Micropayments are one of the paths out of advertiser hell and were one of the original dreams of many crypto nerds and advocates.
I still think that twitter is pure mind cancer, but I have to give it to Jack on this. Great move, and something I hope gets repeated to the rest of the web.
For those who aren’t very familiar with the crypto space: this uses a bitcoin side chain called lightning; transactions are effectively free and instant, but still denominated in BTC.
Micropayments are something we’ve had available to us forever, there’s no reason a custodial wallet like PayPal can’t offer them - or couldn't have offered them at any point in the last two decades. People don’t want them. And they certainly don’t want them at up to $60 a pop haha. Or over LN which still requires an on chain transaction to open a channel.
Nick Szabo has a great write up that outlines my thoughts exactly [1]
Nobody used micropayments when they were a hassle. Today there are already Lightning-based apps breaking down that barrier, live in production using mainnet BTC.
Spinx[0] and Zion[1] are chat apps that offer room hosts the option to set a fee for joining and/or sending messages to a channel, for the purpose of spam reduction. Another cool feature already live in the app is pay-per-minute streaming of podcasts and videos.
Also accepting tips via CC exposes you to chargebacks, were people can actually financially damage you (ex. they donate and chargeback, they get their money back, you get nothing + a ~$20 chargeback fee)
Lightning Network is not a side chain. It's basically a way to interactively update transactions between nodes before they're broadcasted and settled on blockchain. It forms a network where payments are routed through nodes without having to trust anyone. It's scalable and private.
You conveniently forgot to mention that you have to have a lightning node connected to the network 24/7 to protect yourself from fraud. Or, you have to use and trust a third party node.
Can you elaborate on this? I was under the impression that each update had to be signed. Why then would you have to be connected 24/7 to protect yourself from fraud?
Everytime the balance in the channel is updated, a new transaction is created and signed. If one party in the channel publishes an old state ( which they could have more bitcoin than they should), you have to be online to detect it and publish the latest one, in which case they lose all their bitcoin for publishing an old state as punishment.
Technically you don't need to be online 24/7, just often enough to detect the fraud before the timeout, default is two weeks I think. Or you can pay someone a tiny fee to monitor the blockchain for someone publishing an old state for you.
In practice, nobody is trying to commit fraud, because :
a) if you get caught you get punished severely
b) most channels do not have enough BTC in them
Lightning is for small, instant, fast payments, average channel size is about 0.02 BTC.
The bigger problem is how to maintain up to date backups, and not accidentally publish an old state when recovering from a crash. We're working on it. Taproot bitcoin upgrade brings some interesting improvements we can build upon to improve things further.
EDIT: forgot to mention this is only really a problem if you want to run your own non custodial solution ( which I do). For most people, using a 3rd party custodial solution for their low balance hot wallet seems to be the norm.
If you want to eliminate trust, with Bitcoin and lightning you can. If for you it's too much hassle, you don't have to. Unlike every single other blockchain, in which you have no choice but to trust centralised solutions, because they are centralised. See Solana switching their blockchain off for a while, lol
[1]https://coingeek.com/solana-blockchain-implodes-what-happene...
>>If you want to eliminate trust, with Bitcoin and lightning you can. If for you it's too much hassle, you don't have to. Unlike every single other blockchain, in which you have no choice but to trust centralised solutions, because they are centralised.
True, but in a very limited sense. You're trusting a third party to protect you from your counterparty posting an out of date state. And adding further complexity, your counterparty gets punished if they get caught publishing this state, and they have no way of knowing if you are watching or not.
So, from a game theory perspective, it is unlikely for this to even come into play.
Oh, and you can technically have multiple third parties doing this.
There was recently a paper published on Inherited IDs, which proposes changes that would not only solve the on-chain scaling problem, but also eliminate the need for watchtowers: https://github.com/JohnLaw2/btc-iids/blob/main/iids13.pdf
A dishonest node can try to settle an outdated state of the channel on the main chain. You have 24 hours to stop that from happening. So, if your node is offline for longer than 24 hours, you could lose all the money tied up in the channel.
Leaving BTC and lighting aside, I don't think most people would opt out of ads in favor of micro payments. There is a minority who have the money that would but I see nothing in society that points to making such a change possible. Do you have any studies that show people would pay for news/socials/etc. in exchange for no ads/tracking/+privacy? Even the paid streaming services have ads and even when you pay, I'm sure they are still selling tracking data.
Perhaps not everybody, but this is a core business model for a lot of mobile apps. "Pay and we remove the ads". I've paid for quite a few apps just to get the ads out of the way.
Twitch and similar platforms are absolutely inundated with users who are quickly growing used to regularly donating via micropayment of sorts, not even via subscription but just as one-off donations. And they hate ads. It's very common for the wealthier streamers to run the absolute minimum number of ads required by their contract. When users don't have the money to donate, they will explicitly say "give me ads" and the streamer will run them.
I pay for youtube premium to avoid ads. Paying in a micro form over a lump sum form wouldnt matter for me as long as its reasonable in price and easy.
Really micro payments add-value is that most things on the internet are just not worth a visa charge or the slow fraud detection calcs on the back end. Like access to someones tweets. Its basically opening up a new economy and suitable for the metaverse in general.
Like imagine you have augmented reality glasses and are walking through a city outside a restaurant, and a digital food menu third party gives you access for 5 cents btc or eth.
Bit of a tangent here but the use case is fascinating.
I pay for Youtube and multiple podcasts on Patreon for exactly this reason. I think both ad-supported and subscription-supported are viable, and where possible creators should support both.
Lightning network is "off-chain". Basically a network of 2-of-2 locked bitcoins called _channels_ that exchange valid Bitcoin transactions to update the balances within these channels, but only need to settle them by broadcasting them to the Bitcoin network in case of disputes.
Because they don’t need to. My guess is that you just associate a lightning address with your username, and all Twitter does is present that to a wallet. This way twitter doesn’t need to do KYC, or ever hold any funds. They’re just the phone book.
I'm guessing they also don't want to. If they took custody of the Bitcoin, I believe that would make them a MSB, and hence get to do all of the "fun" associated with that. Also, the additional security and financial implications of holding money for their users.
Exactly. LN is like opening a "tab" in a bar. You ultimately settle on the chain, just like how you settle the final tab on your credit card.
LN is an unnecessary solution to a made up problem. Other cryptos have proved that much much more transactions can be easily processed by merely increasing the blocksize.
Increasing the blocksize makes running a node much more expensive (due to storage, mainly) which in turn makes the network less decentralised. Bitcoin (rightly) selects for decentralisation over transaction speed, hence LN as an L2...
As someone who runs a full node, this is not accurate at all. Space is cheap, bandwidth is expensive. I frequently upload > 1TB a month via my full node, if blocks were twice as big and full, then I would be uploading > 2TB a month. How many people in the world have an internet connection which can handle that? Then you have to process each block, the bigger they are, the most computation needs to be done. Everything is a trade off, Bitcoin has chosen decentralization over throughput, other chains have chosen differently.
In India there are MOBILE plans that allow you 2GB everyday for $2 per month! My broadband is unlimited data at 30 mbps for our $10 per month. Do quit this bullshit argument.
I don't run a node but I imagine if you're conscious about bandwidth you can choose not to upload anything (or very little) and still have the opportunity to maintain an up-to-date copy of the blockchain.
100 Mbps internet connections are really common nowadays. 1 TB of bandwidth in a month is really nothing. I use more than that just for Netflix and torrents.
Crypto are the projects created to market themselves as decentralised bitcoin clones. They are projects controlled by a small group of insiders that run pump and dump and wash trading scams.
I'm having a very hard time imagining a scenario in which I would feel the need to tip someone for a Tweet.
I understand why I might want to pay someone for, say, a Youtube video, or a substack article. But is there really enough value packed into a tweet that I'd want to send someone money for it?
Maybe I'm just not imaginative enough. Or maybe the answer is porn.
Might be good for journalism. People get paid for their analysis and being a trusted source. Hopefully revenue drops off when lying or sloppy work occurs.
(1) to communicate to others that the particular tweet is valuable, by sending something with more scarcity than a mouseclick.
(2) to help fund the creator of the tweet.
(3) "is there really enough value packed into a tweet that I'd want to send someone money for it"? Well a tweet can be much more concise than a youtube video.
How about if I give you a direct solution to your problem? How about if I open source something and you want a feature adding? All sorts of uses. I still won't use it.
The current implementations of the lightning network don't easily allow transactions to an address (A method called keysend does exist but isn't widely used).
In order to receive a lightning payment, the receiver has to generate an invoice that anyone with a lightning wallet can pay (usually by scanning a QR code or copy/pasting the invoice). These invoices are meant to be single use.
There is a draft spec (BOLT12) that would make it easier to be able to just pin a link or QR code on a webpage or profile and receive bitcoin via the lightning network.
As someone who often tips people with crypto, having a button at the point where I’m consuming the content is helpful. Otherwise I have to go search for their address, or hope they have something like an ENS name as their display name so I can easily address a tip to them.
The problem with tipping online is not that people are unreasonably stingy. It's that people are reasonably lazy. A lot of people are happy to toss a few coins to their Witcher. But, it has to be trivially easy to do so or they won't bother. Requiring even trivial effort to give away money is unreasonable.
See, the problem with your methods is that Twitter's not taking a cut. They might even require a user to leave Twitter for another site! And we can't have that.
But it's just a bitcoin address. All you need to do is go to an exchange (or a wallet), click withdraw enter the public key of the other person, type in the amount and you're done.
Dropbox is also silly. It's just rsync with a UI, just spin up a command-line and transfer all your fi-... Wait a minute. This is what you meant! ;-)
I'd love to hear a version where a chef would talk about food this way or some other field that I know next to nothing about.
Edit: I didn't realize it was using the lightning network.
> But it's just a bitcoin address. All you need to do is go to an exchange (or a wallet), click withdraw enter the public key of the other person, type in the amount and you're done.
Or you could just click the button on the tweet and not do all that?
This uses the Lightning Network, which requires an invoice (unless the node has keysend payments enabled, but most end users don't run their own node). It's not the same as a Bitcoin address, and address re-use is a dirty habit anyway.
Yes, they will enter a Defi contract for the few seconds it takes to send the lightning payment. They will scalp fractions of fractions of a cent, making them wealthier beyond their wildest dreams.
Well, technologically it is possible to transfer almost impossible That doesn't mean they will do it. They will hold it for a few days. At scale, it will add some money to twitter coffers(if they are successful that is)
microtransactions via the Lightning network is wonderful part of the bitcoin vision. But I don't think this sentence at the bottom of the "Strike" app page is holding up to the promise: "Custody of your funds and bitcoin trading are offered through Prime Trust, LLC." [1]
Thanks for bringing this up. While the idea of blockchain payments hitting a mainstream app is kind of exciting, adding Strike support to twitter isn't much different than adding something like Venmo support. Both require a banking style intermediary that require KYC from their users.
I don't agree. This way it is a) easier to onboard _receivers_, and b) stays open in the sense that _senders_ can send bitcoins by any app they want (including non-custodial of course).
>>This way it is a) easier to onboard _receivers_, and b) stays open in the sense that _senders_ can send bitcoins by any app they want (including non-custodial of course).
If I were to restate what I think you're saying: Twitter is implementing a tipping system that allows you pay using Strike _as_well_as additional non-custodial [and potentially non-kyc] lightning payment apps once a lightning channel is open.
I think that you're either dead wrong, or the non-Strike lightning payment option will be so convoluted that almost no one actually will actually use it. I will be happy to be proven wrong though.
Ok, I understand (a). Regarding (b) I guess I don't fully understand their implementation, but are you suggesting that any 3rd party app could implement the payments? I guess if any app or user can pull the twitter user's lightning address one can tip then yeah I guess so. So I guess they are just using "Strike" as an officially-supported app?
Time to double down on Twitter alternatives. I feel immensely conflicted about using a platform that supports multi-level marketing pyramid Ponzi schemes.
“Thirdly, early adopters mine or buy large proportions of the total supply at negligible costs while late adopters mine or buy negligible proportions at large costs. It follows that holders immediately have every incentive to get as many people to buy after them. Like stocks? Like stocks, but without the dividends or anything tangible in the real world. Congratulations, you got yourself a pyramid scheme.” —
https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html
Most stocks do not pay dividends. If you do some research you will find that Bitcoin pays interest at rates higher than most dividend stocks.
By your definition real estate, stocks and precious metals are also multi-level marketing since early insiders profit at the expense of late-comers.
Also Bitcoin has something like 70 million users so less than 1% adoption. In other words everyone is still early.
I’ll read those links but please note when I refer to Bitcoin, I am excluding all other crypto.
Bitcoin truly is a special snowflake and if you don’t understand the difference between Bitcoin and Altcoins I would suggest doing some more research to understand what you may have missed.
When people talk about historical Bitcoin returns being attractive, they are talking about an extremely short history full of incredible variance and an uncertain legal future. You can’t easily make long term predictions based on that
11 years is extremely short? As for variance, yes sure over the short term but Bitcoin has 10x’d every other traditional investment on a long-term basis. You make long-term predictions based on things like scarcity, automated inflation policy, and other anti-inflationary properties.
Based on its historical investment returns as well as its inherent properties, I would argue that at this point a zero percent allocation into Bitcoin is objectively the wrong value.
Lightning network theoretically makes micropayments possible, and that should be celebrated for enabling new ways of online monetization that the tech world writ large can explore.
Imagine if you could buy access to a paywalled news article for $0.02 (on an article-by-article basis) instead of having to purchase a monthly subscription. Or imagine being able to pay $0.10 to watch a particular episode of a show without needing to subscribe to the streaming service. How many people would prefer doing that instead of using current SaaS subscription models (which exist largely because it's a huge hassle to implement credit card-based micropayments)?
Subscription businesses should be on guard: micropayments open up advertising-independent ways for creators to monetize content. With all the well-deserved criticism of ad-based businesses in recent years (particularly social media), it's possible that micropayments enable business models that don't rely on ads the way many online businesses have up to this point. That's huge, and kudos to Twitter for taking the leap.
I also think if we remove advertising from existence another plus for the society would be getting rid of "articles" about "look this dog how much barks when he sees the postman", maybe some would pay for that, but I think having micropayments to access content would force the content to be meaningful
Well you can't really tip with a payment system, realistically, right? If I want to toss someone 50 cents Visa or whoever takes a fixed amount plus a percentage, so there are usually minimums.
Sounds like initial plans are to not take a fee for Bitcoin payments. Which is awesome but a bit surprising.
I wonder whether they'll be able to keep this fee-less over the longer term. If/when they start facilitating billions of dollars moving per year, I'd imagine intense pressure from shareholders to take a cut.
They can profit simply by holding bitcoin, which they're increasing demand for.
Bitcoin has always been the kind of thing that rewards insiders.
Companies and government officials can profit just by holding bitcoin and then incentivizing its wider use. It makes more sense to become an insider than to fight bitcoin. Arguably, that's even true for major financial institutions.
Will Twitter offer APIs to do things like allow a user to authenticate to allow an app or service to track tips they receive? I haven't seen any information about this.
> Bitcoin isn't the extent of Twitter’s crypto plans: the company said it is also planning to support authentication for NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, by letting people connect their crypto wallets. “NFT authentication will come in the form of a badge, shown on profile pictures, marking the owner’s NFT as authentic,” a company spokesperson said.
No talk about the NFTs yet. My gut tells me that ultimately, personally speaking, NFTs are going to be about telling me what I can't do. "You can't post that meme, you can't quote that person, etc." Maybe I just don't get it?
This (this specific news as well as crypto in general) still feels like externalizing a fairly important cost - the energy usage required to keep this world-wide distributed ledger going.
Bitcoin's energy consumption depends on mining revenue. Currently the main component of mining revenue is block reward. Block reward will go to zero over time. How much energy Bitcoin will use then is not known today. It is a new experiment that mankind is performing for the first time.
The old financial system is not very efficient. In the USA alone, millions of people work in the finance sector. Automating those tasks via crypto systems might save a lot of energy.
There is a good chance that Bitcoin's energy usage will be completely solar based in the long run.
Bitcoin does not only do transactions. It has a smart contract language which allows more and more types of smart contracts all the time. (Yes, Bitcoin is not static as many people think).
The old system is not at all efficient for transactions. Vendors hate credit cards for a reason. Visa alone made 20 Billion Dollars in revenue last year for a reason.
Bitcoin can scale infinitely via the Lightning Network.
Visa is "inefficient" because they supply many many more services than simply transacting. Dispute resolution, fraud detection, customer service, card issuing, and on and on. You know, all of this stuff we'll have to build from scratch for Bitcoin to become even remotely viable as a currency. There's no reason to believe that Bitcoin can make these services any more efficient.
This "service" has pros and cons. It is one reason why vendors hate credit cards. You never know when you can be sure that the payment really was done. Or if it will suddenly disappear again.
Fraud detection:
One reason why fraud detection is needed is that the whole system of "whoever has the number can pull money" is insane.
Dispute resolution is trivial with a 2-of-3 multisig. The customer locks up funds until service has been provided and then in the ideal case the customer and merchant agree and pay the merchant. If there's a dispute, the dispute resolver can forcibly send funds with the cooperation of either party.
> Bitcoin can scale infinitely via the Lightning Network
No it can't . It barely scales to the orbit of Pluto (~5.7 light hours from the sun). You
can not use it to send Bitcoin from one random point in the Oort cloud to another.
> The bits of the old financial system which duplicate bitcoin (doing simply electronic transactions) are very efficient.
Its all very efficient until Mastercard and Visa decide that your line of business should not be allowed to receive money and they blacklist you and your descendants from the financial system forever.
This uses the lightning network. The energy cost of a lightning payment is orders of magnitude lower than bitcoin.
This kind of usage actually demonstrates bitcoin's valuable use case (a base layer for final settlement) whereas in recent years a lot of energy was being burned effectively just for speculation.
There are many ways to re-internalize the costs of CO2-producing energy use, such as putting a carbon tax on energy providers which emit CO2.
In contrast, writing specific policies to target (specific uses of) specific cryptocurrencies, without exempting the renewable energy used in their production, and without targeting other "frivolous" uses of energy, would be an inelegant approach.
Anyone else not really suprised. It's like they were actively in search of sharks to jump over for years. The question we should be asking is, what's next or why? I think this is for Only Fans uber-for-porn competition.
If only a massive corporation could think beyond their wallet which may people put next to their second favourite organs!
onlyfans for SFW stuff actually sounds a much better way to monetize twitter. There's a reason why onlyfans looks like a twitter feed. Might even possibly help them to change their perception of being politically onesided
Please don't post unsubstantive defensive stuff about the community. I realize it's frustrating to hold a minority/contrarian view (believe me, I understand) but all a comment like this does is add bile, which helps nothing.
Two productive choices are: (1) take up the cross of patiently and respectfully explaining what you believe to be the better information; or (2) chalk it up to people being wrong on the internet and just don't post.
Sorry dang I have patiently defended crypto / blockchain for years and taken all the downvotes. Twitter announces full integration and it’s still all negativity. Not sure what success would be anymore to convince the HN community.
In that case you could always go with option 2. I know it's frustrating, but the internet is to a first approximation wrong about everything, so it's a frustration we all have to live with.
The problem is that HN actually does understand crypto and blockchain. The layperson might believe the myth that NFTs, for example, are "amazing tools with huge potential for monetization of all sorts of digital goods", but most of HN will know the reality - you are "buying" nothing more than a URL in a JSON file (i.e. no legal ownership of anything), almost all artists will lose money (there are over 20M listings on OpenSea and almost every one of those will not sell or sell at a loss to the artist given all the costs in making a listing), and most "investors" will too (unless they are one of the rings of anonymous bidders who collaborate to artificially inflate the price of their selected "artists").
Indeed, the mainstream media talks about NFTs as if they were property titles, completely misleading the public into thinking NFTs are something they are not. A lot of people also think Bitcoin spends a lot of electricity because it needs to do super complicated calculations. When you explain them how bitcoin actually works they usually can't believe it. The misinformation floating around with regards to cryptocurrencies is staggering.
Art is one application of NFTs, but NFTs are not specifically made to represent digital art. Gods Unchained cards are a much better use case since there is built-in utility.
Artists can also mint on ImmutableX without paying any fee at all.
> you are "buying" nothing more than a URL in a JSON file (i.e. no legal ownership of anything),
This is wrong. I can see why you think it, but it is wrong.
The URL in the JSON file is free, as is the artwork that it points to. It's very hard to restrict the copying of digital artworks anyway, so why bother trying to?
The person buying the NFT is not "buying a URL". This phrase doesn't even mean anything! What they are buying is control of a record on the blockchain, which (with some slight hand-waving) contains a list of the signatures of the previous owners, including the original creator or their agent. While it is trivial to copy a JPEG, it is not at all trivial to copy the list of signatures from one part of a blockchain to another, unless you happen to have the private keys of all of the previous owners.
As such, the JPEG is abundant but the record is scarce. This mirrors the physical world, in which Picasso prints are abundant but signed originals are rare and hard to copy. What you're paying for is the uniqueness of the signature, not the ability to look at the content of the artwork, which you can probably already do for free on the internet.
"No legal ownership of anything" is not really true. You do legally own the blockchain record! You can decide whether to sell it or keep it, and you can generally dispose of it as you would with any other property. You don't legally own the copyright of the artwork, but as we've already established, that copyright probably isn't worth very much.
Your other statements may be perfectly accurate - I can't imagine 20M artists on OpenSea all turning a profit, and I imagine that a lot of the investors are likely to lose some money too. I just don't think that this has anything to do with faulty assumptions about how NFTs work.
No you don't. In fact, I don't think NFT ownership has been litigated in any court of law (yet). The deed/title analogy is pretty good. But what makes a deed a deed is that it has the force of the law behind it. NFTs do not.
This might depend on your jurisdiction, but in general legal systems are quite lazy: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If it's something that I have exclusive control over, and I paid someone else money for that exclusive control, then it's my property. There doesn't need to be a written contract or a deed, any more than there needs to be a written contract or a deed for me to sell you, say, my bicycle. If I agree to accept payment, and you provide payment and I provide you with the bicycle, there is no sense in which you are not now the owner of the bicycle.
The crypto space does have an unfortunate history with a kind of legal mysticism, in which people ignore legal practice in favour of attempts to re-derive everything from half-remembered Locke, or something from Nick Szabo's blog, or some weird way of doing things that turns out to be an elaborate attempt to evade securities law rather than any actual legal requirement for sale of property. The term "smart contract" takes this tendency and multiplies it. Ignore this stuff and focus on simple principles: party A paid party B for something that party A was indeed able to transfer to party B in return for the agreed payment. Unless there was an agreement specifying otherwise, B has just acquired some property from A.
So, what we have is the artwork. The artwork, as a digital artifact, continues to exist as long as there is a copy of it anywhere. A copy that was hosted at a particular URL may cease to exist, though.
"Buying a URL" doesn't make sense because there's no transfer of rights. I already have the URL! There's no meaningful mechanism by which I can take control of the URL, and there are no rights over the URL that anyone can sell to me. The reason people mock the idea of "buying a URL" is because they rightly observe that it doesn't make sense.
The value of the record is not directly related to the URL. The value of the record is that it has the artist's signature on it (or the signature of someone I believe to be the artist, or the artist's designated agent; fraud is definitely possible here!). Notably, the URL does not have the artist's signature on it (how could it? This also does not make sense as an idea). The artwork pointed to by the URL might or might not have the artist's signature on it, but if it does then the signature is easily copyable, because the image itself is easily copyable.
The thing that is not easily copyable is the blockchain record. This is because it contains an encrypted transaction signed by the artist's key, and I can't make a duplicate of this unless I have the artist's private key.
If I'm buying an NFT, I'm doing it because I think the artwork is going to be popular or important in some way. If this is true, there are going to be many copies of it. I don't really care about what happens to any single copy, even if it's the copy that was presented as the reference copy at the time I bought the NFT. If I'm truly concerned that the image might disappear entirely, I will download a copy to my laptop and save some backups. If it turns out that the thing I bought was so unpopular and unimportant that months later nobody anywhere saved a copy of it, then I suppose that sucks for me.
Here's my question - NYT could charge me $5 and then deduct from my balance on a per-article basis.
Do we need crypto to enable those transactions? If micropayments made sense, why haven't they caught on already with the payment infrastructure 99% of people already have? Micropayments via crypto are just payment with extra steps.
I'm not for/against either one. I'd just like to see a coherent argument against the idea that crypto is a solution looking for a problem.
I think the answer looks different when you talk about NYT (a large organization most of us probably trust to not steal) vs smaller websites/blogs. I wouldn’t pre-pay some no-name blogger $5 and trust them to charge me properly.
With the pre-pay model, you may even end up with each site dictating it’s own payment terms, which would naturally create opportunities for scammy terms that users don’t understand until their money is gone.
A tipping model incentivized quality content and keeps funds under the user’s control.
In this specific case, it looks like some Strike-related company will have custody of funds, which does defeat the purpose of using a decentralized payment method.
Most of the world does not have access to cheap and easy dollar-denominated payments. Using Bitcoin for this simplifies the implementation for Twitter, and reduces fees.
Most of the world has credit and debit cards. Or, at least, most of the world where people have enough disposable income to shell out for NYT articles. I don't live in a country that deals in USD but I have a debit card and very often buy services denominated in USD.
Fees and chargebacks are the ones that usually come to mind. Oftentimes major credit card provider networks set a "minimum" interchange fee to disincentivize small transactions (a chargeback on a ten-cent transaction is often not worth the squeeze from a support/processing perspective).
Basically all major payment networks are facilitated by a middleman of some sort, and that middleman entity usually has operational costs that disincentivize them from offering micropayments.
Your point about a "balance" lands though - nothing stops NYT from making one "big" charge and then deducting from it other than consumer psychology (paying $10 up front can feel different than paying $0.05 at a time, for example).
Imagine a world where not everyone used the dollar. Then imagine having to support different currencies and ensuring that your price per article stayed in line with currency fluctuations.
Translate the payments to some abstract credits with consistent rate across currencies. Then just forex the money received to euros or dollars or what ever your local currency is.
Actually, there is already a massive platform that does this sort of thing with what really are microtransactions too and even in local currencies, namely Steam.
It's a spectrum of course. Some people thoroughly understand it and still think it's rather boring or dumb. Some people thoroughly understand it and, like yourself, think it's a revolutionary game changer. And most people don't understand it and either (a) think it's dumb and downvote it, or (b) think it's awesome and are fanatical about it.
When an NFT is sold a unit of data stored on a digital ledger is transferred. When a D3 item was sold a unit of data stored on in the database was transferred. Why are those meaningfully different?
Thanks for asking! The difference is that Diablo 3 represents 10E6~ dev hours invested into making a fun game, and items make it more fun. The items are a kind of 'share' in the total fun of the game. Now if we imagine NFTing the Diablo 3 item system, that's interesting.
Mostly what's interesting about it is why it hasn't happened. I've noticed that actors in public blockchain ecosystems VERY strongly seek 'incentive wells' i.e. locally maximized extraction mechanisms. This might be a property of certain general public-ledger economic systems, because it sure comes up a lot. Basically the law is: as long as a blockchain/Dapp/pattern makes money, the people writing it won't improvements to it outside the core extractive mechanic; at least not without some rare external inputs, which inputs are surprisingly rare in practice.
So if your application is on an incentive hill from this perspective, you know it will never get written.
The Diablo 3 Dapp won't get written by Blizzard because it lies on an incentive hill from blizzard's perspective, simply because: assets would (1) increase item prices due to fees and (2) Blizzard would be cut out as a middleman for at least some transactions.
Only once you find public-ledger tech that fixes those incentives (and probably other incentives I've missed) will you start to see interesting and complex distributed applications
I don't understand OPs point, but the meaningful difference is that the digital ledger is decentralized. If Blizzard shuts down D3, your virtual goods are gone forever. NFTs and ownership of NFTs live as long as the blockchain lives
NFTs solve the problem of digital theft. It's just...that's not really an issue with the sort of digital goods that can use NFTs. Nor do most people want to download a whole blockchain for every marketplace they want to participate in (and then continue participating in to facilitate transactions).
How's the eco status on NFTs these days? I know Bitcoin is still trying to cook the Earth but have they fixed NFTs yet?
My only "get off my lawn" take on it
Also it all seems to be digitally drawn portrait templates with different accessories on (eg robot heads). I have no idea if they sell but someone's giving Twitter a bunch of money to shove those in my face haha. I'll put that one down to not getting it, I never got into pokemon cards etc either
The production proof-of-stake system has actually been running in parallel since last December, staking real ETH, with over 200K full nodes. What's left is just to repoint the main clients, so instead of choosing blocks by the most work, they let the staking network choose blocks.
Also, this article has a completely different take:
> A video was released on Thursday of Jack Mallers demonstrating the service with the firm’s integration of the Strike API. In the video Mallers sent Bitcoin from Chicago to El Salvador via Twitter.
Micropayments are one of the paths out of advertiser hell and were one of the original dreams of many crypto nerds and advocates.
I still think that twitter is pure mind cancer, but I have to give it to Jack on this. Great move, and something I hope gets repeated to the rest of the web.
For those who aren’t very familiar with the crypto space: this uses a bitcoin side chain called lightning; transactions are effectively free and instant, but still denominated in BTC.