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It's crazy, that we still do not have something like "Cash" on the internet. A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. To use a website or read an article.

It's crazy, that we still do not have something like "Cash" on the internet. A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. To use a website or read an article. That would make the world so much better for indie developers. Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have. If users would pay directly, that would change.

ryacko 7y ago
It exists: http://opentransactions.org/wiki/Main_Page http://opentransactions.org/wiki/Main_Page It is, like all crypto currencies, bottlenecked by the issue that it has to be exchanged for hard currency.
BubRoss 7y ago
Cryptocurrency can do this, but Bitcoin artificially keeps the blocksize to 1.6KB/s so people think that small transactions are not practical in a general sense, since they aren't practical there.
- FreeHugs 7y ago
  The throughoutput is only one of the problems. There are more: 1: You need to download and install software to use current cryptocurrencies. And users hate that. 2: Turning Fiat into Bitcoin and vica versa is not easy. 3: It is less private then cash. 4: Volatility of the value. Users would want something pegged to their currency of choice.
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    These aren't show stopping problems. Web pages and browser extensions are pretty low barrier to entry. Exchanging cost is not too bad, but probably the biggest hurdle still. Privacy I don't think is a problem here. One random address to another is good enough for these type of transactions. Pegging to another currency means centralization, though that is acceptable to plenty of people. You said you wished there was a solution, all I'm saying is there is a clear path to how it could be done.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    > You need to download and install software to use current cryptocurrencies. And users hate that. People already trust companies with their money. If banks supported crypto natively the no-install/web app model works great. The last three points are rendered irrelevant here if banks are able to make the experience easy and guarantee some value. Those who don't want the protection of a bank are trading off points 1/2/4 for point 3.
  - lawn 7y ago
    > You need to download and install software to use current cryptocurrencies. And users hate that. Users don't have a problem installing apps on their phone. The rest are valid problems, with #2 and #4 being directly linked to low adoption.
- pelasgian 7y ago
  I've never had an issue sending small amounts using Bitcoin Cash which has increased the blocksize limit. The guy who took over after Satoshi left also says that Bitcoin Cash is what he was working on for what it's worth. https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/929377620000681984?lang=en https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/929377620000681984?... Cash Shuffle and Cash Fusion will also provide the privacy needed for users to safely enjoy Bitcoin Cash.
- stormtv 7y ago
  It wouldn't be the best user experience if you had to wait 10 minutes for confirmation. Also by increasing the size of the blocks you increase the orphan rate due to propagation delay which results in needing more confirmations before a transaction is considered truly immutable. Bitcoin has to have a fee market to incentivize miners so that as block rewards decrease the cost of securing the network doesn't shrink as well.
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    Bitcoin is never going to solve anyone's problems now. The people who have taken it over have relegated it to a lesson in what not to do. Shorter block times are not a problem and neither are much larger block sizes, both of these things have been proven by other currencies.
  - lawn 7y ago
    You don't have to wait 10 minutes for a confirmation, especially not if we're talking about dollar amounts. Credit card transactions work exactly the same as 0-conf, and we seem to accept them just fine. > Also by increasing the size of the blocks you increase the orphan rate due to propagation delay which results in needing more confirmations before a transaction is considered truly immutable. Which happens at around 20 MB. Improvements like Graphene, Xthinner and blocktorrent will drastically reduce the orphan rate allowing for much bigger blocks to be propagated fast enough for the orphan rates to not climb in a relevant fashion. > Bitcoin has to have a fee market to incentivize miners so that as block rewards decrease the cost of securing the network doesn't shrink as well. Or Bitcoin needs many more lower fee transactions to compensate. In a couple of decades.
greycrasan 7y ago
Unfortunately the service that is free will always be more popular and ultimately win over more users. People have decided that paying with their privacy is better for them. I really wish paying 10 cents to use the service was the norm, but alas I doubt it will ever happen.
- FreeHugs 7y ago
  Fine. Let Facebook be an order of magnitude more popular then my website. I would still be happy to have 240 million monthly users who pay me 10 cent. Why would I care that FB has 2.4 Billion monthly users and squeezes more then 10cent out of them via ads? That's none of my business.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    You can already do whatever you want on your own site, like a paywall instead of ads, so what’s the issue?
- toast0 7y ago
  I suspect you're right that people will strongly prefer free over paid, but it's hard to know how many people would pay ten cents for something, because it's not feasible to charge that little. Paypal has a micropayment rate of 5% + five cents (USD), which means if you charge ten cents, you get maybe $0.0045. Plus, you have to do all the billing infrastructure etc. The economics would be better with a stored balance system, but those are sketchy --- you'd need the balance holder to be someone you trust already; or a credit system where you pay once you've accrued enough content debt to make billing worthwhile, but that's going to be totally scammed.
  - aesthesia 7y ago
    "Free" is also a very psychologically special price. Micropayments would make it easier to get over the energy barrier to paying for something, but it's still there. Laboratory experiments (and real-world experience) show that people value the difference between a price of 1 cent and 0 cents much more than the difference between 1 cent and 2 cents.
droffel 7y ago
Monero (getmonero.org) has many of the properties of cash on the internet. Definitely more so than Bitcoin. It's surprising how few cryptocurrencies take privacy by default seriously.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- radicalriddler 7y ago
  I strongly doubt Monero is the solution to the issue OP is talking about. Can we not shill on HN? Go back to /r/cryptocurrency.
  - droffel 7y ago
    It's perfectly on topic here. I would hardly call this shilling.
  - en-us 7y ago
    > A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. Pretty sure it solves that.
    - mNovak 7y ago
      I thought XMR had high transaction fees?
      - boring_twenties 7y ago
        Transaction fees have been a fraction of a penny since the Bulletproofs upgrade in October 2018. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/monero-transactionfees.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/monero-transactionfees....
      - droffel 7y ago
        Only if you consider $0.002-$0.006 per transaction high. The protocol has been significantly streamlined over the years.
tempsy 7y ago
Well that is the whole premise of this grant. Coil, the co-sponsor of this grant, is a company founded by the ex Ripple CTO and trying to do that.
mrfusion 7y ago
I mean just buying something without giving them your email or filling out a ton of fields would remove a ton of friction. I could see myself paying 25 cents to read a NYT article right now as an impulse buy. But how does it even work right now. They’d probably ask for my email, phone, and address. Then I’d have to enter credit card details.
- noxer 7y ago
  You have to register at Coil.com You pay with CC or whatever you like to Coil. Your browsers streams money as soon as you visit a site that implements web monetization over IPL. The site doesn't need any info from you it has the address to stream to in the HTML of the site. So your payment is theoretically anonymous ofc the site can still see your IP, fingerprint your browser etc.
meerita 7y ago
I think indie developers shouldn't rely on advertising at all. It's like being adventurer and rely on carrots as food for adventure. You need to find the proper food to do adventure. Same with the developers. Indie developers must do software and provide a service or anything that is valued by a consumer. Anything else is just a waste of time.
- manigandham 7y ago
  Having ads doesn’t mean the context has no value. Otherwise why are you visiting any site with ads?
  - meerita 7y ago
    Indeed. But ads shouldn't be the reason you write software or write about software development.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      Who’s doing that? And nobody needs to tell anyone else why they should or shouldn’t do something. Everyone can make their own way and living.
      - meerita 7y ago
        Sure. I never put that power of choice. I was just stating my opinion. The market will regulate everything without us stopping others to keep doing things for ads.
Canada 7y ago
Yes, if only the powers that be could let go of dictatorial control of our finances. But that's just not the way it is. Nothing anonymous can be tolerated.
UncleMeat 7y ago
There's been dozens of these products. Some have even been supported by Google, Facebook, and Co. Nobody uses them.
- xur17 7y ago
  Can you give a few examples?
  - vkou 7y ago
    https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta The gp post is correct. When given the option between an ad, adblock, or tipping, people overwhelmingly choose option #1 or #2. They then complain about ads, if they chose #1, and about adblock naggers, if they chose #2. And, of course, all three sets of people lose their mind when they run into a paywall. There is no non-legislative solution to this problem.
    - elcritch 7y ago
      Simple, paywall but provide an option to pay a reasonable price for an article, say $0.25 instead of tipping or ads. Of course NYT and all want a sleezy $5 subscription that’ll balloon to $30/mo in three months.
    - iaml 7y ago
      Google contributor most likely was a failure because they didn't do anything about promoting it. I only learned about it on hn and after it was already dead.
jedimastert 7y ago
> Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have. If you're referring to the cut AdSense takes out of ad revenue, it's about 30%
snthd 7y ago
GNU Taler is a WIP for that. https://taler.net https://taler.net
- IngvarLynn 7y ago
  >Taler is a pure payment system, not a new crypto-currency. As such, it operates in a traditional banking context. In particular, this means that in order to receive funds via Taler, the merchant must have a regular bank account, and payments can be executed in ordinary currencies such as USD or EUR. That implies high transaction costs to say the least.
- fhennig 7y ago
  Very interesting, thanks for posting.
uncletammy 7y ago
The answer to this was meant to be Bitcoin, hence the title of the whitepaper "Bitcoin: A peer to peer electronic cash system". Unfortunately there is a lot of money being spent to keep that goal from being realized. If you really want to see "cash on the internet" I would advise you to do some research and find the cryptocurrency that best resembles it, then help build it. It will be an uphill battle the whole way.
- ilaksh 7y ago
  I think there are a lot of good candidates. Personally I am rooting for Ethereum. But Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Monero, are all good options. Even Bitcoin could be a good option but it seems like you said there are too many people working against that.
- dylkil 7y ago
  >If you really want to see "cash on the internet" I would advise you to do some research and find the cryptocurrency that best resembles it A large part of the BTC community forked Bitcoin Cash from Bitcoin and removed the artificial limits imposed on it.
bloopernova 7y ago
There's probably a different cryptocurrency for each user on HN, certainly enough for people to argue over until the end of time. Perhaps it's as simple as this: 1) Make adding a box to pay a website in your crypto easier than adding google analytics or facebook share links. 2) Make buying small amount of your crypto easier than anyone else's crypto. 3) Give lots of your crypto away to as many folks as possible to put lots of it into circulation. 4) Provide easy ways for people to buy amazon and walmart gift certs with your crypto. (so web site operators can do something with the coins they receive) Has anyone done step 1 yet?
- julien 7y ago
  https://unlock-protocol.com https://unlock-protocol.com ;) [disclaimer: I made this!]
  - bloopernova 7y ago
    OK, you win :) Nice job!
    - julien 7y ago
      Thanks ;p
  - r-w 7y ago
    This is really interesting! I was fascinated by the website, joined the Telegram group… and of course got kicked for not sending a message in 60 seconds. Is there any chance I could email you my username and be re-added?
    - julien 7y ago
      Sorry, our anti spam bot is wayyy too agressive. We removed it. Please join again (or email me julien@unlock-protocol.com). Thanks!
205guy 7y ago
My idea was just to have this integrated into your ISP bill. I once thought that ISPs should pay for all content, then pass the bill onto users + costs-and-profit. I guess there would need to be separate standardized rates for video, audio, and text, but that creates a ton of regulatory and technical issues. Not the least of which is people don't want to pay. It would be like music licensing essentially, and look how that played out. So just make it all voluntary like patreon, but integrated into my ISP billing, and give me an app/browser add-on to make payments and track my spending.
- ryacko 7y ago
  Security issues. Ad fraud is already bad enough. And small children paying a thousand dollars for an app does reach the news.
- jamesrcole 7y ago
  Say there are three people living together in a share house/unit, all sharing the one internet connection. There'd have to be a way to deal with cases like this.
donohoe 7y ago
This has been attempted so many times and they all end in obscurity of failure. Might be about timing. Maybe this time it could be different.
d0gbread 7y ago
Brave is doing exactly this with BAT on Ethereum but automating the whole thing. You can donate to any website, but you'll also auto-contribute if you choose to have that enabled.
- elcritch 7y ago
  I wish brave would just go for a plug-in approach, and partner with some news sites.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    Major publishers are already in bed with Apple News, which is preinstalled on iPhones and iPads. Brave is my goto mobile browser, but it's slow on desktop and its market share is practically zero.
    - elcritch 7y ago
      Yah been thinking about trying Apple news. Brave browser really isn’t taking off, that’s why plugins for chrome, Firefox, safari would be better.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cpeterso 7y ago
I think Twitter is missing out on a big opportunity for micropayments by letting users "tip" real money when favoriting tweets. Content creators would be incentivized to use Twitter more if they can make money directly from tweeting. More content from more content creators would also attract more users. Content stealing and reposting would be a bigger problem, but you can somewhat address it with text and image matching algorithms and user reports.
- tastroder 7y ago
  > micropayments by letting users "tip" real money when favoriting tweets. Content creators would be incentivized to use Twitter more if they can make money directly from tweeting. I'd honestly delete my Twitter account if they introduced that. Twitter as a social media channel is fine (to keep up with creator's content elsewhere and maybe the odd follow-up generated by that content) but there is zero content in my feed I'd be prepared to pay any money for (and that would still hold if it was longer form/mixed media).
- PhilippGille 7y ago
  For Twitter there are bots for various cryptocurrencies which you can mention in an answer to a tweet, leading to the original tweeter's wallet being filled. Unfortunately most systems are not decentralized (custodial cryptocurrency wallets) and of course there's no consensus on using a single cryptocurrency.
aurbano 7y ago
I started working on this exactly 2 weeks ago, so was pretty surprised to see this post by mozilla just now! Essentially a very simple browser extension to tip websites, where you load some credit and it gets distributed as you browse (with more nuances obviously, but that is the main idea) Even if it never amounts to anything it might at least inspire others to start similar projects until something better than ads appears!
- Schoolmeister 7y ago
  Even though it isn't without controversy, Brave browser has this exact feature through use of its BAT token [1]. Basically, you earn BAT either by directly depositing money into your wallet, or by viewing "privacy respecting ads" (herein lies part of the controversy), which let you earn 70% of the ad revenue as BAT. These tokens are then distributed over the content creators who have signed up for the program. The exact distribution depends on how much attention you gave each creator. [1] https://brave.com/brave-rewards/ https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
mrlala 7y ago
I'm not going to pay for every stupid little thing I do on the internet. And I'm sure there have been attempts at stuff like this, but who really wants this? I can see it now.. every link I click on here or reddit I have to pay $0.05 to read. Yeah, no thanks. Suddenly the most upvoted things will be ones that people promote to make money on etc. I already have to pay for every damn thing when I leave my house.. when I'm at my house browsing the internet I would really like to not have to constantly be mindfucked with small purchases every moment.
- arcturus17 7y ago
  I don't know if I would mind so much donating, say, $20 / month worth of microtransactions to content I really enjoy... The problem would be the friction of deciding what I reward and what I don't. I don't want to make 200 decisions like that every month in my day to day browsing. If you bundle it, then it's basically just a subscription (I already pay for, say, the Atlantic). If you let an algorithm decide for you, then it probably becomes a shitshow. Maybe there's a genius idea to solve this massive UX problem but I certainly don't see it.
  - mrlala 7y ago
    >The problem would be the friction of deciding what I reward and what I don't. I don't want to make 200 decisions like that every month in my day to day browsing. Yeah that is exactly the problem. It would be like having an ala-carte TV cable where you were charged every time you turned on the TV to watch a certain show. I just wouldn't do it.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  > when I'm at my house browsing the internet I would really like to not have to constantly be mindfucked with small purchases every moment. Do you feel this way about using the toaster, shower, every light switch, turning on the TV, marginal usage of rechargeable electronics, etc? You already make "micropayments" for a million tiny, less-discrete usages of electricity, but have learned to adapt to only getting feedback and adjusting usage at a monthly cadence. Why do you assume this couldn't also be the case for Internet usage?
nine_k 7y ago
Simple? Anonymous? Sounds like a perfect money laundering scheme. All governments in the world hate cash in hands of citizens. It's hard to track. It can be used for tax evasion, buying illegal stuff, financing of undesirables, any transaction that a government would not approve of, but cannot easily learn about. Many countries evict cash from daily use, either leaving it for small-scale purchases ("we only accept notes of $20 and below"), or even completely. The chance of an anonymous online currency to appear is nonzero. The chance of it to be widespread, convenient, and not under constant legal scrutiny is epsilon, for it to last, epsilon squared.

ryacko 7y ago

It exists: http://opentransactions.org/wiki/Main_Page http://opentransactions.org/wiki/Main_Page It is, like all crypto currencies, bottlenecked by the issue that it has to be exchanged for hard currency.

BubRoss 7y ago

Cryptocurrency can do this, but Bitcoin artificially keeps the blocksize to 1.6KB/s so people think that small transactions are not practical in a general sense, since they aren't practical there.

FreeHugs 7y ago
The throughoutput is only one of the problems. There are more: 1: You need to download and install software to use current cryptocurrencies. And users hate that. 2: Turning Fiat into Bitcoin and vica versa is not easy. 3: It is less private then cash. 4: Volatility of the value. Users would want something pegged to their currency of choice.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  These aren't show stopping problems. Web pages and browser extensions are pretty low barrier to entry. Exchanging cost is not too bad, but probably the biggest hurdle still. Privacy I don't think is a problem here. One random address to another is good enough for these type of transactions. Pegging to another currency means centralization, though that is acceptable to plenty of people. You said you wished there was a solution, all I'm saying is there is a clear path to how it could be done.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  > You need to download and install software to use current cryptocurrencies. And users hate that. People already trust companies with their money. If banks supported crypto natively the no-install/web app model works great. The last three points are rendered irrelevant here if banks are able to make the experience easy and guarantee some value. Those who don't want the protection of a bank are trading off points 1/2/4 for point 3.
- lawn 7y ago
  > You need to download and install software to use current cryptocurrencies. And users hate that. Users don't have a problem installing apps on their phone. The rest are valid problems, with #2 and #4 being directly linked to low adoption.
pelasgian 7y ago
I've never had an issue sending small amounts using Bitcoin Cash which has increased the blocksize limit. The guy who took over after Satoshi left also says that Bitcoin Cash is what he was working on for what it's worth. https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/929377620000681984?lang=en https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/929377620000681984?... Cash Shuffle and Cash Fusion will also provide the privacy needed for users to safely enjoy Bitcoin Cash.
stormtv 7y ago
It wouldn't be the best user experience if you had to wait 10 minutes for confirmation. Also by increasing the size of the blocks you increase the orphan rate due to propagation delay which results in needing more confirmations before a transaction is considered truly immutable. Bitcoin has to have a fee market to incentivize miners so that as block rewards decrease the cost of securing the network doesn't shrink as well.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  Bitcoin is never going to solve anyone's problems now. The people who have taken it over have relegated it to a lesson in what not to do. Shorter block times are not a problem and neither are much larger block sizes, both of these things have been proven by other currencies.
- lawn 7y ago
  You don't have to wait 10 minutes for a confirmation, especially not if we're talking about dollar amounts. Credit card transactions work exactly the same as 0-conf, and we seem to accept them just fine. > Also by increasing the size of the blocks you increase the orphan rate due to propagation delay which results in needing more confirmations before a transaction is considered truly immutable. Which happens at around 20 MB. Improvements like Graphene, Xthinner and blocktorrent will drastically reduce the orphan rate allowing for much bigger blocks to be propagated fast enough for the orphan rates to not climb in a relevant fashion. > Bitcoin has to have a fee market to incentivize miners so that as block rewards decrease the cost of securing the network doesn't shrink as well. Or Bitcoin needs many more lower fee transactions to compensate. In a couple of decades.

greycrasan 7y ago

Unfortunately the service that is free will always be more popular and ultimately win over more users. People have decided that paying with their privacy is better for them. I really wish paying 10 cents to use the service was the norm, but alas I doubt it will ever happen.

FreeHugs 7y ago
Fine. Let Facebook be an order of magnitude more popular then my website. I would still be happy to have 240 million monthly users who pay me 10 cent. Why would I care that FB has 2.4 Billion monthly users and squeezes more then 10cent out of them via ads? That's none of my business.
- manigandham 7y ago
  You can already do whatever you want on your own site, like a paywall instead of ads, so what’s the issue?
toast0 7y ago
I suspect you're right that people will strongly prefer free over paid, but it's hard to know how many people would pay ten cents for something, because it's not feasible to charge that little. Paypal has a micropayment rate of 5% + five cents (USD), which means if you charge ten cents, you get maybe $0.0045. Plus, you have to do all the billing infrastructure etc. The economics would be better with a stored balance system, but those are sketchy --- you'd need the balance holder to be someone you trust already; or a credit system where you pay once you've accrued enough content debt to make billing worthwhile, but that's going to be totally scammed.
- aesthesia 7y ago
  "Free" is also a very psychologically special price. Micropayments would make it easier to get over the energy barrier to paying for something, but it's still there. Laboratory experiments (and real-world experience) show that people value the difference between a price of 1 cent and 0 cents much more than the difference between 1 cent and 2 cents.

droffel 7y ago

Monero (getmonero.org) has many of the properties of cash on the internet. Definitely more so than Bitcoin. It's surprising how few cryptocurrencies take privacy by default seriously.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
radicalriddler 7y ago
I strongly doubt Monero is the solution to the issue OP is talking about. Can we not shill on HN? Go back to /r/cryptocurrency.
- droffel 7y ago
  It's perfectly on topic here. I would hardly call this shilling.
- en-us 7y ago
  > A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. Pretty sure it solves that.
  - mNovak 7y ago
    I thought XMR had high transaction fees?
    - boring_twenties 7y ago
      Transaction fees have been a fraction of a penny since the Bulletproofs upgrade in October 2018. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/monero-transactionfees.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/monero-transactionfees....
    - droffel 7y ago
      Only if you consider $0.002-$0.006 per transaction high. The protocol has been significantly streamlined over the years.

tempsy 7y ago

Well that is the whole premise of this grant. Coil, the co-sponsor of this grant, is a company founded by the ex Ripple CTO and trying to do that.

mrfusion 7y ago

I mean just buying something without giving them your email or filling out a ton of fields would remove a ton of friction. I could see myself paying 25 cents to read a NYT article right now as an impulse buy. But how does it even work right now. They’d probably ask for my email, phone, and address. Then I’d have to enter credit card details.

noxer 7y ago
You have to register at Coil.com You pay with CC or whatever you like to Coil. Your browsers streams money as soon as you visit a site that implements web monetization over IPL. The site doesn't need any info from you it has the address to stream to in the HTML of the site. So your payment is theoretically anonymous ofc the site can still see your IP, fingerprint your browser etc.

meerita 7y ago

I think indie developers shouldn't rely on advertising at all. It's like being adventurer and rely on carrots as food for adventure. You need to find the proper food to do adventure. Same with the developers. Indie developers must do software and provide a service or anything that is valued by a consumer. Anything else is just a waste of time.

manigandham 7y ago
Having ads doesn’t mean the context has no value. Otherwise why are you visiting any site with ads?
- meerita 7y ago
  Indeed. But ads shouldn't be the reason you write software or write about software development.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    Who’s doing that? And nobody needs to tell anyone else why they should or shouldn’t do something. Everyone can make their own way and living.
    - meerita 7y ago
      Sure. I never put that power of choice. I was just stating my opinion. The market will regulate everything without us stopping others to keep doing things for ads.

Canada 7y ago

Yes, if only the powers that be could let go of dictatorial control of our finances. But that's just not the way it is. Nothing anonymous can be tolerated.

UncleMeat 7y ago

There's been dozens of these products. Some have even been supported by Google, Facebook, and Co. Nobody uses them.

xur17 7y ago
Can you give a few examples?
- vkou 7y ago
  https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta The gp post is correct. When given the option between an ad, adblock, or tipping, people overwhelmingly choose option #1 or #2. They then complain about ads, if they chose #1, and about adblock naggers, if they chose #2. And, of course, all three sets of people lose their mind when they run into a paywall. There is no non-legislative solution to this problem.
  - elcritch 7y ago
    Simple, paywall but provide an option to pay a reasonable price for an article, say $0.25 instead of tipping or ads. Of course NYT and all want a sleezy $5 subscription that’ll balloon to $30/mo in three months.
  - iaml 7y ago
    Google contributor most likely was a failure because they didn't do anything about promoting it. I only learned about it on hn and after it was already dead.

jedimastert 7y ago

> Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have. If you're referring to the cut AdSense takes out of ad revenue, it's about 30%

snthd 7y ago

GNU Taler is a WIP for that. https://taler.net https://taler.net

IngvarLynn 7y ago
>Taler is a pure payment system, not a new crypto-currency. As such, it operates in a traditional banking context. In particular, this means that in order to receive funds via Taler, the merchant must have a regular bank account, and payments can be executed in ordinary currencies such as USD or EUR. That implies high transaction costs to say the least.
fhennig 7y ago
Very interesting, thanks for posting.

uncletammy 7y ago

The answer to this was meant to be Bitcoin, hence the title of the whitepaper "Bitcoin: A peer to peer electronic cash system". Unfortunately there is a lot of money being spent to keep that goal from being realized. If you really want to see "cash on the internet" I would advise you to do some research and find the cryptocurrency that best resembles it, then help build it. It will be an uphill battle the whole way.

ilaksh 7y ago
I think there are a lot of good candidates. Personally I am rooting for Ethereum. But Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Monero, are all good options. Even Bitcoin could be a good option but it seems like you said there are too many people working against that.
dylkil 7y ago
>If you really want to see "cash on the internet" I would advise you to do some research and find the cryptocurrency that best resembles it A large part of the BTC community forked Bitcoin Cash from Bitcoin and removed the artificial limits imposed on it.

bloopernova 7y ago

There's probably a different cryptocurrency for each user on HN, certainly enough for people to argue over until the end of time. Perhaps it's as simple as this: 1) Make adding a box to pay a website in your crypto easier than adding google analytics or facebook share links. 2) Make buying small amount of your crypto easier than anyone else's crypto. 3) Give lots of your crypto away to as many folks as possible to put lots of it into circulation. 4) Provide easy ways for people to buy amazon and walmart gift certs with your crypto. (so web site operators can do something with the coins they receive) Has anyone done step 1 yet?

julien 7y ago
https://unlock-protocol.com https://unlock-protocol.com ;) [disclaimer: I made this!]
- bloopernova 7y ago
  OK, you win :) Nice job!
  - julien 7y ago
    Thanks ;p
- r-w 7y ago
  This is really interesting! I was fascinated by the website, joined the Telegram group… and of course got kicked for not sending a message in 60 seconds. Is there any chance I could email you my username and be re-added?
  - julien 7y ago
    Sorry, our anti spam bot is wayyy too agressive. We removed it. Please join again (or email me julien@unlock-protocol.com). Thanks!

205guy 7y ago

My idea was just to have this integrated into your ISP bill. I once thought that ISPs should pay for all content, then pass the bill onto users + costs-and-profit. I guess there would need to be separate standardized rates for video, audio, and text, but that creates a ton of regulatory and technical issues. Not the least of which is people don't want to pay. It would be like music licensing essentially, and look how that played out. So just make it all voluntary like patreon, but integrated into my ISP billing, and give me an app/browser add-on to make payments and track my spending.

ryacko 7y ago
Security issues. Ad fraud is already bad enough. And small children paying a thousand dollars for an app does reach the news.
jamesrcole 7y ago
Say there are three people living together in a share house/unit, all sharing the one internet connection. There'd have to be a way to deal with cases like this.

donohoe 7y ago

This has been attempted so many times and they all end in obscurity of failure. Might be about timing. Maybe this time it could be different.

d0gbread 7y ago

Brave is doing exactly this with BAT on Ethereum but automating the whole thing. You can donate to any website, but you'll also auto-contribute if you choose to have that enabled.

elcritch 7y ago
I wish brave would just go for a plug-in approach, and partner with some news sites.
- rchaud 7y ago
  Major publishers are already in bed with Apple News, which is preinstalled on iPhones and iPads. Brave is my goto mobile browser, but it's slow on desktop and its market share is practically zero.
  - elcritch 7y ago
    Yah been thinking about trying Apple news. Brave browser really isn’t taking off, that’s why plugins for chrome, Firefox, safari would be better.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

cpeterso 7y ago

I think Twitter is missing out on a big opportunity for micropayments by letting users "tip" real money when favoriting tweets. Content creators would be incentivized to use Twitter more if they can make money directly from tweeting. More content from more content creators would also attract more users. Content stealing and reposting would be a bigger problem, but you can somewhat address it with text and image matching algorithms and user reports.

tastroder 7y ago
> micropayments by letting users "tip" real money when favoriting tweets. Content creators would be incentivized to use Twitter more if they can make money directly from tweeting. I'd honestly delete my Twitter account if they introduced that. Twitter as a social media channel is fine (to keep up with creator's content elsewhere and maybe the odd follow-up generated by that content) but there is zero content in my feed I'd be prepared to pay any money for (and that would still hold if it was longer form/mixed media).
PhilippGille 7y ago
For Twitter there are bots for various cryptocurrencies which you can mention in an answer to a tweet, leading to the original tweeter's wallet being filled. Unfortunately most systems are not decentralized (custodial cryptocurrency wallets) and of course there's no consensus on using a single cryptocurrency.

aurbano 7y ago

I started working on this exactly 2 weeks ago, so was pretty surprised to see this post by mozilla just now! Essentially a very simple browser extension to tip websites, where you load some credit and it gets distributed as you browse (with more nuances obviously, but that is the main idea) Even if it never amounts to anything it might at least inspire others to start similar projects until something better than ads appears!

Schoolmeister 7y ago
Even though it isn't without controversy, Brave browser has this exact feature through use of its BAT token [1]. Basically, you earn BAT either by directly depositing money into your wallet, or by viewing "privacy respecting ads" (herein lies part of the controversy), which let you earn 70% of the ad revenue as BAT. These tokens are then distributed over the content creators who have signed up for the program. The exact distribution depends on how much attention you gave each creator. [1] https://brave.com/brave-rewards/ https://brave.com/brave-rewards/

mrlala 7y ago

I'm not going to pay for every stupid little thing I do on the internet. And I'm sure there have been attempts at stuff like this, but who really wants this? I can see it now.. every link I click on here or reddit I have to pay $0.05 to read. Yeah, no thanks. Suddenly the most upvoted things will be ones that people promote to make money on etc. I already have to pay for every damn thing when I leave my house.. when I'm at my house browsing the internet I would really like to not have to constantly be mindfucked with small purchases every moment.

arcturus17 7y ago
I don't know if I would mind so much donating, say, $20 / month worth of microtransactions to content I really enjoy... The problem would be the friction of deciding what I reward and what I don't. I don't want to make 200 decisions like that every month in my day to day browsing. If you bundle it, then it's basically just a subscription (I already pay for, say, the Atlantic). If you let an algorithm decide for you, then it probably becomes a shitshow. Maybe there's a genius idea to solve this massive UX problem but I certainly don't see it.
- mrlala 7y ago
  >The problem would be the friction of deciding what I reward and what I don't. I don't want to make 200 decisions like that every month in my day to day browsing. Yeah that is exactly the problem. It would be like having an ala-carte TV cable where you were charged every time you turned on the TV to watch a certain show. I just wouldn't do it.
wutbrodo 7y ago
> when I'm at my house browsing the internet I would really like to not have to constantly be mindfucked with small purchases every moment. Do you feel this way about using the toaster, shower, every light switch, turning on the TV, marginal usage of rechargeable electronics, etc? You already make "micropayments" for a million tiny, less-discrete usages of electricity, but have learned to adapt to only getting feedback and adjusting usage at a monthly cadence. Why do you assume this couldn't also be the case for Internet usage?

nine_k 7y ago

Simple? Anonymous? Sounds like a perfect money laundering scheme. All governments in the world hate cash in hands of citizens. It's hard to track. It can be used for tax evasion, buying illegal stuff, financing of undesirables, any transaction that a government would not approve of, but cannot easily learn about. Many countries evict cash from daily use, either leaving it for small-scale purchases ("we only accept notes of $20 and below"), or even completely. The chance of an anonymous online currency to appear is nonzero. The chance of it to be widespread, convenient, and not under constant legal scrutiny is epsilon, for it to last, epsilon squared.