> But we haven't figured out a way to scale the vending machine model yet, Haha sure we have, it just isn't as profitable as the current solutions which are to

> But we haven't figured out a way to scale the vending machine model yet, Haha sure we have, it just isn't as profitable as the current solutions which are to collect as much data as you can and use that information secondary income such as selling to marketers or using for "analytics" or "targeting" Service builders just have to care about designing their systems like this. Every single person in this thread who works with or for one of these information collecting companies is responsible for the current state of the world. > If someone paid $1500 for their laptop, however, they're going to want that convenience of being able to prove they purchased the laptop from XX retailer and be compensated if the thing is a lemon. That can easily be solved. Either by using GNU Taler as Stallman describes, or by issueing cryptographic receipts of a purchase, whereby the vendor digitall signs the receipt so they can recognize it later if presented, but internally they just don't store a record of that transaction, or they don't store any information about who purchased that. It's not a hard problem to just not store personally identifiable information, you just don't store it. What is a hard problem is convincing people in these industries that they should care, that they should protect user privacy by not collecting the information in the first place.