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Thanks for the great project, it fixes the most egregious problems with bulletin boards - which reddit and hn are just fancier guis for. There's a lot to unpac

Thanks for the great project, it fixes the most egregious problems with bulletin boards - which reddit and hn are just fancier guis for. There's a lot to unpack about the issues of p2p monetization. Probably a few books worth. Before we get into the social issues I think the original sin of the internet was that IP did not negotiate payments as part of the fundamental protocol. Every layer above that suffers from the same. This made sense in a government/corporate/university environment where the protocols were invented, but not for the wider world. I'm not going to try and give solutions because all of them are flawed in some way, but better than the current system where only surveillance advertising and altruistic services are viable business models.

nradov 7y ago
Payment is far too complex and abstract to contemplate building in at layer 3 (IP) of the network stack. Even in some idealized alternate history it would have never worked, and probably still couldn't work today.
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  Global payment, yes. Same as global routing. The internet is happily chugging along on routers and switches who know nothing about the global topology of the network. When you reduce the payment problem to 'how do we get two routers to keep track of the data passed between them' it is a non-problem that even the first generation of imps could have solved).
  - warkdarrior 7y ago
    Except for the part where you do not want payments to be best effort, while it is OK for network packet delivery to be best effort.
    - buzzkillington 7y ago
      Why? I don't care that I will need to pay 1e-10 dollars to have a packet sent 10 times. Likewise I don't care if I lose 1e-10 dollars because someone doesn't pay for their bandwidth. Networking is just not worth lying about until you get to sums for which lawyers can get involved, at which point you have to deal with lawyers.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> Before we get into the social issues I think the original sin of the internet was that IP did not negotiate payments as part of the fundamental protocol. Every layer above that suffers from the same. That isn't really what causes the problem. Payments don't need to be inside the network layer of the internet. The problem is that a digital payment system that works like IP routing doesn't exist at all, even independent of the internet. Existing banks could implement it trivially -- you walk into the branch with $100 in cash, give them the money and they give you a secret passphrase. Then the banks talk to each other so anyone anywhere in the world who walks into another bank and has the correct passphrase can get the money. Except that there are laws against that. Know Your Customer laws that require them to know who you are and know who the person you're sending the money to is, even if what you're paying for is both legal and private. "Consumer protection" laws that require them to allow you to reverse the transaction, which means they can't just give the money to the other party, they have to sit on it for a while. The effect of these laws is to make small transactions between random individuals incur prohibitively high transaction costs and subject honest people to capricious denial of service attacks by risk-averse financial institutions without effective recourse. It also makes people afraid to pay for things they don't want an official record of them consuming, which specifically applies to political speech when your views don't align with the party currently in office -- or the party who may be in office next year. In other words, it interferes with people actually paying people for creating content on the internet. That leaves the creators with only advertising to support them, which implies central control by the ad network. Fixing that requires a way to anonymously, irreversibly send small payments with low transaction costs. Which is currently de facto prohibited by law.
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  No there are no systems that can deal with the $1e-10 you will need to pay for the usual packet. You don't care if someone scams you a thousand times, you do care when someone scams you a few billion times, or when you're talking to millions of people. The cost of getting it wrong is so low on the internet that you can use the most blunt statistics to still come out ahead.
  - 7y ago

nradov 7y ago

Payment is far too complex and abstract to contemplate building in at layer 3 (IP) of the network stack. Even in some idealized alternate history it would have never worked, and probably still couldn't work today.

buzzkillington 7y ago
Global payment, yes. Same as global routing. The internet is happily chugging along on routers and switches who know nothing about the global topology of the network. When you reduce the payment problem to 'how do we get two routers to keep track of the data passed between them' it is a non-problem that even the first generation of imps could have solved).
- warkdarrior 7y ago
  Except for the part where you do not want payments to be best effort, while it is OK for network packet delivery to be best effort.
  - buzzkillington 7y ago
    Why? I don't care that I will need to pay 1e-10 dollars to have a packet sent 10 times. Likewise I don't care if I lose 1e-10 dollars because someone doesn't pay for their bandwidth. Networking is just not worth lying about until you get to sums for which lawyers can get involved, at which point you have to deal with lawyers.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> Before we get into the social issues I think the original sin of the internet was that IP did not negotiate payments as part of the fundamental protocol. Every layer above that suffers from the same. That isn't really what causes the problem. Payments don't need to be inside the network layer of the internet. The problem is that a digital payment system that works like IP routing doesn't exist at all, even independent of the internet. Existing banks could implement it trivially -- you walk into the branch with $100 in cash, give them the money and they give you a secret passphrase. Then the banks talk to each other so anyone anywhere in the world who walks into another bank and has the correct passphrase can get the money. Except that there are laws against that. Know Your Customer laws that require them to know who you are and know who the person you're sending the money to is, even if what you're paying for is both legal and private. "Consumer protection" laws that require them to allow you to reverse the transaction, which means they can't just give the money to the other party, they have to sit on it for a while. The effect of these laws is to make small transactions between random individuals incur prohibitively high transaction costs and subject honest people to capricious denial of service attacks by risk-averse financial institutions without effective recourse. It also makes people afraid to pay for things they don't want an official record of them consuming, which specifically applies to political speech when your views don't align with the party currently in office -- or the party who may be in office next year. In other words, it interferes with people actually paying people for creating content on the internet. That leaves the creators with only advertising to support them, which implies central control by the ad network. Fixing that requires a way to anonymously, irreversibly send small payments with low transaction costs. Which is currently de facto prohibited by law.

buzzkillington 7y ago
No there are no systems that can deal with the $1e-10 you will need to pay for the usual packet. You don't care if someone scams you a thousand times, you do care when someone scams you a few billion times, or when you're talking to millions of people. The cost of getting it wrong is so low on the internet that you can use the most blunt statistics to still come out ahead.
- 7y ago