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Calling this "the missing piece" oversells what it's a missing piece of. I'm not really interested in participating in something like this until other missing
by __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Calling this "the missing piece" oversells what it's a missing piece of. I'm not really interested in participating in something like this until other missing pieces are present also.
Most notably, content should be able to cite its sources and I should be able to verify that payment is being split and sent to those sources directly. Sending it all to whoever maintains the server and trusting them to pass it on to the right people feels like a recreation of exactly the problems that crypto micropayments were supposed to solve.
If I rehost some content, I should just be cutting into the server-owner's slice of the pie. Other contributors should get paid just the same. Otherwise you might as well just do paywalls like they currently do paywalls.
- fragmede 2y agoIn cryptocurrency, if you don't trust the person you're paying, you can check the program being called and its outputs and see the previous runs of the program distributing the currency to other accounts.
- nemomarx 2y agoHow do I know the accounts of all the people involved in creating it or etc? That feels like a lot of burden on the consumer of the media. Maybe if you had inspection tools that helped automate that lookup, or some sort of DNS esque catalog of addresses?
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoWhy not just put the addresses in the metadata of the content? Like credits at the end of a movie, except you can send money to it.
- fragmede 2y agoIt starts to get complicated with more than a single author. I'm not associated with L402, just mentioning properties of the system.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoBut it could be a multisig transaction in the first place. Why have the middleman at all?
- theamk 2y agoYou are forgetting the most important cryptocurrency rule: all this works as long as it's all on-chain and real world is not involved. No amount of smart contracts or bitcoin magic can prevent me from taking someone's work (say by web scraping), stripping all attribution of original author, putting it on my server, charging people for it, and pocketing all the money.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoWell duh, blockchains are for accounting. All they save you from is untrustworthy or overpriced accountants. The rest of the humans are still in the loop being potentially untrustworthy. As with all accounting, participation of others is needed for it to be meaningful. It's no more of a fairy tale than intellectual property is in the first place, or money for that matter.
- roughly 2y agoI'm not a crypto maximalist or even optimist, but it'd be interesting to see a version of this with smart contracts - when you rehost content and collect payments, a percent goes back to whoever you rehosted from, and on from there; when you cite a work and collect payments, a percent goes back to whoever you cited, and so on from there to whoever they cited. There's a long way to go to get there, and there's no enforcement against, well, let's call it the NFT jpeg problem, but it's at least an interesting structure that I think would improve the economic incentives of the internet.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoIf you had that structure in place for payments, you could use it for other stuff. Imagine confirming an experimental result and adding a "replicated" annotation to the original such that all upstream citations that trust you can now have more confidence in the original result. Or imagine doing the opposite with misinformation. I dream of a world where being trustworthy is the most profitable thing. How strange would that be?