This is why Let's Encrypt is zero cost by the way. I'm certain Hanno knows that, but for everybody else:
The purpose of ISRG (the not-for-profit which runs Let's Encrypt) is to drive automated issuance for Web PKI certificates. Nothing about this directly means they should be free - surely a not-for-profit could deliver this as an at-cost service, so why zero cost when that's not a core goal?
Machines don't have wallets. If they charge even 1¢ for a Let's Encrypt certificate (which would certainly cover costs at current issuance rates) now there needs to be a payment flow, which the machine needs help with because it doesn't have money. At zero cost all of that goes away and leaves you only solving engineering problems to achieve your goal of automated issuance.
I wish there were a way of sending $0.01, by sending $10 with probability 0.001. That is, you and I negotiate a random seed (using something like Diffie-Hellman) and then we can generate probabilistic microtransactions and only transfer the $10 in the p=0.001 case.
This sounds great for the recipient, who will get approximately the amount of money they'd otherwise get, but bad for the sender, who now has to budget a thousand times more than they were intending to spend.
Or more precisely, it's good for the party operating at scale and bad for the individual participant. This is the opposite of how most financial schemes handle unpredictable events: they put the risk on the party that can absorb the risk by letting it be lost in the noise, and take it away from the party that cares deeply about small amounts. Insurance companies will charge everyone the same amount, whether it's a customer that will ultimately bring them a bit of revenue or ultimately cost them a lot of money: the price for the individual customer is fixed. A plane flight costs the same amount of money whether there are strong tailwinds and the plane flew cheaper than expected or whether there was bad enough weather that the flight had to land somewhere for refueling, and the cost of the occasional rare disruption is built into the ticket.
This trick is mathematically nice, but there isn't really a reason for a consumer to prefer it to even paying $.02, unless the consumer is also paying at scale (in which case you can just aggregate the transfer and not use this scheme at all).
Great points, but can't you tweak the idea somehow by also buffering individual participants? I could imagine a service here could be worth a lot more than ~$10 user.
This is only needed for micropayments so a buffer of like $5-10 could be fine if you could somehow otherwise otherwise verify the user / monetize the relationship. Best way I can think of that preserves privacy is to serve image only ads through the payment network in an appropriately boxed window every time you add a tip to the randomized micropayment scheme.
This model works maybe for uses where small value transactions aren't worth the cost or hassle, but that's not the (main) problem here. It's that payment itself adds a layer of complexity.
And if the problem is that even simple payment complicates things, complicated (probabilistic maybe or maybe not) payment isn't going to make it better.
You'd have to have some way to enforce that people actually make the payments. And once you do that, it seems like an intermediary that just aggregates microtransactions and takes care of settlement at the end of the month or whatever would be a lot easier.
Yes, I think people would hate it for the same reason they love gambling slot machines. People overweight rare and random events. You'd always remember the one time you got dinged $10 for looking at some lame clickbait article.
I like how you said "WEB PKI". This works for the web, but the problem of verifying domain ownership for non-web interner remains. If ever there is a new version of DNS it should assume registrars will provide this CA service for free (or for whatever the domain costs)
Web PKI is just its name‡, like my name is tialaramex, names are not meanings. The Web PKI is a PKI for TLS services with names from the public Internet not just for HTTPS (the web).
Names meaning mostly DNS names like news.ycombinator.com but also numeric names such as 1.1.1.1
The Baseline Requirements (the rules Certificate Authorities agreed to obey some years back now) currently provide 13 potential ways to verify domain ownership, but these ways are sometimes called the Ten Blessed Methods dating back to when Gervase Markham was alive and worked on the Web PKI.
Although some of the Ten Blessed Methods are specific to the web in practice, such as 3.2.2.4.6 which involves creating a document to be retrieved from a web site, others really aren't such as 3.2.2.4.7 which is just a DNS change. Let's Encrypt offers both these (as challenges http-01 and dns-01 respectively)
Method 3.2.2.4.12 is specifically for domain registrars in the sort of relationship you're talking about, and is used by some registrars which also have a CA business (such as Google) today I believe.
‡ It got this name because the Web is why this PKI exists. SSL was invented by the Netscape Corporation, whose Web browser is the ancestor of today's Firefox. Netscape's successor, the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation continues to be the most visible and only public oversight for the Web PKI. Perhaps if instead some other group had secured the Network it would be named, say, the Usenet PKI, or the IRC PKI or the NetBSD PKI, but they didn't and it isn't.
Names are not meanings but they describe a meaning. Webpki is framework used to verify public key ownership,specitically for TLS like you mentioned.
What makes webpki unique (and correct me if I am wrong) is how responsibilities are separated such that domain ownership is established by a 3rd party (like ISRG) as opposed to by the domain registrar. Logically speaking, the party transfering or registering domain ownership (for a fee) would also issue you a certificate at the time of transfer/registration. The different approaches to verify ownership would not be needed if the more sane approach was taken to begin with.
As you know, DNS is a protocol sepatate from TLS or other protocols. As such, domain ownership/control validation should be contained within the domain name system (also, why dnssec,dane and other efforts are under way, but they don't address the root cause of the problem).
For method 3.2.2.4.12 (and thanks for informing me about this), my comment was that it should be mandatory (not optional) for registrars to issue DV certs.
While I appreciate the ISRG, there are cases where using letsencrypt is not practical ,that aside, one org controlling so much of the web goes against the very concept of having TLDs that are independent in purpose/function. It would be more architecturally sane if what the ISRG does now was instead done at least at the TLR level. (E.g.: .com's owners should issue certs that says site.com belongs to whoever has this cert)
For the impractical corner cases: let's say I need to run a non-web service like SMTP and I can't spin up a web server to validate the domain. Or let's say I need non-TLS x509 such as ipsec.
> let's say I need to run a non-web service like SMTP and I can't spin up a web server to validate the domain.
You should use Let's Encrypt's implementation of 3.2.2.4.7 which is the dns-01 challenge as I already mentioned. Or use another vendor's own implementation of 3.2.2.4.7 or any of the half a dozen or so non-web methods listed.
> Or let's say I need non-TLS x509 such as ipsec.
The Web PKI can't help you. Leaf certificates in the Web PKI contain an EKU 1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.1 which says their purpose is TLS server authentication. There is no global public PKI for IPsec. Feel free to try to make your own, but I expect it will be an expensive and thankless task.
The central issue of a PKI is trust and domain name registrars are not on the whole very trustworthy. We're talking about the industry which invented Domain Front Running - the idea of waiting until a customer shows interest in a unique product (a domain name) and then buying it yourself so that they'll have to buy it from you at an inflated price.
I sympathise with the desire to build a parallel PKI baked into the DNS system, but the Web PKI is not that system and there's no practical way to mutate it into that system. If you believe DANE is the only way forward you should go help people make DANE work better, not argue against the Web PKI.
Issuing "a certificate" at time of domain registration greatly misses the point of Internet hierarchical naming by the way. While it would be technically possible for every domain to hold a single wildcard certificate and use flat naming (so news.america.ycombinator.com couldn't exist, it would need to be news-america.ycombinator.com) that's a terrible security choice. Necessarily where a service corresponds to one specific name the certificate and corresponding private key should be for that name only, and not a hierarchy of related names in order to mitigate risk.
I think you misunderstood, I was not arguing against WEBPKI, I was advocating for a better ideal solution that does not exist. WEBPKI solves real problems well. I don't care for DANE either.
To address your concern, clients will have TLD certs in their trust store. TLDs issue intermediate CA certs to registrars. When you get a domain, they issue a cert (not x509 neccesarily) that allows you to issue certificates like an intermediate but restricted to that domain and its subdomains. So news.america and news. Under ycombinator.com will have separate certs,signed by the owner of ycombiator.com which on turn has to have their CA cert signed by a registrar.
This actually can improve security, because you can isolate your intermediate signig key from the rest of your services, and possibly have a dynamic process of issuing extremely short lived certs by your CA box to all of your services. Code signing certs,s/mime,client certs, eap-tls,etc... Can all be more easy to use. For example, if I could use eap-tls to connect to wifi at an airport or starbucks using a cert I issued myself under my domain (or under my work/school domain). Things that have been notoriously hard to adopt like TLS client certs could easier to use because anyone can have a client cert issued to them by any domain owner (likely the domain of their email provider for most) because any site can verify their client cert using this system and anyone with a domain can issue certs. This is the natural and most sensible way.
As for trust, you already trust them with the power to transfer your domain. If someone compromises your registrar account, what stops them from taking over the domain,pointing it at their own servers and getting a new cert from ISRG? Imagine getting a government ID and to verify it's legitimacy,people have to contact 3rd party companies instead of the government, that makes no sense. Things are the way they are because public key crypto was not used widely when DNS and the internet became a thing.
> which the machine needs help with because it doesn't have money
How long does it take to mine 1¢ worth of bitcoin? Or, is there anything else a machine can do in a relatively short timeframe that’s worth 1¢ to someone else?
This kind of thing has been proposed but you can easily end up in a situation where the device uses 2c of electricity to mine 1c and then you'd be better off preloading the device with, say, ten years worth of currency instead of mining.
Like what? If you have anything my computer can do to generate 1c/10seconds with no input from me, that’s $3.60/hour income running twenty four seven; I’ll buy a few and retire right now.
LE certificates last 90 days. $3.60/hour is enough to cover renewal for almost a million certificates. The mining doesn't have to be done during the renewal process. You can do the mining gradually between renewals.
I don't think you can mine $0.01 worth of bitcoin. Most of the time, you'll lose the race to find the correct hash collision and so you'll end up with nothing. Other times, you'll win and get the reward for the block which is 12.5 BTC at the moment (IIRC). People do join collectives to pool their mining power, but there isn't predictability to when the collective will end up with a coin. If you're looking to set up a web server, you don't want to be waiting days or weeks or whatever while your collective tries to win a block. Theoretically, you could buy a lot of computing power and always get unlucky.
So you can't really get a penny of bitcoin via mining.
Realistically, larger pools mine multiple blocks per day and can pay out daily. 21 even came up with a scheme to front BTC to the device and make it up later, but that's excessively complex IMO.
And not just overhead for the company, but for the consumer too.
Whether it's actual time spent signing up, putting in my credit card data, updating expired cards, etc. Or linking my account/PayPal/Venmo to receive tiny transactions.
Or just the friction of "do I really want to pay $0.05 for this?" And I just don't want to make a choice, so I close the tab.
I know a lot of people dream about microtransactions changing everything... but even if they work flawlessly technically, I just don't want the mental overhead of making 20 tiny economic decisions every time I use the internet. Ugh.
They don’t dream of micro transactions where you make micro decisions to approve it, they dream of it like a direct debit leech where the amount they drip out is micro enough that you won’t bother taking the decision to stop it - like Amazon Prime, gym membership, wine magazine tasters, book club, whatever you subscribed to but forget about.
Or just the friction of "do I really want to pay $0.05 for this?"
LOL, that's so obvious in retrospect: if something costs so little, it's because you probably don't need it. Minor annoyances, even the mere decision, and you won't bother.
I just also want to note that people shouldn't ignore the psychological cost of paying. Making a decision on whether or not to spend money requires mental effort that doesn't scale down well with price.
Correct. I once pointed out to my friends who earns a five-digit salary every month (by no means impressive in the Bay Area) that he spent 20 minutes agonizing over a $2 payment. Before I pointed it out he didn't even realize it was irrational.
Also frugal habits learned from agonizing over $100 and $10,000 spending sometimes trickle down to those $2 decisions. It becomes an instinct even if it doesn't make sense.
This. If international micro payments, with close to zero transaction fees, really were an option, lot more things would have variable pricing or payouts.
There's this awkward gap in online service pricing that I hate. I'd like to pay $3 per month for a 100GB Dropbox quota, but Dropbox decided (rationally--I don't blame them) than anyone paying less than $10 per month isn't worth their time.
Pretty much all ~consumer services like that are either free or at least $10.
Sadly, a flat per-transaction fee of 30 cents or so associated with credit card payment processing means that fees alone eat up over 10% of a $3 plan.
Until payment processing is an inherent feature of the monetary system, rather than through multiple third parties, small transactions like these are just bad for everyone.
I have a suggestion to solve this issue and the "low-paying customers aren't sticky" issue mentioned in another thread:
Only make the really cheap plans available as annual subscriptions. Charging $3/month isn't very viable, but I bet $36/year is. (Assuming that the costs of providing the service itself permit that.)
I think that is avoided because an annual-only plan at the bottom tier prevents you from charging monthly at higher tiers, or offering annual discounts.
Attempting to do both increases the complexity of your pricing scheme, and that translates to abandoned and lost sales. At least, that was my understanding of the reasoning.
I could see creating a tier chart for the different levels of service with "monthly" and "annual" price columns, where the monthly column is crossed out for certain tiers.
Yeah, I think engineer types tend to underestimate how much our training enables us to quickly reason about, and then simply accept, complexity.
Pretty much anything that is remotely considered a barrier to your sign up or checkout process costs you sales; having questions or needing to spend time deciding which position on a chart you want to purchase from is time you are giving people to decide maybe they don't actually want to sign up.
Presumably they think more people would pay a higher amount than walk away because they don’t offer a lower amount? or that people who want to pay for smaller space are more likely to use it, or become less attached to the account and more likely to be less loyal and shop around, or don’t want to support the increased complexity...
Card fees would presumably be more of an issue for flat rate $/gb but I don’t think they they are that zero-margin?
If you are old like me you remember when stores had minimum purchase limits for credit cards, and some places (esp. gas stations) would charge different prices for cash or credit. The credit card issuers have strongarmed the retailers to curb those practices, so the only rational response for a service that would be entirely dependent on them would be to have a minimum for everything.
I still see minimum credit purchase signs, especially in restaurants, cafés, and the like. Generally, they're small -- like $5 or $10 -- making purchase of all but the most trivial of items exceed the limit, but they're technically there.
This is no longer a violation of the merchant agreement. The card brands used to ban minimums, but now merchants are allowed to require a minimum payment for credit. Too many cash-based businesses who just would not bother with a credit card machine at all if they weren't allowed to stay cash-only for small transactions, and the card brands want to be in as many storefronts as possible.
In NZ, those minimums and surcharges are coming back and relatively common. Retailers are getting vocal about the "evils" of credit cards companies too.
And many places simply don't accept credit card payments.
I find it interesting, because EFTPOS (like a debit card in the US) seems to be far-and-away the most popular way to pay for small items and is accepted virtually everywhere.
So just make it an annual-only plan. Companies that charge subscriptions vastly prefer annual payments to monthly payments, anyway. It's not just the per-transaction percentage that credit card processors take. Cards get declined (expire, etc), and 1/12th the number of charges means 1/12th the number of potential issues.
That's why they offer such great discounts for annual billing. DropBox's cheap plan is $10/month when paid annually, but $12/month if you pay monthly, for example.
Do you really want to have the monetary system (the Fed, the Treasury, the Post Office, ...) to be the payor, aribitor, and recordkeeeper of every transaction you make?
There are benefits to cash. And despite the tremendous faults and failures, of a (more-or-less) decentralised payments-processor system. Though one might argue that one in which Visa and Mastercard account for 3/4 of all card-based payments[1], even before accounting for the data "sharing" between payment and credit-scoring entities, fails even harder than even the government-controlled case.
I could have chosen my words and phrasing better; I am most certainly adamantly opposed to doing away with cash.
Unfortunately, with the costs of transaction fees being put on merchants, there's essentially no incentive for customers to get anything other than what is commonly accepted, and so no way for any new entrant to the system that uses a different (or no) processing fee structure. The closest thing to new has been Stripe, and that too has essentially the same structure as the rest.
It is interesting to me that you mention the Post Office- a government run organization that effectively operates independently and probably has less data on you than your phone company. In fact, I suspect an organization set up in a similar manner probably would have the same level of insight and (in theory, if not practice) the same level of privacy for you as Visa or MasterCard.
Then again, if I had a magical fiat wand, I would also allow FedEx and UPS to deliver packages into my mailbox rather than leaving them in the rain and snow, so I can't say that I've worked through all the details of where the right balance between "public good demands a monopoly" and "public control is unwarranted and not likely to be more beneficial".
The problem's a difficult one. More usually, the answer seems to be a mix of bundling and subscriptions.
With technology and all that it entails (protocols, data, interchange, hardware, various forms of IP), that itself is problematic in ways simple print content subscriptions generally weren't.
I always wondered why no governments decided to get into the payments ecosystem.
If you keep the existing rate structure, payment processing represents a ~3% sales tax that yields a huge margin for all players, a tantalizing revenue stream to nationalize.
Id you use the state resources to subsidize the price down to zero, you have a great "pro-business"/"pro-inclusive-economy" plank for political points.
Either way, you get a huge amount of data and a massive lever you can use for political ends. Think of the deplatforming debates of a year or two ago, but magnified by "this is basically the only payment platform used in the country."
Russian Central Bank (our financial authority) have done exactly that.
The so called Faster Payments System (Система Быстрых Платежей), launched last year, offers instant money transfers in Russia for 0.05-6 rubles (≈$0.01-0.1). Your bank can charge you on top of that, but i.e. in my bank it totally free (subsidized by other services).
Now (since autumn) they are slowly launching payments system (it's not gained traction yet, but it's just started).
Tariff for payment system is 0.4-0.7 for retailers, split between your and retailer's bank.
Afaik, China also has something like that for for years.
I think that USA don't have something like that because political tradition forbids government to compete with established private services. I have read that Americans have to buy commercial software for filing taxes. :-) In Russia, it would be unbelievable — you just using government provided tax filing software free of charge.
The IRS had a no-compete agreement with tax software companies under the premise that simple, standard filings would be offered for free. That agreement recent expired, and since the tax software companies used scummy tactics to hide the free option, the IRS has recently indicated that it is willing to build its own platform.
Personally, I would much prefer that our legislators simplified the tax code to the point that specialist preparers and software wasn't necessary, but all of the incentives around elections pretty much guarantee that won't happen.
On a global scale: Since PayPal and U.S.-based credit card companies are too strong.
Outside the U.S. there are differences in payment system. Here in Germany we have working wire transfers for most things working fine. However that system lacks online authorization ... only in 2015 German banks started their PayPal copy PayDirekt, which however fails to attract vendors and users, to a degree due to hen and egg issues and to some degree due to competition law issues (such a cooperation between banks might for a cartell, thus they've built a complicated structure)
Government can't really regulate this much, unless they want to rule prices completely.
good idea. i'd go further and advocate a government option for every utility-type service, like banking, internet, healthcare, etc. businesses would be free to compete with these government services, but they'd also provide a competitive anchor to help keep markets efficient.
We used to have that in the Netherlands. For banking, regular banks refused to service small businesses and lower income private people. The government set up two banks of their own, one for small businesses and one for ordinary people to do things like deposit their paychecks and have simple savings accounts. The latter especially was wildly successful and innovative, with a truly forward thinking IT department (they had online banking over dialup in 1987!)
Alas, the 90s hit and these banks, along with the energy companies, the cable companies and the postal company, were privatized. Innovation ground to a halt and service quality plummeted. In the end, they had to be bailed out during the 2008 financial crisis.
Randomness that only punishes? So you're essentially saying that typical annual cost is going to be 63 a year, but if you are unlucky it could easily be over 120, and your best case scenario is 36? I have to imagine most people would pass.
For business services and products there exists similar price gap.
Low level managers and staff are allowed to purchase stuff directly below some sum, typically below $2000, sometimes higher. If somebody needs something below that sum they just buy it online or with few emails if they have money in the budget.
If you go above that limit, suddenly it's more complicated. There may be purchasing department. They compare prices, may select bidders etc. Purchase may even become a procurement. You often have to send a person to sell and negotiate. If you send someone, you may as well add $20,000 to the price to cover the cost of travel and time. Product you sell for $5000 online costs now tens of thousands.
There's a price known as the "price of spousal consent." It's the price where you have to ask your spouse for "permission" to buy something. It's around $100.
I think I heard about it on the radio(?), but might have gotten the name wrong. It's a thing, though, and there's a threshold where couples have to talk about purchases first.
I think the pricing is what it is partly because their main cost is not actually the storage space, but data transfer and computing. However to keep things simple and predictable for the customer, Dropbox is not directly charging for these.
Just think about the traffic you can easily generate when you have some work projects sitting on Dropbox folder. All the builds, downloading libraries, getting node modules etc, people working on large documents etc. The cost to provide 100GB of space vs 1TB of space might be actually pretty close for Dropbox (considering also that very few people actually use all that space).
Other providers may have different cost structures. Maybe the services they are providing are bit different (for example less focus on sync speed), or maybe the customers are using the storage in very different way (I guess most of the content in iCloud is photos and videos).
Apple needs your payment information so you can buy apps. Since apple is a payment platform they want to make sure everyone gives them their payment information.
But people are typically very apprehensive of paying for apps (even though they may spend the same amount or more on eg coffee every day). And if apple get you to set up Apple Pay then surely you’re also able to pay for apps easily.
Maybe they just want people to be used to getting a monthly invoice from them. Or to used to paying for cloud storage (and so willing to increase the limit if needed). But then the $1 tier is pretty generous so maybe they want you to store a load of data in their cloud so you’ll continue to buy their products.
Maybe they want everyone to be able to back up their iPhone and avoid antitrust but really, really don't want to upgrade their free tier, which is atrociously stingy given how expensive their devices are and that no alternatives to iCloud are permitted.
I'd say it's because it's just a feature to Apple that incentivizes owning Macs and iPhones. For Dropbox it's their whole business -- they can't afford to subsidize the cost.
Solo founder here. For my SaaS, I keep considering a low-cost hobbyist tier at $60/year and I keep rejecting it every time. It just doesn't make sense unless you have huge economies of scale. Dropbox might be able to pull it off, a niche SaaS can't.
Selling to individuals is expensive, not just because of credit card fees, but also because of accounting costs, VAT MOSS in Europe, and support. In my case, a single support inquiry from a customer could negate income from that customer for an entire year.
At the same time, you can sell to companies, which pay 8-48x more, and will bother you with fewer support requests because they have things to do.
I think pulling of a consumer SaaS is extremely difficult in general.
> Selling to individuals is expensive, not just because of credit card fees, but also because of accounting costs, VAT MOSS in Europe, and support. In my case, a single support inquiry from a customer could negate income from that customer for an entire year.
As a very rough comparison for SaaS companies, sales and marketing can consume a solid 50% of your revenue, overhead like accounting, insurance, support, and office space should be 20%, and actual product development is just 30%. This obviously varies greatly by industry and product, but if you're solely thinking about the final product and not how you get it to your customer, you're not thinking broadly enough.
Dropbox has a free tier so it doesn't seem like it would be a big deal to have something between that and their first paid level. If support costs are the big factor, then don't offer support at the lowest levels.
I also has to do with expectations of the buyer. "Less than $10 p/m? Why is that? Maybe it's shite?" That initial tier is established in the minds of consumers.
I would imagine that it does lower chun. Commit to $10 and you're likeky to stay. Less, and it's no commitment at all. I don't think the seller - sans chun - has a tbing for $10. It the market setting that.
If it was a Netflix competitor launching for $5 per month (and without the reputation of Disney), I might think that, but for Dropbox, especially if they have clearly different personal and business plans, I think people are smart enough to know they're just buying less storage.
I'm not so sure. At $10 there's plenty of "Mary said buy X" or "If Y is good for Bob it's good for me." Ten bucks clears one mental hurdle (is it good enough) but is low enough for "this isn't worth stressing over."
the solution is bundling. For example Patreon bundles all your subscriptions into a monthly credit card transaction, and bundles all the payouts into monthly payments too
> It’s obvious why the likes of Facebook and Google don't charge for their products: It costs nearly nothing to transmit, say, one Gmail or host, say, one photo on Instagram.
This already doesn't make sense. This wrong logic could be extended to every paid service which doesn't rely on an external service, especially SaaS, on the internet. If this reasoning was correct, everything from Zendesk to Superhuman to GitHub (pre-Microsoft pricing) should be free. Development costs money, and hosting overall costs a fair bit of money (because every user doesn't just post one picture, or have one email, and it compounds).
The real reason it is free is because they want users, and make more money from ads than they would charging a reasonable price (which would massively cut adoption anyway).
Yes, I stopped reading at that point. What does the author think the small army of software engineers and researchers that create their products are paid? Nothing?
Yes, the premise of this article almost immediately struck me as being quite off base. The economics of pure tech companies at this point are well understood: large up front investment with near-zero (but importantly not actually zero) marginal costs.
This article seems to be written by someone who doesn't understand the engineering side of things. At scale, the extremely low cost of serving an individual request ends up being potentially costly in aggregate, which is why the larger a web service gets, the more important performance becomes.
I've gotten to the point where I automatically and instantly discount any theory that proposes blockchain as a solution. I'm not saying blockchain technology will never be a good solution to a real world problem, but I have noticed that it is very often an ignorant assertion of faith rather than an argument based in fact. It walks like a religion and quacks like a religion, so I'm not sure why I should think it's something other than a religion.
> It walks like a religion and quacks like a religion, so I'm not sure why I should think it's something other than a religion.
This is such a good way to describe the current state of blockchain.
It's a cult. And mostly spread around by people who are trying to increase the price so they can sell and profit off other people. It's a giant ponzi scheme, and wealth redistribution.
But I think the technology has promise. We just haven't bothered explore real applications of it, because we're too busy trying to use it to make a quick buck at someone else's expense.
I thought I was clear, but perhaps I can explain better: Blockchain is very often suggested as a solution to a social or ethical problem, absent any evidence that it can solve those problems (or can solve them better than existing law/contract/trust-based solutions). Kinda like religion.
Blockchain is real, in the same way any other algorithm or technology is. Saying it will solve people being jerks is superstition.
There's a lot of evidence that the bigger factor is transaction cost. People consume more under all-you-can-eat plans than per-transaction plans (e.g. internet service) even though the unmetered plans may cost more, simply because they don't want the mental overhead. People will drive out of their way to avoid a tool bridge even if the toll costs less than the cost of operating their vehicle for the other route.
All that billing infrastructure costs money as well. Think of how much of the phone and TV cable networks is consumed by nothing but managing tollbooths?
The post from Stratechery yesterday made this point differently: when credit cards were introduced merchants liked them because they no longer needed the (pre-computerized in those days) infrastructure and headcount of billing customers, checking credit, etc.
> People will drive out of their way to avoid a tool bridge even if the toll costs less than the cost of operating their vehicle for the other route.
It's not just the mental overhead here. I specifically avoid toll roads because I think their concept is fundamentally wrong. I pay taxes to pay for roads and their maintenance. I shouldn't have to pay more taxes ("tolls") to pay to use those roads.
If it's a private road then it should be marked as such. The public shouldn't be permitted to drive on private roads marked as if they're a interstate or state highway or anything like that. It's deceptive and profiteering off of what the government already provides: transportation infrastructure. And it absolutely should not be permitted for a private entity to purchase an existing road and turn it into a tollway.
They could still belong to the people. It's just that they are paid for by the people who use them. The more you drive, the more you pay. To a small extent the gasoline tax works like this.
Poor people cannot afford this. It's the whole reason that taxes were set up for road and infrastructure maintenance: so that everyone can benefit instead of just the wealthy.
And, arguably, mental transaction costs. Getting people to pay anything at all is a big hurdle to get over whether it's a penny, a dollar, or ten dollars. Clay Shirky wrote way back when that this was the main problem with micropayments and I'm mostly inclined to agree. (It's true that $1 digital music and video rentals for a few dollars were/are something of a thing. But people seem to generally prefer all you can eat subscriptions.)
If people were really on board with micropayments, I suspect they could be made to work technically/financially.
The OP means friction in the form of costs. Payments go through several hands, the payers bank, the payments networks, the payees bank and each of them incurs costs on the transaction.
At least not in Germany. Every household has to pay a monthly fee even if they dont want to. No opt outs possible.
And for music licenses there is GEMA which is also financed by additional charges on empty media like SDcards or Hard disks. Also no opt out possible. Google/youtube was fighting it and they finally lost the battle.
So in principle the IP Providers could be forced to pay a monthly fee for internet searches and social media. For mobile networks this is already discussed.
It seems that the EU doesnt like the free services from the SV giants and will fight them in the time to come. The GDPR was only the beginning. The next one will be more about the money.
> At least not in Germany. Every household has to pay a monthly fee even if they don't want to. No opt outs possible.
Yes, but you can simply not pay that. I've been doing that for decades now. They send you scary reminders and say things like "Hurr durr, we are going to impount your wage!" but that's where it already ends. Just send them GDPR requests which they can't/won't reply to on a regular schedule and they are actually the ones that have to deliver/comply first before anything else.
Side note: My household and car are broadcast/radio free and I don't consume these on the internet either.
That was previously. Since 2013 it is mandatory for each household (Exceptions for disabled, people on social security, etc.) as well as mandatory for business premisses.
The assumption is that everybody owns a media receiver (since computer+internet counts as well, as there is streaming) and since running the infrastructure is seen as a public service.
No one said anything about deletion. GDPR is more than that. They don't respond to general queries about saved data, which they are obligated to. See "right on access".
> > Every household has to pay a monthly fee even if they dont want to
> Even if you don't own any screen or audio devices they still make you pay for it. I always fail to see how this isn't pure theft.
The rationales is that you are benefiting from that service (public information) indirectly (other citizens make more informed decisions) even though you don't use it directly.
And, realistically, which household does not own a device that is able to receive a video via a web site?
BTW, you don't need to pay the Rundfunkbeitrag if, among others:
«* you receive BAföG and do not live with your parents,
* for recipients of unemployment benefit II or social allowance benefits,
* for recipients of social welfare benefits or basic subsistence benefits ("Grundsicherung"),
* for recipients of assistance to blind people according to § 72 German Code of Social Law XII.»
That said, it is high time that these kind of levies get converted into normal taxes and progressively taxed like everything else. Why should the €30k/year household contribute as much to the public information as the €200k/year household?
The rationale behind not making it a tax is making it politically independent. If it were a tax any government could decide to just allocate the funds to other projects if they didn’t like the way they are portrayed on television. I’m very happy that it’s not paid for with tax money, otherwise we would just have uncritical state media.
If it's mandatory then make it a tax, like every other thing. This is kind of in limbo between tax and "you're not really obligated to pay, it's not illegal not to pay, but if you don't pay the state allow it to be processed by debt collectors".
It's like if you received a letter asking you 10 euros a month for building schools, another 15 euros for building new public buses, another 15 for a new train line. All these things are taken from your salary before it even reaches your bank account so why is this tv/radio thing any other way? We're already paying insane amount of tax in gerrmany, asking for 17 euros per months for thing like this on the side is an insult.
If all taxes were itemized like that it would probably lead to a lot more government accountability of how money is spent, and it would be a forcing function to create a budget ahead of time.
I'm sure there's a million issues I haven't thought of, but I like the idea.
I've been paid a total of 35 BAT (~$8) for using the Brave browser since October '19.
STEEM was supposed to be like Facebook, but you get paid. It turned out to be more of a "rich get richer" ecosystem, so I stopped using it.
Facebook's Libra may yet turn out to be a way for people to get paid for using Facebook. I stopped using Facebook entirely following all the negative press. I only recently signed in to strengthen my password and enable 2FA. I don't use it anymore at all. Maybe I would start again if they paid me.
It's a common thing to happen and I've noticed it a lot with middle age non tech crowds. It's not a new phenomenon overall but people talk about how their son made a YouTube or they sent a Gmail quite regularly. For some reason tech folks find it natural to use the verbs (e.g. I googled/youtubed it) but not the nouns.
It doesn't always require the service have 100% market dominance either, just that it be popular enough people hear others use it and commonly used in exclusivity by the user.
It's not really a local speech pattern thing it has more to do with associating <product name> with <name of tool>. If you can think of examples for a dozen other traditional products (kleenex, ketchup, jello, aspirin..) it shouldn't be hard to imagine that people do it for gmail and technology products/services. It's also certainly not unheard of though it is still less popular than traditional "emailed" https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=h...
For the same reason they "email my friend" but don't "tissue my nose" or "drug their head". If it doesn't sound right to start with it won't sound right after you swap the generic term for the brand name.
You've at least heard someone say "let me Google that" or "that's photoshopped" right?
I think one is complements[1] (if the price of jelly goes down, peanut butter sales increase)
Apps are complementary to iPhones, so if Apple drives the cost of apps to zero, they sell more iphones.
For Google, if data sales are complementary to services, making the services free makes data sales rise.
Only thing I've noticed though is that free is associated with lots of unintended consequences. Free electric car charging means it's hard to reliably charge your car. Free web services means nobody gets good customer service. Even a modest co-pay leads to significant cost savings for insureres because free visits can easily tie up all health-care resources.
Amazon had a service that was built mainly with micropayments in mind. It never took off.
"Amazon FPS’s aggregation feature lets developers track and aggregate micro-payments into a single payment transaction, saving on transaction processing costs and avoiding having to build complex ledger functionality into their own applications. Using the aggregation functionality coupled with the lower Amazon FPS fees, developers can now pursue micro-payments businesses that previously have been cost-prohibitive."
That 30% is on more than $60B/yr for apple. Are you suggesting that their overhead for running app store is anywhere within even a couple orders of magnitude of $20B/yr?
Apparently bus fares in San Francisco just cover the costs of collecting the fares. When a recent Mayor attempted to just make the buses free he was told it was impractical because they would become "rolling dumpsters".
This article's only value is as a counterexample to the assertion "there are no stupid questions." Not charging (or paying) people at all is not the same as charging them zero, you have to be being deliberately obtuse to pretend that it is.
I think most of the microtransaction argument here is forgetting about Swagbucks [1]. I would argue micro transactions are doable, either through networks or payout systems that wait until you have enough for a payout.
I believe the real reason is that Google isn't exactly a commodity. People are used to the brand, the user interface, the web url, and maybe the occasional quality or exact flavor of the search results.
Because it's not a commodity, people don't just instantly change to whichever site pays the most, and because of that there would have to be a large pay difference for customers to make a switch. Users are basically willing to "forfeight" the money they would get using Swagbucks to use Google.
> It’s obvious why the likes of Facebook and Google don't charge for their products: It costs nearly nothing to transmit...
That's not why. They don't charge because it's not lucrative to do so. Charging - however small - would change expectations on SLA, privacy, security, etc.
Most importantly, as everyone on HN knows, they can't charge for access to their platform because the platform isn't the product. You and I are the product.
Finally, Bloomberg should be more careful with their word choice. They are prestigious enough to know that __nothing__ is free. There is always a cost(s) involved. The transaction might not call for an exchange of financial wampum but that does not make it free.
>Finally, Bloomberg should be more careful with their word
choice. They are prestigious enough to know that
__nothing__ is free. There is always a cost(s) involved.
The transaction might not call for an exchange of financial
wampum but that does not make it free.
I read the article. It is a synopsis of a paper.
The word "free" does not appear in the article,
and to my reading the author does not imply "free".
I've seen more of this - people linking semi-relevant question/answers on quora. Even with similar wording. I'm not sure why? Is there a rise of people using quora as a sort of blogging platform? Incentives to get views on your answers for users?
Maybe I'm just overly sensitive as Quora initially got on my bad side when they used to put everything behind a login wall and required accounts with real names.
Every form of payment, no matter in which direction, needs to provide enough benefit to justify the costs of the complexity added by it.