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I think we really, really need cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Buying access to stuff online with a credit card is totally inconvenient, and even worse, you

I think we really, really need cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Buying access to stuff online with a credit card is totally inconvenient, and even worse, you have no privacy then. I guess this is part of the reason why sites financed by advertising have become so prevalent. Personally, if there was an easy and private way to do so, I'd much rather pay for content than getting "free" stuff financed by ads. Inevitably, sites will be extremely reluctant to write anything negative about products from companies that buy lots of ads. For this reason, I consider many of the reviews on tech sites, for example, kinda worthless. So, I'm glad to see this ad financed business model break down. Buying access to content with a cryptocurrency could be real easy (and relatively private). But it does not help that many governments want you to calculate capital gain/loss everytime you make such a purchase. I think governments ought to make an exception in the capital gains tax for small personal purchases. Maybe promoters who loudly proclaim that cryptocurrencies will soon replace "legacy" government fiat currencies are part of the problem. No wonder governments are so negative. But I don't think cryptocurrencies necessarily will replace fiat currencies anytime soon. Cryptocurrencies work great for small purchases online, but I wouldn't want to put my lifesavings into one - oh no! My computer got hacked - my life savings are gone! Edit: replacing the entire capital gains tax with a wealth tax would probably be even better.

danieldk 11y ago
I think we really, really need cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Or just something where I could pay, say 10 Euro per year, and every website that participates gets a fraction to my number of visits or reading time. As far as I understand, Google is trying to do this. But it does not provide a 'no ads' guarantee and there are other ad networks with even more obnoxious ads.
- teddyh 11y ago
  You mean something like Flattr?
- ac29 11y ago
  > Or just something where I could pay, say 10 Euro per year, and every website that participates gets a fraction to my number of visits or reading time. The problem with this is you must allow a third party to track every page visit and/or page view time, which is unacceptable to many people that use ad blockers. If you are OK with persistent, pervasive tracking, I think this is probably the best solution.
  - thesteamboat 11y ago
    Ignoring the page view time bit, couldn't this (theoretically, I have a hard time imagining it practically) just be handled invisibly by the ISP that already knows every request you make?
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    You've described the situation pretty accurately here I think. I wonder, though. What if a browser extension generated tokens and stuck them in headers, and then sites sent those tokens on to the central authority after some appropriate transformation? It seems possible to set it up so the central authority would have enough information to remunerate sites without having enough information to know what users are doing.
ufo 11y ago
Bitcoin stores every single transaction that ever happens in a public ledger. Not only is it not private but it also will not scale for microtransactions on a massive scale.
- jensen123 11y ago
  > Bitcoin stores every single transaction that ever happens in a public ledger. Ok, I admit I'm not a Bitcoin expert. But if I buy Bitcoin with cash, or mine some myself, is this really a problem?
  - Jweb_Guru 11y ago
    Yes. It's unrelated to how you acquire the Bitcoin, there's a soft limit of something like seven transactions per second across the entire ledger (it's not exactly that because the difficulty of mining a block is set based on the current hash rate, but it's set so that on average a block is mined every ten minutes; in practice, it will usually be much lower, since that figure assumes only minimum-sized transactions are used and the block is full, which is rarely the case).
  - mindslight 11y ago
    Yes, because in the best case you're still creating a single pseudononymous profile and one identity-tied transaction will deanonymize the whole thing. Even without that, enough usage activity means a shadow profile can be inferred that is effectively tracking you, just without a specific name. FINCEN has been developing this type of technology for decades. And this is magnified when you're talking about essentially penny transactions - unless your cash bitcoin dealer is willing to see you every week for another $2. "Anonymity" means little in the context of ecash. The property we're really looking for is untraceability, which bitcoin does not have.
    - jensen123 11y ago
      Interesting. Apparently, there is much I don't know. I wasn't necessarily thinking about micro transactions, though. It would be nice to for example buy a 1 year full access to a site like Guru3D easily and anonomously. But yeah, I guess the profiling you mention is still a problem.
inopinatus 11y ago
You're being downvoted and I think that's unfair. My reading of this article produced the same notion. My willingness to pay (in the form of being the recipient of advertising, and the associated loss of privacy) is lower than the value I receive from most content. Therefore I block the ads except on the tiny fraction of sites for which I make exceptions. Similarly I rarely cross a paywall. Ergo, my willingness to pay is non-zero, but current fiat-currency payment services are inadequate to represent the negotiation. I would be willing to buy (e.g. with fiat cash or another cryptocurrency) a block of quota, denominated in a well-constructed unit, for access to content. This quota could be automatically decremented within a framework of personally definable rules. It is analogous to the GB blocks I buy from my ISP, but the unit might instead represent the market value of information. Bitcoin itself is not answer - there are limitations that preclude microtransactions at scale, and traceability issues - but some distributed cryptocurrency will be the solution. It will take luck and genius to design & establish. The Ethereum project gives me hope that a solution will be found within a couple of decades.

danieldk 11y ago

I think we really, really need cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Or just something where I could pay, say 10 Euro per year, and every website that participates gets a fraction to my number of visits or reading time. As far as I understand, Google is trying to do this. But it does not provide a 'no ads' guarantee and there are other ad networks with even more obnoxious ads.

teddyh 11y ago
You mean something like Flattr?
ac29 11y ago
> Or just something where I could pay, say 10 Euro per year, and every website that participates gets a fraction to my number of visits or reading time. The problem with this is you must allow a third party to track every page visit and/or page view time, which is unacceptable to many people that use ad blockers. If you are OK with persistent, pervasive tracking, I think this is probably the best solution.
- thesteamboat 11y ago
  Ignoring the page view time bit, couldn't this (theoretically, I have a hard time imagining it practically) just be handled invisibly by the ISP that already knows every request you make?
- jessaustin 11y ago
  You've described the situation pretty accurately here I think. I wonder, though. What if a browser extension generated tokens and stuck them in headers, and then sites sent those tokens on to the central authority after some appropriate transformation? It seems possible to set it up so the central authority would have enough information to remunerate sites without having enough information to know what users are doing.

ufo 11y ago

Bitcoin stores every single transaction that ever happens in a public ledger. Not only is it not private but it also will not scale for microtransactions on a massive scale.

jensen123 11y ago
> Bitcoin stores every single transaction that ever happens in a public ledger. Ok, I admit I'm not a Bitcoin expert. But if I buy Bitcoin with cash, or mine some myself, is this really a problem?
- Jweb_Guru 11y ago
  Yes. It's unrelated to how you acquire the Bitcoin, there's a soft limit of something like seven transactions per second across the entire ledger (it's not exactly that because the difficulty of mining a block is set based on the current hash rate, but it's set so that on average a block is mined every ten minutes; in practice, it will usually be much lower, since that figure assumes only minimum-sized transactions are used and the block is full, which is rarely the case).
- mindslight 11y ago
  Yes, because in the best case you're still creating a single pseudononymous profile and one identity-tied transaction will deanonymize the whole thing. Even without that, enough usage activity means a shadow profile can be inferred that is effectively tracking you, just without a specific name. FINCEN has been developing this type of technology for decades. And this is magnified when you're talking about essentially penny transactions - unless your cash bitcoin dealer is willing to see you every week for another $2. "Anonymity" means little in the context of ecash. The property we're really looking for is untraceability, which bitcoin does not have.
  - jensen123 11y ago
    Interesting. Apparently, there is much I don't know. I wasn't necessarily thinking about micro transactions, though. It would be nice to for example buy a 1 year full access to a site like Guru3D easily and anonomously. But yeah, I guess the profiling you mention is still a problem.

inopinatus 11y ago

You're being downvoted and I think that's unfair. My reading of this article produced the same notion. My willingness to pay (in the form of being the recipient of advertising, and the associated loss of privacy) is lower than the value I receive from most content. Therefore I block the ads except on the tiny fraction of sites for which I make exceptions. Similarly I rarely cross a paywall. Ergo, my willingness to pay is non-zero, but current fiat-currency payment services are inadequate to represent the negotiation. I would be willing to buy (e.g. with fiat cash or another cryptocurrency) a block of quota, denominated in a well-constructed unit, for access to content. This quota could be automatically decremented within a framework of personally definable rules. It is analogous to the GB blocks I buy from my ISP, but the unit might instead represent the market value of information. Bitcoin itself is not answer - there are limitations that preclude microtransactions at scale, and traceability issues - but some distributed cryptocurrency will be the solution. It will take luck and genius to design & establish. The Ethereum project gives me hope that a solution will be found within a couple of decades.