
A Thought for Your Pennies: Micropayment and the Liberation of Content (2009) - j_s
http://transcopyright.org/hcoinRemarks-D28.html
======
jonah-archive
Ted's sitting across from me right now! He says this article is old, and
wanted to link to a video he recently made talking about his life and work, if
anyone's interested: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmfjM-
SGlGs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmfjM-SGlGs)

We're also hosting an ongoing archival project of his junk mail that he's
saved over the years:
[https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail](https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail)
(more details on the project:
[http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5206](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5206)
)

~~~
hossbeast
What does he have to say about cryptocurrencies, and the impending possibility
that they might make micropayments a reality?

~~~
sillysaurus3
In fairness, cryptocurrencies have become more like gold than pennies. I
recently proposed someone pay me in Bitcoin for services rendered, and it
immediately seemed like a bad idea. PayPal or Venmo is still where it's at,
for better or worse.

As far as "impending," well... Maybe if the lightning network proposal
happens. Maybe.

The other currencies do matter, but Bitcoin remains the granddaddy and has
immense inertia. It's hard enough for normal people to acquire Bitcoin, let
alone any of the others.

~~~
hossbeast
Yeah, lightning is what I had in mind. Next year is my guess, with SegWit now
in place.

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zorpner
I highly recommend this 1995 Wired article about Ted Nelson and the history of
hypertext:
[https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/)

~~~
anotheryou
so good, just recently found it too.

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korethr
The thought of some kind of micro-payment has crossed my mind more than once
as a potential alternative to increasingly invasive and annoying
advertisements when it comes to funding content creators.

There was a time when I didn't mind ads. Hell, I've discovered some of the
Internet content I now enjoy through ads. But now ads have become creepy,
following me around the Internet, slowing down and breaking the rendering of
sites, and acting as an avenue for the distribution of malware. I'd love to
support the various webcomics, music streams, blogs, and other things on the
Internet I enjoy without having to open my browser up to unscrupulous ad
networks. Yes, now there's sites like Patreon, but that's still opt-in (though
admittedly better than the fanclubs of the early 00s, with membership
contingent on remembering to send a PayPal again this month). I'd imagined
something automagic that Just Worked. You view a website, your viewing of that
site shows up on your ISP bill.

A hypothetical example I came up with went something like this: After doing an
archive binge of some new-to-me webcomic, there was a slight increase of my
ISP bill that month. This reflected the additional load I put on the author's
over-worked webserver while voraciously consuming in 6 hours the story this
artist had spent 6 years producing. His hosting provider billed my ISP and
then my ISP billed me.

But then I realized, for that to be practically implementable, my ISP would
have to know who's looking at what on the Internet at what times. How else
would Comcast know the bill they got from Joe Webcomic c/o Bluehost should be
billed to me, and not someone else? Such a system could be abused to be an
invasive privacy nightmare just as advertisements have become. To say nothing
of how governments would love to abuse such. If my ISP knows I visit nifty-
webcomic.com and can send me the creator's bill, then so could authorities in
Egypt know who to arrest for visiting gay-rights.com.

I have yet to come up with a solution for this :/

~~~
ex3xu
As a theoretical solution to what you are saying, you could implement this in
aggregate -- the ISP accepts a flat "content" payment from all its
subscribers, sums the time spent on each site from each user, and then pays
out micropayments to each content provider as a percentage of the total
content payments received from all subscribers. Sort of analogous to how the
Tor network prevents deanonymization. You could even implement it as an open-
source browser extension in the same fashion as Tor.

Ultimately however, this solution has two major flaws that I can think of up
front -- first, it is too susceptible to botting, and second, it relies on a
steadfastly privacy conscious central party (the ISP in this example) that
never accidentally hires an Eric Schmidt-type who gives in to the monetary
value of data. Having just read Tim Wu's "The Attention Merchants" I don't
have a lot of hope for that.

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equalunique
Brilliant idea from 1960.

Immediately I thought of Safecoin/SAFE Network[0] and Mercury
Protocol[1]/Cyber Dust[2].

[0] [https://safenetwork.wiki/en/FAQ](https://safenetwork.wiki/en/FAQ) [1]
[https://www.mercuryprotocol.com/](https://www.mercuryprotocol.com/) [2]
[https://interestingengineering.com/billionaire-mark-
cubans-n...](https://interestingengineering.com/billionaire-mark-cubans-new-
project-making-new-imprints-on-social-media)

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josefwasinski
Consider the success of Spotify over iTunes. People will always prefer an "all
you can eat" approach, even if they don't end up consuming any more or
spending more than if they bought individual units. You have the decision
fatigue every time you buy content vs once when you subscribe.

The exception to this rule is obviously for a platform like Patreon, where it
is about the relationship.

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tpeo
I think saying that people might trade arbitrary portions of data instead of
some specified standard is missing the point. People already can trade
arbitrary portions of data in the absence of previously agreed standards. The
real issue, specially for curation, is how to choose standards for what
qualifies as "content" within a certain medium in order to maximize the
likelihood of meaningful communication occurring within that medium.

Which doesn't seem easy.

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smangat17
This is what we're building at Stream!

streamtoken.net

