed you. Yet here we are with people complaining about how it hasn't yet obsoleted the US dollar.
However if im making bets for my own projects, with my own money, I’m not seeing the incentives for the sort of massive change to actually happen. Love it or hate it, you can’t just burn down the world and start over, so something has to be aligned with the gate keepers to make this work. I don’t think it is. Without adoption it’s ceases to be valuable to those outside the magic circle, which means it’s not worth adopting.
This blog post[1] from Vitalik explains a little:
> Unlike wealthy countries like the United States, where financial transactions are easy to make and 8% inflation is considered extreme, in Argentina and many other countries around the world, links to global financial systems are more limited and extreme inflation is a reality every day. Cryptocurrency often steps in as a lifeline
Some of the users are on battle tested decentralized solutions like Ethereum and its rollups. Others transact through centralized exchanges because fees are cheaper. And others use more centralized blockchain networks such as Tron to avoid high fees. On one hand, using central exchanges doesn't match up to the decentralized promise of the blockchain. On the other hand, it's cool to see people using crypto without caring that it's crypto. They just want to have access to more stable currencies for payments and transactions!
I've seen this myself, from talking to LatAm businesses and from a friend in Argentina.
[1]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html
They seem pretty excited about it.
It should reduce fraud and apparently improve conversion rates, so that’s a big win for Stripe.
This describes Stripe's early involvement in the spec.
It seems nice but I think Apple will never implement this for Safari, even if standardized. It’d bypass their AppStore and make the web even more “app-like”, which they already aren’t crazy about.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Payment_Req...
https://webkit.org/blog/8182/introducing-the-payment-request...
The closest similarity we have is that Apple supported the existing payment standard relatively early on.
In app purchases - Apple takes 30% for electronic goods in the App Store
Apple Pay - Apple charges standard credit card fees on the web or via the App Store.
As mentioned above, you can use Apple Pay in app if you sell physical goods.
c.f. example of how merchants M1 and M2 could collide to identify payment method P1 and P2 are connected to the same user
EDIT: Throttled on new comments
I agree: I'd take up more detailed Qs with the article writer & spec/proposal, they seem sure its different.
I also agree if the new proposal is the same as the old proposal, it does seem likely Apple would implement it.
I don't understand why the W3C would make a new proposal that was the same as the old one, but...forget it Jake, it's ̶C̶h̶i̶n̶a̶t̶o̶w̶n̶ web specs.
I believe SPC comes out of the Authn working group.
> This specification defines an API that enables the use of strong authentication methods in payment flows on the web. It aims to provide the same authentication benefits and user privacy focus as [webauthn-3] with enhancements to meet the needs of payment processing.
https://www.w3.org/TR/secure-payment-confirmation/
Are you going to make a pile of gold and sit on it like a dragon?
We'd be a much more stable society if the majority of the population wasn't one paycheck away from being financially ruined.
37% of Americans don't have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency[0]. That percentage goes up as the amount goes up and a $400 emergency is easy to hit - medical bill, moving expense, car repair, etc. It becomes 68% at $1,000[1].
[0]https://fortune.com/2023/05/23/inflation-economy-consumer-fi... [1]https://fortune.com/recommends/banking/57-percent-of-america...
Now investing is another story! Buy durable things with your cash that hold value over time!
And billionares who borrow money because it's tax efficient must all be secretly broke too. /s
I actually don't know, because I'm not American. Over here just having a credit card draws questions about one's financial stability and responsibility.
At the end of the day it's really not your money you're spending like that. I mean - it's in the name even. You'll have to pay it back eventually.
Neither am I.
> At the end of the day it's really not your money you're spending like that. I mean - it's in the name even. You'll have to pay it back eventually.
Eventually in this case is in less than 50 days. In the 15 or so years that I've been using credit cards, I have never once failed to pay off the bill in full before the due date. And the miles and points I've accrued have saved me significant amount of money.
> Over here just having a credit card draws questions about one's financial stability and responsibility.
I am really curious to know where in the world that is. Even if that is the general perception, it is unlikely to be actually true. Even in Germany, the rich use credit cards at a higher rate than the poor. That is a pattern you'll see replicated the world over. Getting approved for a premium credit card requires one to have a demonstably good income and credit score. So, having such a card is an indicator of strong financial stability and responsibility.
Yeah, but that's you. People living paycheck to paycheck don't have a realistic chance of achieving the same.
> I am really curious to know where in the world that is. Even if that is the general perception, it is unlikely to be actually true.
Poland. Out of 44mln payment cards issued, less than 5mln are credit cards. This is reflected in statistics:
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/people_with_credit...
> So, having such a card is an indicator of strong financial stability and responsibility.
Yeah, such a card, not any card. Over here the most popular type of debt is one taken to purchase consumer goods like appliances and electronics in installments, mortgages are second.
Upper-middle class people and higher just buy things cash. There's no benefit in stretching this out if you can afford not to and any, even accidental, delay might hurt one's credit score - not worth it.
Your contention might be true in Poland. But that most definitely is not universal.
17.27% of men don’t live to age 60, and another ~6%, or 23.57% of men overall, don’t make it to age 65.[1] For reference, one must typically be age 59.5 before they can withdraw from their 401k without penalty.
So, if you save for 40 years, live below your means so you can maybe have a chance at enjoying all that money you’ve socked away. Pretty crazy to think that nearly a quarter of us won’t live to see or use the money beyond 5 or 6 years after retirement.
* [1] - https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
There's no definite win-strategy here. It is possible to die young. It is possible to outlive your savings and live a miserable final years. We can't guarantee a happy solution.
(Well, TBF, we could decrease the misery of the one option by deeply funding social security, not to sustain it but to raise to a higher standard of living than previous generations ever knew because we currently live in a world with a higher productive capacity than previous generations ever knew. So I'm speaking of transient political reality and not concrete laws of the universe.)
Take from the young (poor) to pay the old (rich). Yeah, that sounds amazing, where do I sign up? /s
Interesting you cite Social Security, the mandatory pyramid scheme that every American pays into and many/most retirees rely on for income. If you die before you retire, you get nothing from Social Security. If you have a 401k and die before using all the money in it, your beneficiaries (the people who inherit your stuff when you die) keep it; nothing like that happens to your Social Security benefits.
Social security has both death and survivors benefits, actually.
You can go buy life annuities at your will, and they're pretty close in function and clearly not schemes.
You are making the almost certainly mistaken assumption that the population of men who "live below [their] means to max out [their] 401k" are representative of the overall population of American men with regards to life expectancy.
The demographics and actuarial numbers of people maxing out their 401k will look very different. The richest live ~15 years longer than the poorest.
If you want to buy a house, yes. A pile of gold is also handy to start a business.
Pointless and all is displayed is "Declined". Embarrassing if your paying in the party.
I'm still somewhat worried about webauthn but recent news around it has (imo) been moving in a more positive direction and I'm less worried about it than I used to be. So I would really love to be cautiously optimistic about this.
Assuming webauthn turns out well, this seems to be a pretty natural and pretty useful extension.
I'm kidding on the square, but I thought they'd been effectively displaced by WHATWG (and TC39).
How about a domain.tld/.well-known/cookies.txt file that contains a description about each cookie-key and then let the browser provide the UI for displaying that information and being configurable on which individual cookies to store for how long? (and for example discard all cookies that are not described in the cookies.txt file)
That won't work. The cookie banners are annoying and tricky on purpose.
As a legal professor said (paraphrased): it was amazing to see an entire industry come together to undermine legislation.
Why are websites required to inform a user about data tracking and required to ask for consent in a custom implemented, not-machine-readable dialog/poup. The user can not even check if the tracking is actually disabled once they clicked "decline" or "only accept technical required cookies".
Why not require websites to provide that information on a per-file/per-cookie/per-localstorage-key level. Then browser could block all js-files/cookies/storage-entries that have now proper description included (eg, in an http-header for files, or a robots.txt-like cooies.txt file, or as standardized comment at the top of a js file).
Currently there are extension like no-script taht block everything, but how about allowing/requirig site-owners to annotate files with tracking meta data in order to be unblocked?
My favourite payment system is still the Dutch iDeal: marchant creates a payment request, redirects the user to their own bank, the user uses thhe bank's authorization system to authorize the payment, informs the merchant that payment is successful, and then redirects the user back to the merchant who now knows the transaction is successful, without having to know anything about how the user paid.