It's hard to see this appeal going anywhere. The app store guidelines even explicitly mention this use case as one that requires in-app purchases to be used.
> Apps may use in-app purchase currencies to enable customers to “tip” the developer or digital content providers in the app.
Apple lists the limited scenarios where alternative purchase methods can be used and this one is not included. Since they mention it in the guidelines it's clearly something they are aware of.
You may disagree with Apple's policy, but bigger companies have fought this battle and lost. Intentionally (or unintentionally) misreading the guidelines isn't going to hold water on appeal.
I don't think the section you quote tells the whole story
> If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, (by way of example: subscriptions, in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium content, or unlocking a full version), you must use in-app purchase.
> Apps may use in-app purchase currencies to enable customers to “tip” the developer or digital content providers in the app.
Using "must" for unlocking features and "may" for tipping is pretty odd if they need to be treated identically.
This is especially clear if you look later in the document where an almost identical phrasing is used in the other direction:
> If your app enables the purchase of real-time person-to-person services between two individuals you may use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments.
> If your app enables people to purchase physical goods or services that will be consumed outside of the app, you must use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments
Certainly the person-to-person transactions aren't required to use purchase methods other than in-app purchase despite the use of "may" in the same context.
This section could probably invalidate it although its extremely confusing because only "reader" apps (3.1.3(a)) are allowed to direct to other purchasing methods but physical goods apps are required not to use IAP. How would they avoid using IAP if they can't direct to other mechanisms?
> Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase, except as set forth in 3.1.3(a).
I'm outside of the edit window on this comment otherwise I would make this more prominent, but way below in the "Other" section they do actually have a "monetary gift" rule that aligns with what the dev says:
> (vii) Apps may enable individual users to give a monetary gift to another individual without using in-app purchase, provided that (a) the gift is a completely optional choice by the giver, and (b) 100% of the funds go to the receiver of the gift. However, a gift that is connected to or associated at any point in time with receiving digital content or services must use in-app purchase.
Although I think it still depends on what Apple means by "associated at any point in time with receiving digital content or services". I think they may be intending to allow something like GoFundMe or Venmo, while disallowing something like Reddit gold where users give gifts based on the digital content created even though that content isn't gated by payment.
Perhaps the developer's use of Bitcoin complicates things as well. Does Apple consider that a "monetary gift" or "digital content" or both?
True. Apple can also choose to stand their ground, which would likely work if the developer doesn’t have the resources to fight a court battle. There may be other viable strategies for them to remove this application in whatever legally valid way.
Still, a plaintext interpretation (as far as I can tell) of Apple’s current rules seems to favor the developer, given the circumstances.
Why go to court instead of changing the rules the next day so that the app more obviously violates them and remove it anyways?
What developer are gonna to go to court for the few weeks or months when his app was removed for ambiguous reasons?
Terms and conditions mean nothing for Apple. They are solely to restrict developers how Apple wants. They give developers no rights in practice. Only the illusion.
Yes, I think their phrasing in that sentence is vague. It should be structured like the functionality one to make clear that tipping _may_ be added, but if implemented it _must_ use in-app purchases.
However, since tipping is not listed in the exceptions, one should read it as not being allowed.
Agreed, from historical context it definitely seems like the intention was confirming for developers that tipping is a valid use case for IAP and not creating an exemption, but I can see why a motivated party would read it differently, and it is made even more confusing by the App Store review notice seemingly acknowledging that some tips are exempt.
So can't people who want to offer an in-app "tip the developer" feature simply comply (without paying Apple's commission) by selling a token physical good such as a button, sticker, t-shirt, or other merchandise?
It sounds like that should be allowed. But I think that fulfilling button, stickers and t-shirts orders is pretty expensive, and only makes sense if people give big tips (eg. if someone tips 5€, there's not going to be much left after you pay someone to mail them a sticker).
Yeah this case seems incredibly obvious, and I feel like any suggestion from the developer that they aren't violating the policies is disingenuous.
Whether the policy is a good one or not is a fair question, but not one that App Store review will (or even can) answer, and trying to do anything there is barking up the wrong tree.
The right place to challenge this sort of thing is likely with organisations like the FTC, Competition and Markets Authority, or the EU equivalent.
The developer had a meeting with Apple representatives where they assured him that tipping profiles would be okay so he adjusted his app so people would tip profiles instead of posts. Then they still rejected the app.
Sure but reading the guidelines that Apple representative was clearly mistaken. Unless they said "we acknowledge what the guidelines say but they are incorrect", it just seems like poor developer relations comms (from Apple, never!).
I can't find the bit from the dev you're referring to so don't know if they have screenshots of it in writing or something, however, what I suspect is more likely (based on my experience talking to Apple reps about similar things) is that they gave a very charitable description of their feature, and the rep gave a non-committal "sounds like it could pass, try submitting it".
I don't get why the developer is so convinced that their tip system for tipping people based on their activity on their app is not tipping for "digital content". Unless you can only tip randomly with no control over who it goes to, or tipping is for the user's activity off-app, digital content (i.e. posts etc) are literally the only thing you could be tipping for.
The Apple representative may have been mistaken, but they did represent Apple and as such have very clearly overruled the guidelines. It should have ended there.
The degree to which people will twist themselves into pretzels to defend mega-corps is something I find hard to understand, for this guy it is their life line and for Apple it is a non-issue. Apple doesn't get to hide behind their own guidelines if even their own representatives don't know them well enough to adequately represent the company.
It's unfortunate confusion, but a mistake from an employee is not a policy commitment. If Tim Cook said it, sure, but a low-level "representative" is just someone doing a job.
The company can delegate people to interact with the outside world and those people have the ability to bind the company. If they mess up beyond their pay grade then the company may have recourse on them but the company may well still be bound externally.
You still have to check if the functionary is an 'authorized agent' but if they misrepresent themselves as such then the company may well have a problem if you had no reason to believe otherwise (for instance: because of their job title or because someone with signing authority delegated the interaction with you). Such 'apparent authority' (of which this may well be a case) is the source of much confusion and many lawsuits.
This is why, until I see a transcript of the conversation, I'm extremely inclined to believe this is the developer giving the best possible interpretation for their cause. I've spoken to Apple people and they are good at all this stuff in my experience, they know what they can say and what they can't, they're careful, and they're non-committal. Marketing people encouraging us to get our app on the store were still deferential to App Store Review and always reminded us they had the final say, and wouldn't be pinned down to any specifics.
The actual policy at issue is tucked away in the "Other Business Model Issues" section and uses the term "monetary gift" instead of tip:
> (vii) Apps may enable individual users to give a monetary gift to another individual without using in-app purchase, provided that (a) the gift is a completely optional choice by the giver, and (b) 100% of the funds go to the receiver of the gift. However, a gift that is connected to or associated at any point in time with receiving digital content or services must use in-app purchase.
Because the benefits of side loading on iOS are so massive that everyone will use it i.e. you can use private APIs, bypass Apple's privacy controls, implement device tracking, harvest data e.g. contacts.
It's going to be a huge transfer of power and wealth back to the likes of Meta, Epic etc
I’m happy with the one that doesn’t allow crypto crap.
Also free speech is a practical impossibility. Standard email is a free as it gets and it turns out nobody wants that because if you have completely free speech your inbox gets spammed into oblivion. Everyone draws the line somewhere.
People really like to use the slippery slope argument to mean "I took the most expansive interpretation of what someone did throwing away all context and came up with the worst possible thing they could do with that."
That's because if a bad actor was given the opportunity to make a lot of money doing the worst possible thing they could do with something someone will do that thing eventually 100% of the time, no exceptions. This isn't even an "Only siths deal in absolutes" scenario either.
There are plenty of people in the world who will do anything in this world for money, power, wealth, and control over people and they don't care who they hurt in the process of achieving that goal.
And? A bad actor that has power by fiat over you doesn't need a slippery slope to do bad things, they can just go and do them.
Case in point - Reddit's enshittification. Spez has decided that Reddit will now be a walled garden, and all you can do is take it or leave it.
Slippery slope arguments provide exactly zero guidance for as to when it is reasonable to stop going down the slope, which is what makes them utterly useless.
I replied to this comment and I'm sufficiently happy with my explanation. What's disagreeable about my statement in the context of answering the parent's question?
> People really like to use the slippery slope argument to mean "I took the most expansive interpretation of what someone did throwing away all context and came up with the worst possible thing they could do with that."
The point where you don't go down the slope is when you recognize it and you don't know what is at the end of it's long tail. The guidance is built in.
"We can't have police, this will lead to a slippery slope that will lead to a 1984 police state."
"We can't not have police, this will lead to a slippery slope that will lead to Mad Max anarchy and roaming bands of killers and warlords riding in really awesome-looking semis."
That's the entire problem with the slippery slope! Two entirely conflicting, equally compelling arguments can be construed with it, starting from the same simple question - "Should there be police? Yes/No?"
Just because the bottom of a slippery slope looks awful, or can't be seen isn't a reason to do, or not do something - because I can construct a million awful slippery slopes for any action you do, or not do.
A slippery slope argument eliminates all nuance from a question, and provides no guidance for answering it well. That's exactly what makes it a logical fallacy.
> Just because the bottom of a slippery slope looks awful, or can't be seen isn't a reason to do, or not do something - because I can construct a million awful slippery slopes for any action you do, or not do.
Who said anything about using a slippery slope for the _only_ justification to do or not do anything?
You said "Slippery slope arguments provide exactly zero guidance for as to when it is reasonable to stop going down the slope, which is what makes them utterly useless" and I disagree that they're utterly useless. Sure, it doesn't provide guidance. Why does it need to? As you go down the slippery slope you learn about the possibilities you should consider. You also learn about the possibilities you can ignore. It's a risk assessment tool and it's incredibly useful.
I'm not sure how you can deny that putting all the chips on the table, thinking about, and debating all the possibilities has no benefit when you're assessing an idea or an action to take. There's nothing wrong with _considering_ possibilities and going down the slippery slope. It's often a very useful exercise.
There's a thing some people seem to be unable to understand, and it's that... coming after bad things can be good, actually.
The thing about the "first they came" poem is that attacking the socialists, trade unionists and jews is already bad. There's a reason it doesn't start with "first they came for the murderers, but I didn't say anything because I wasn't a murderer".
The poem urges us to stand up against injustice even if it doesn't affect us directly. The poem doesn't argue that all slopes are slippery.
> There's a thing some people seem to be unable to understand, and it's that... coming after bad things can be good, actually.
Going after bad things can be good, but going after a developer who wants to be tipped in crypto isn't a bad thing. Apple being able to take down an app because it allows the user to monetarily reward a developer in the way the dev chooses *is* a bad thing.
> allows the user to monetarily reward a developer in the way the dev chooses is a bad thing
I honestly don't believe anyone can argue this in good faith. First off it's not user->developer but user->user and second "the way the dev [or user] chooses" is just silly. At the end of the day people want fiat currencies, Bitcoin (or any other crypto) in this case is clearly meant as a way to bypass the app store cut. It's not because "they really wanted bitcoin", no, they wanted a loophole. We can argue about if Apple/Google deserve 30% but pretending people actually want crypto for any reason other than avoid rules/regulations is silly.
> We can argue about if Apple/Google deserve 30% but pretending people actually want crypto for any reason other than avoid rules/regulations is silly.
> I have a PornHub subscription that uses bitcoin. There's nothing speculative about it and it's completely legitimate. I've also used to to purchase indie games instead of giving Steam/Google/Apple/Epic a cut. I'm looking for a Spotify alternative and this seems to fit the bill and I'd give OP some bitcoin to check it out.
> Just because viable usecases don't exist today isn't proof that they'll never exist and isn't a reason to stop development. If we gave up on hard problems because we didn't solve them in 15 years we wouldn't have the AI we have today.
Can you please explain to me how my use of crypto is avoiding rules/regulations? I don't wish to be silly or have pretend intentions.
Is there a rule that says all developers have to put their games on Steam or Epic and accept local currency that I'm trying to avoid? Is there a rule that says developers can't sell their games for apples? What rules/regulations would a developer avoid by accepting apples as payment for their work?
Now extend this to people who are creating videos and want to create their an iOS app that will allow them to accept apples as payment. What makes crypto special?
Apple's 30% cut is not a real rule, I'm sorry. It doesn't bring any good in the world and it doesn't help anybody except Apple. Apple and Apple's supporters care about the rule but that doesn't make it a valid rule or something the rest of us have to sit back and accept. Using crypto to avoid Apple's fees isn't hurting anybody except the poor old multi-trillion dollar company named Apple. If you want to talk about people pretending let's talk about how many people pretend like Apple is a good guy or how people pretend like Apple cares about them on an individual level. It's as delusional as walking into a strip club and walking out thinking the stripper you paid $300 for a lap dance for loves you and wants to see you again because they care about you on an individual level.
It's also fully within someone's rights to put their foot down and fight Apple on this. There's nothing wrong with that and the US legal system allows for it. You can be a bully and tell people to pick up their ball and go somewhere else when they're in "your park" but one day someone is gonna punch you in the mouth and tell you to sod off when they see you let everyone else play there with different rules. Apple is going to lose their 30% cut in the very near future, they know it, and they're terrified.
If you wanna argue that going after cryptocurrency is a bad thing, make that argument. Don't just use the poem to make a lazy slippery slope argument.
And apparently, this isn't even about cryptocurrency but Apple's normal 30% tax. If that's true, then it means that the lazy slippery slope argument is even less applicable.
It's absolutely wild to me to see someone take a poem about the genocide of millions of people and apply it to an app being banned from a digital store over cryptocurrency tipping.
You’re saying that Bitcoin is “crypto crap”, or just talking in general?
And regarding the “free speech” topic, you’re saying that’s ok not finding new censorship resistant solution because essentially censorship is ok?
Just asking to better understand the underlying knowledge on the topic before putting myself into this valley of tears.
> if you have completely free speech your inbox gets spammed into oblivion.
Don't know for your provider, but on Gmail, I click on Spam and there are all there. It's not censorship, it's sorting. I usually go see them once a month, just in case something got badly sorted (it's also quite entertaining to see the scams attempts).
In what world is it censorship to choose to read something or not too? It may be censorship for sure that something is blocked (and still can be argued upon), but choosing not to read crap is not censorship, just like choosing not to read every scientific papers in the world is not censorship…
I mean anyone who would work on or with a google platform certainly isn’t. They’re the least cypherpunk, most bland and corporate, evil tech corp I can think of that makes consumer hardware outside of MAYBE Meta.
It's known that iOS is the best platform to make money and targeting iOS makes more sense because of that. They probably have an idea of how much they're willing to spend to fight Apple on this because if they win it will be huge for them and they stand to make more than releasing on Android. This is also putting them directly into the news and will reach those Android people so it almost doubles as a genius marketing campaign to fight Apple. I highly doubt they see all this as a waste of money and time and I can see them fighting Apple until they are forced to release an Android app to recoup the money they've lost.
Android users are notorious for not spending money (IIRC Apple users spend double the amount of money on subscriptions vs Android users) and it's unlikely Android users would tip content creators, or even watch the content they're putting out there.
Android (more strictly, AOSP) is an open source linux based operating system that can be used standalone with no google shenanigans whatsoever. I don't like google either, but at least I can use whatever software I want on my machine. To say android is as restrictive or more restrictive than Apple is to be disconnected from reality. To say that using Android is less cyberpunk than using a completely vertically integrated system like the iPhone with it's thousand dollar accessories because "evilcorp" is absurd.
Sure. It’s nice to have. I absolutely give google (limited) props for ASOP. Tho it’s “open” in mostly the “you can see & download the code” sense, not the “we’re open to contributors from the community” sense, but still… it’s great they did that.
But it doesn’t make using the “open” software that’s completely controlled by the giant corporate empire any more “cypherpunk”, does it?
A little more, yes. Of course, ideally, I'd love a BSD mobile operating system that runs TUI applications I made myself. But it's a world of compromise, so I compromise.
From my phone (in Minecraft), I run an IPFS node, I communicate over distributed encrypted channels, I share files over BitTorrent, I probe networks, I zap people on nostr, I do all sorts of things the big powers would rather me not be doing, even though they aren't necessarily illegal. I can run literally any sort of software that I like, period, with nobody's permission or even knowledge of the fact. In computing, I take into consideration absolutely nothing that these corporations would prefer that I do. That's pretty cypherpunk, even if I do it all without google explicitly giving me an AMOLED black theme in their operating system. I use one of those too anyway.
This is what happens when you give a single company monopoly over your computing. I know there's a lot of apple fans around here, but I think it's largely social proof, apple products are jewelry in my eyes. Why anyone would develop for such an unpredicrably restrictive platform is beyond me. Apple is just too controlled for my taste. If I developed mobile apps I wouldn't even try to build an iPhone version.
I can't believe the EU, which has fined Microsoft because of having IE as the default browser, is OK with Apple having a total walled garden in iOS. Which by the way only has one "browser", because other browsers are forced to use the safari engine.
Saying "US companies are not allowed to buy EU" is lower quality IMO. Not being allowed to do things has never stopped people from doing things and it isn't adding to the discussion.
At least this comment is pointing out how ridiculous it is to say something isn't allowed as a justification for why it will never happen.
Coming to the conclusion that something can't happen because there exists a law that forbids it seems like it requires some faith in a system that I'm not willing to accept.
Unlike a lot of antitrust action I see, the DMA has teeth. Up to 20% of global revenue per infraction. I'm not worried Apple is going to give up the entire market, and I know that that fine is enough to force compliance. So yes, I have a lot of faith in this system.
There a very simple solution for this: "Grandma Mode." If you're worried about your grandma being scammed, or your grandma is still cognisant of her surroundings, you can put her on Grandma Mode. I don't think all of us should be on Grandma Mode permanently so that your grandma is protected from hypothetical scammers.
They’re not even in the same league as what MS was doing. At the time of the EU vs MS suit they had a 91% market share, and had only recently come down from a fraction over 95%
THAT is why the EU took action. Apple isn’t in a monopoly position in phones at all, they’re not even the dominant OS.
What they are, is the one that makes the most money.
As far as EU jurisdiction goes the only stat that matters is the EU. If Apple had 100% of market share in the US, the EU would still have no governing power.
Based off what I found through a quick search, in Q4 2022 Apple has 29% of smartphone shipment and they have about 38% of mobile OS share. Not tiny, but not dominating the market. Back when Microsoft was being prosecuted, they had >95% of desktop OS share, approaching 99% in some places, and they were accused of leveraging that to muscle out paid-for software vendors that sold directly competing software (both operating systems through exclusivity agreements with OEMs and application software on Windows).
This is missing context: Microsoft made their browser free at a time when Netscape cost $49.
Apple giving away Safari for free at a time when all major web browsers are free is different. Sure, Apple might benefit from being the default but Spotify and Pandora, which compete with Apple Music, are both still in Apple's app store.
Why the quotes? Apps bundling their own outdated web views using old versions of Chromium or WebKit are a legitimate security threat. By forcing every web view to use the fully up to date system bundled one, you automatically eliminate dozens of security vulnerabilities.
Nothing forces anyone to buy an iPhone. They don’t even have a majority of market share. In the late 90s-2000s, Microsoft actually held a monopoly on PCs. Smartphones on the other hand are a very healthy duopoly with diversity and cross pollination of ideas.
Three companies have wall gardens for game consoles and nobody cares about that. Those three companies own the entire console market. There's no alternative.
Why doesn't the EU do something about that? Why is Apple an exception?
This comment makes it sound like Apple shouldn't be forced to open up their hardware, but the better conclusion is that game consoles should be forced to open up their hardware. This is (allegedly) Hacker News, we should be all for giving people more control over the devices they (allegedly) own.
Just don’t buy closed devices if that’s what you want. There’s no shortage of open devices available to buy.
Complaining about iPhones and game consoles being closed is like complaining that your Honda Civic isn’t good at off-roading and won’t tow your horse trailer.
> There’s no shortage of open devices available to buy.
I'd like an open device that supports iMessage and Facetime.
I don't understand why I should have to give up all the iOS software that I really like just because I want to run one app on my device that Apple doesn't allow.
"Walled gardens" when MS has a policy of porting all their games to Windows and also offers an official way for users to run custom software on the device.
Agreed on the other two though, both should also be forced to open up.
Remember: everything you blame Apple of also applies to Sony (Playstation) and Microsoft (Xbox).
Exact same thing.
A phone isn't a "general computing device" like a PC any more than a gaming console is. So if Apple has to allow 3rd party stuff on their phones, it must be so for PS and Xbox too.
Good, I don't know why I should have a problem with that?
Though I disagree that a phone is not a 'general computing device' moreso than a gaming console is, it is hard to come up with a legally-clear definition of one.
Yeah, a phone is definitely a "general computing device", while a video console arguably is not. But considering that you can watch Youtube on a Nintendo Switch, I think they should maybe be considered "general computing devices" as well.
How so, the last two generations of Xbox and PS consoles have been pretty much off-the-shelf hardware.
The Xbox and PS5 are literally using an AMD Zen2 CPU and an AMD GPU, nothing weirdly custom like the PS3's "emotion engine".
There's no reason they couldn't run a standard Linux or even Windows. They have HDMI ports, USB and everything just like a normal PC. Even the PS3 with it's super weird processing system had a _native_ Linux version provided by Sony[0].
Why aren't people up in arms insisting that Microsoft and Sony allow us to install Linux on "our hardware", but are so very pressed when they can't do that with a phone? Why is a console walled garden perfectly fine, but on a phone it's anathema? Are people still thinking of the NES when they hear "console"?
[0] Yes, it was there to dodge import taxes, but still =)
It's pretty clear when you look at both how these devices are used, and how they are marketed, that there is a difference between the products' purpose.
However you are right, it is hard to make an unambiguous distinction, so I am with you - consoles should also be forcibly opened up. I do strongly hold the philosophical view that if you own any computing device you, as the owner should have absolute control of what that device trusts as far as any cryptographic 'locks' are concerned. The place where this seems to have both a) the largest negative impact on the market and b) the best chance of people caring and doing something about it, seems to be with mobile computing, so that is where the voice are the loudest, but personally at least, I hold the same view about any device.
Our society has long held that reverse engineering is perfectly acceptable when it comes to interoperability / competition, even if the OEM doesn't appreciate it. Now, we have progressed technologically to the point that an OEM can literally prevent any reasonable manner of that, if they want to. I just don't think our laws / society have really caught up with that fact yet, but for me it follows directly from the reasoning behind allowing reverse engineering that we shouldn't allow this.
So I don't know why you keep bringing this up as if it is a counterpoint. Yes, it's a similar situation, and yes anything we do about Apple should apply to Sony as well.
A bunch of bureaucrats somehow outsmarting one of the most well resourced and talented machineries out there is the thing I am skeptical about. The two systems are not equal by a long shot.
While I personally agree with your latter sentiment, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines bureaucrat to be simply, “a member of a bureaucracy”. Where the top definition of bureaucracy is:
A government is by definition a bureaucracy, but so is any private corporation. Any organization of sufficient size becomes one out of necessity. Any time you have a bunch of people together and you need to establish any kind of pattern for how things get done, you have a bureaucracy.
What is funny is the way people use the word derisively, as if bureaucracy is inherently evil in some way. Bureaucracy is like math, it is netiehr good nor bad, it simply is. Like math, it can be used to do good or bad things.
Yes, domain names have existed since forever, but I don't see how crypto domain names are any different or changes anything.
Does a domain name need a token attached to the service in order to operate?
I would say it is still a scam as it is airdropping ENS tokens that were minted out of thin air and insiders pump and dumping the token to make a profit.
You can't do that illegal stuff with traditional domain names.
The name itself is the non-fungible token. You just pick your own ENS name and buy it from the system, much like DNS, though they did add a bit of complexity in an attempt to limit name squatting. (ENS later airdropped a fungible token used for things like voting rights, since this is meant to be a decentralized project and there's no reliable way on Ethereum to identify individual people for voting purposes.)
Ethereum is essentially a database, so certainly centralized databases can do similar things. The point is to do them with decentralization, openness, censorship resistance, and an economic model where users pay the expenses as they go. You may or may not think those things are valuable, but some people do; Ethereum and similar projects fill that niche.
AFAIU the token is only needed in case you want to participate in the voting of governance events, related to the roadmap of the ENS project. You don't need ENS tokens to register or use ENS domains.
IMO the token might be an illegal security indeed; and if that's the case I hope the SEC crushes them. But in the meantime I'll be using ENS names happily as a user and watch the events with popcorn.
> but I don't see how crypto domain names are any different or changes anything.
It will prevent that a big corp with the court on their side redirect your domain-bought-in-a-complete-legit way to them.
"It will prevent that a big corp with the court on their side redirect your domain-bought-in-a-complete-legit way to them."
No, it will absolutely not. It does not matter what method of accounting or voting you use, you will be made to comply with a court order. If you don't comply, you're going to prison.
If the domain is bought anonymously, the court cannot notify the buyer; not to mention jurisdiction issues. Also, courts cannot reverse blockchain transactions.
Sometime I'd like to see a court rule on the SEC's theory that a token airdropped to people who made no actual financial investment nevertheless passes the "investment of money" clause of the Howey test.
Could you elaborate? There are a lot of proposed NFT usecases that sound superficially useful (e.g. magically preventing secondary sales of event tickets), but don't actually solve any real problems when you think about it properly.
In the case of shipping it was about providing a cryptographically verifiable chain of custody for each shipment.
It’s just a cryptographic enhancement of existing systems, but a nice use of the tech (standardized rather than proprietary too).
One company also used smart contracts to update other systems & such automatically. It was quite a nice system, crypto-based or not.
Personally, as a huge crypto skeptic (and I have worked in the space), I think this kind of use has much more long term utility than the gold rush value stores.
The ticket thing you mention could be useful, but I’ve never seen an implementation that was worth any company (let alone Ticketmaster) bothering with. It “solves” a mostly solved problem.
The use case that I am most familiar with (just from reading about) was to allow artists to sell digital work derived real work, and have them benefit financially from any resale of that digital work. Not sure if there's a non-NFT way to accomplish the same.
Now that the jpeg craze is dead, capital should be allocating itself towards more virtuous NFT use cases, should it not? That's where economic activity in an efficient market would move towards.
The marketplace decides what the purpose is. The use case people wanted was an easy way to launder real money into jpegs of arbitrarily set ETH values. Now that the PPP loan and ZIRP era is over, the bottom has fallen out of NFTs entirely. NBA Top Shot was one of the few non-jpeg early succes stories but that's flamed out as well.
It really isn't, because if you either don't trust the sender or the shipping company, then your real issue is that the shipment or its contents get stolen, not that the shipping information is wrong.
Once again, crypto is trying to solve problems that don't actually exist while completely failing to address the ones that do.
> then your real issue is that the shipment or its contents get stolen
No, the chain-of-provenance use-case is to prevent people from being able to sell grey-market products while claiming that they're official products. E.g. selling iPhones built out of reconstituted parts from iPhones that were pickpocketed from their owners and then scrapped for parts. (Yes, this is a big issue — Google "my stolen phone ended up in shenzhen" and you'll get a ton of news stories.)
If you (or a retailer) forces the retailer (wholesaler) to provide a chain of digital signatures demonstrating each hand-off of the parts all the way back to the factory that produced them, then you implicitly reject any assemblage of parts where some of the parts were black-market-sourced. Which allows for legitimate refurbishing using legitimately acquired parts (i.e. it doesn't put the Shenzhen phone-repair stores themselves out of business); but destroys the demand for the electronics "chop shops" these stores currently sometimes order parts from.
In this case, a "blockchain" here is an open-public-participation multiparty ledger that tracks ownership of physical goods; with a digital signature inherent to each transfer of the digital asset representing the physical good, which should be done at time of transfer of physical goods. Unlike other use-cases, you really can't simplify the solution — to enable this use-case, you need a system with pretty much all the properties of a blockchain.
This might be simplistic or ignorant - but does the essential core of crypto boil down to having a public trust ledger? Could a use case of crypto (and NFTs) be a replacement for PGP?
This whole signing a physical product to prove it's official kind of sounds like PGP but I only have a 10000 foot view and don't know much about PGP other than you sign stuff and people can cryptographically verify that you actually signed it.
Optional follow-up because I'm curious: how do you actually track that the physical thing wasn't modified or tampered with in practice? Couldn't a bad actor repair a broken RAM chip with their own parts and it would still be officially signed? Or does it rely on the owner invalidating their device, saying their phone is broken, and then all the parts in the phone get flagged as broken?
Doesn’t have to be public (though that’s desirable) but it does have to be accessible by any user to really have value.
So you could have a ledger that was only accessible to… say members/subscribers/users of a service. As long as everyone involved can see it, it serves the purpose.
> does the essential core of crypto boil down to having a public trust ledger?
A blockchain is a public trust ledger that is uncensorable because everyone who wants to can get both a copy of a random sampling of the messages pushed to it (by p2p node gossip of the txpool) and then also a copy of the canonical state (by p2p gossip of the chain-head; the ability of nodes to fetch previous blocks by content-hash; and the ability of all nodes to independently compute block validity and canonicity.) But this uncensorability means that blockchains must solve for the problem of DoS spam attacks, that would seek to fill the chain with noise messages, to the point that it bloats to an impractical-to-store size.
That's why blockchains [that have distributed posting authority, rather than being de-facto centralized "Proof of Authority" systems] always "have" (but not "are") some form of digital money built into them. The digital money is there to be what the old proposals for eliminating email spam called an "eStamp" — a cost for posting your signed messages/transactions that regular users can afford to pay, but spammers cannot.
Without the "eStamps", you just have an unworkable, ever-growing pool of spam noise.
If you choose to eliminate the noise by only keeping the messages that nodes care about store-and-forwarding (such that you lose messages when their originator goes offline, unless at least one other node has accessed them), then rather than a blockchain, you get a system like Freenet.
If you choose to eliminate the noise by combining store-and-forward with TTLs, with push-based probabilistic gossip, then you get the original Usenet numbers groups and SMTP anonymous remailers that presaged blockchains, and were invented by roughly the same group of people (the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk s), being used to anonymously distribute PGP-signed and encrypted payloads in much the same way that blockchains are currently used to anonymously distribute transactions.
> Couldn't a bad actor repair a broken RAM chip with their own parts and it would still be officially signed?
No, because the point is that you get to know who sold them the RAM chips that went into the device, because the RAM chip vendor digitally signed the sale of those chips to them, and their repair job "consumes" that item in their own digital inventory to convert one manifest (representing all the parts in a phone with bad RAM) into another manifest (representing all the parts in a phone with good RAM.) The provenance of the replaced RAM chips "travels within" the provenance of the repaired phone. It's a tree of component sourcing, not just a log of repairs.
> No, because the point is that you get to know who sold them the RAM chips that went into the device, because the RAM chip vendor digitally signed the sale of those chips to them, and their repair job "consumes" that item in their own digital inventory to convert one manifest (representing all the parts in a phone with bad RAM) into another manifest (representing all the parts in a phone with good RAM.) The provenance of the replaced RAM chips "travels within" the provenance of the repaired phone. It's a tree of component sourcing, not just a log of repairs.
Thank you and apologies for all the questions! I'm very fascinated by this but not sure where to start. Is this part of the chain-of-provenance you spoke about?
Also wondering if you have anything helpful to share to learn more. I'm really curious about how the "consume" part works in practice. I was trying to get at a situation where someone fixes the RAM but doesn't update the inventory? Or if you lost your phone, do you have to report it lost to invalidate the manifest? I'm also struggling to imagine what happens when the RAM goes bad? Does that phone with bad RAM get a new signature? How does the phone turn from a phone that works into a phone with bad RAM digitally?
"No, because the point is that you get to know who sold them the RAM chips that went into the device, because the RAM chip vendor digitally signed the sale of those chips to them, and their repair job "consumes" that item in their own digital inventory to convert one manifest (representing all the parts in a phone with bad RAM) into another manifest (representing all the parts in a phone with good RAM.) The provenance of the replaced RAM chips "travels within" the provenance of the repaired phone. It's a tree of component sourcing, not just a log of repairs."
Which they only do if they are already trustworthy. I don't trust them. At any point in the chain, a vendor/manufacturer can put whatever garbage they want on the chain because the chain can't interact with the real world, and for that reason, blockchain solves absolutely nothing in the space of supply-chain management.
Blockchain doesn't solve any of that. It's just coming back to the oracle issue. I still have to trust people putting stuff into the chain, and I don't have any reason to just because you say blockchain.
Hashing and hash stores are not unique, or particularly original, so really this is just applying common crypto tooling/standards to an existing problem.
Regulatory oversight in addition to Apple looking for its cut is a good reason why this would have been blocked anyway. Few things out there are more regulated than the transfer of money, something the crypto economy is desperately trying to avoid.
Anything else you want banned just because you don't like it authoritarian? If you don't like it just don't use it. You're financially privileged, just stick to your transactions your bank let you do and let other people do what they want.
The problem with letting people do what they want, is that you will inevitably have bad actors ruining things for the rest of us.
That's where regulation comes in, where government comes in, where centralization comes in.
Do you seriously believe, that if Bitcoin becomes the global currency, that crime won't skyrocket due to people getting robbed relentlessly? You just need the PK dawg, and it's very easy to tell if you were told the truth - access to the wallet opens up.
I think you are just naive about the nature of mankind. We need rules, structure and order - the key question, is how do we create the environment that allows enough structure to not interfere with the creative process to allow us to continue growing and developing new technology?
Bitcoiners have a sad, yet fascinating trend to talk about nothing but Bitcoin. Take a look at your comment history.
You've said a lot without making any real points there.
How does allowing people to send small tipping amounts of Bitcoin for fun from their hot wallet mean "bad actors ruining things for the rest of us"?
>Do you seriously believe, that if Bitcoin becomes the global currency, that crime won't skyrocket due to people getting robbed relentlessly? You just need the PK dawg, and it's very easy to tell if you were told the truth - access to the wallet opens up.
And if people have geographically distributed multi-sig cold storage for the bulk of their wealth? Will they be getting "robbed relentlessly"? If you follow best practice and take self custody seriously you'll be fine so no I don't seriously believe people would be robbed relentlessly.
So I'll ask you too, what's your problem with other people sending small amounts of money P2P in a fun way to each other in a currency they prefer? Just don't use it if you don't like it.
>Bitcoiners have a sad, yet fascinating trend to talk about nothing but Bitcoin. Take a look at your comment history.
Again, what's your point? I'm stirred to reply to fiat brained financial authoritarianism, that's what I find weird and sad.
Considering the App Store is 99% adwall trash and subscription scam apps I’d say if you hate Bitcoin you’d have to admit it’s right at home with the rest of the content there.
And? This is as expected as you can get, Apple does not allow you to by pass them for payment. Next thing you know, the dev will have a rule on its website enabling certain features once you tipped, Apple isn’t gonna wait till that happens
> Apps may use in-app purchase currencies to enable customers to “tip” the developer or digital content providers in the app.
Apple lists the limited scenarios where alternative purchase methods can be used and this one is not included. Since they mention it in the guidelines it's clearly something they are aware of.
You may disagree with Apple's policy, but bigger companies have fought this battle and lost. Intentionally (or unintentionally) misreading the guidelines isn't going to hold water on appeal.