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This is everything I wanted from micropayments. Please, take my money rather than forcibly taking my attention and shoving garbage through my brain. Too bad i
by dkarl 9y ago
This is everything I wanted from micropayments. Please, take my money rather than forcibly taking my attention and shoving garbage through my brain. Too bad it has to waste electricity, but at least it's not abusing my poor, finite, distractible, distortable brain. It's not precious to anyone else, but it's precious to me.
- perl4ever 9y agoIs it really everything you want? Because one thing that I can imagine wanting with micropayments is transparency about how much you are paying...
- dkarl 9y agoNot everything. But having this appear out of nowhere after years of waiting for micropayments for journalism is enough to make me gush like that.
- imron 9y agoCheck out brave and brave payments.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y agoYou can control how much is "spent" with with a cap on CPU utilization.
- AstralStorm 9y agoBrowsers do not provide such caps for JS CPU usage. Maybe they should. This is extra bad when you're viewing on a phone, tablet or battery powered laptop.
- majewsky 9y agoIf this problem persists, we will see tools popping up that use the OS APIs for restricting resource usage (e.g. cgroups on Linux) when starting the browser.
- squarefoot 9y agoAll it needs is faking the available computing power to any process created by the browser, or run it into a VM with extremely limited resources.
- perl4ever 9y agoI'm not sure if that would slow the page down and make it unusable though. Prioritizing non-mining activity seems like it might be trickier than simply capping processor usage. Although it's not quite the same thing, it makes me think of how bandwidth heavy pages are now. Once upon a time, I browsed the web on 56K, or even 14.4K. Now, when my phone gets throttled to 128K many sites are unbearable.
- castle-bravo 9y agoMy phone is currently throttled to 8kB/s. The only thing I can read is Hackernews; this is a well-built site.
- Fej 9y agoCNN Lite comes to mind. https://lite.cnn.io/en https://lite.cnn.io/en
- jnordwick 9y agoI'd rather pay 10 cents than waste 20 cents in electricity. There just isn't good way to really do that easily and transparently.
- seanwilson 9y agoHalf-baked thoughts here, but the way I thought of it is you'd "top-up" your browser with say $10 a month and it would be distributed to sites you've viewed or chosen to donate to. There's obvious questions with privacy though and sites trying to game the system if it's view count based. I think most people wouldn't be against a small monthly payment to avoid seeing ads but you'd need to do it in a way that was simple and transparent that didn't require lots of work per site.
- wmf 9y agoCheck out the Brave browser and Google Contributor.
- viraptor 9y agoThe distribution system you're describing is: https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/
- Torn 9y agoBrave Browser & Basic Attention Token (BAT) seems to have more traction: https://brave.com/creators/ https://brave.com/creators/
- jnordwick 9y agoNobody wants to have am account you have to top up. You need to plan ahead, there would be multiple systems not completely overlapping (or some sites being cheaper with a specific billing company), and a myriad of other reasons. You would need to sequester multiple monies, and some you might ever use like having $3.12 left on a gift card, but multiple cards.
- tepmoc 9y ago
- staunch 9y ago> Too bad it has to waste electricity... It doesn't waste electricity. It uses a lot of electricity to create a secure global payment network that can solve the micropayments problem. Sacrificing efficiency for decentralization was a key design decision in Bitcoin. YouTube cat videos and daytime television are genuine wastes of power. Humanity has to solve the power generation problem and processors are already far more power efficient than they were.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoCat videos and daytime television waste less power while providing much more value. Ultimately cryptocurrencies have some value offering, but it's of dubious utility, because you can get 99% there with a little bit of trust, and then you don't have to pay this humongous upkeep in electricity. Popularity of cryptocurrencies is almost entirely driven by greed, so it obscures the actual value of blockchain tech.
- splintercell 9y agoKeep it in mind that Proof of Work is necessary for this initial world of decentralized trust to be created, but after that, it is not necessary. Nearly all the other cryptocurrencies can bootstrap themselves using bitcoin and following Proof of Stake or some other non-PoW algorithm. Even if Bitcoin dies, we still don't need to bring PoW again.
- mandelbrotwurst 9y agoYou're technically correct in that it does provide some value, but it is a waste in the sense that it is CPU mining which is far less efficient than mining with GPUS or ASICS.
- staunch 9y agoThere are proof of work algorithms that try to be ASIC-proof. And most visitors already have a CPU and GPU sitting idle. Something that used an extra 25% of your processors may not even be noticeable, and yet it could solve the fake news and clickbait problems.