[HN Gopher] Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let u...
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Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let users
authenticate NFTs
Author : jbegley
Score : 138 points
Date : 2021-09-23 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| chippy wrote:
| Anyone else not really suprised. It's like they were actively in
| search of sharks to jump over for years. The question we should
| be asking is, what's next or why? I think this is for Only Fans
| uber-for-porn competition.
|
| If only a massive corporation could think beyond their wallet
| which may people put next to their second favourite organs!
| pcbro141 wrote:
| Plenty of people tip creators on YouTube (SuperChats) and
| Patreon for things that have nothing to do with porn or sex at
| all.
| seibelj wrote:
| HN will never understand crypto / blockchain. Bitcoin and NFTs
| are amazing tools with huge potential for monetization of all
| sorts of digital goods. It has never been a better time to be a
| digital artist and earn a living.
|
| The lack of imagination and "get off my lawn" around here is
| absurd.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post unsubstantive defensive stuff about the
| community. I realize it's frustrating to hold a minority view
| (believe me, I understand) but all a comment like this does
| is add bile, which helps nothing.
|
| Two productive choices are: (1) take up the cross of
| patiently and respectfully explaining what you believe to be
| the better information; or (2) chalk it up to people being
| wrong on the internet and just don't post.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| seibelj wrote:
| Sorry dang I have patiently defended crypto / blockchain
| for years and taken all the downvotes. Twitter announces
| full integration and it's still all negativity. Not sure
| what success would be anymore to convince the HN community.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| NFTs solve the problem of digital theft. It's just...that's
| not really an issue with the sort of digital goods that can
| use NFTs. Nor do most people want to download a whole
| blockchain for every marketplace they want to participate in
| (and then continue participating in to facilitate
| transactions).
| corobo wrote:
| How's the eco status on NFTs these days? I know Bitcoin is
| still trying to cook the Earth but have they fixed NFTs yet?
|
| My only "get off my lawn" take on it
|
| Also it all seems to be digitally drawn portrait templates
| with different accessories on (eg robot heads). I have no
| idea if they sell but someone's giving Twitter a bunch of
| money to shove those in my face haha. I'll put that one down
| to not getting it, I never got into pokemon cards etc either
| DennisP wrote:
| Most NFTs are on Ethereum. That has pretty high energy
| usage for now, but is on track to eliminate it almost
| entirely in Q1 next year.
| BTBurke wrote:
| Here's my question - NYT could charge me $5 and then deduct
| from my balance on a per-article basis.
|
| Do we need crypto to enable those transactions? If
| micropayments made sense, why haven't they caught on already
| with the payment infrastructure 99% of people already have?
| Micropayments via crypto are just payment with extra steps.
|
| I'm not for/against either one. I'd just like to see a
| coherent argument against the idea that crypto is a solution
| looking for a problem.
| wskinner wrote:
| Most of the world does not have access to cheap and easy
| dollar-denominated payments. Using Bitcoin for this
| simplifies the implementation for Twitter, and reduces
| fees.
| mdoms wrote:
| Most of the world has credit and debit cards. Or, at
| least, most of the world where people have enough
| disposable income to shell out for NYT articles. I don't
| live in a country that deals in USD but I have a debit
| card and very often buy services denominated in USD.
| DylanBohlender wrote:
| Fees and chargebacks are the ones that usually come to
| mind. Oftentimes major credit card provider networks set a
| "minimum" interchange fee to disincentivize small
| transactions (a chargeback on a ten-cent transaction is
| often not worth the squeeze from a support/processing
| perspective).
|
| Basically all major payment networks are facilitated by a
| middleman of some sort, and that middleman entity usually
| has operational costs that disincentivize them from
| offering micropayments.
|
| Your point about a "balance" lands though - nothing stops
| NYT from making one "big" charge and then deducting from it
| other than consumer psychology (paying $10 up front can
| feel different than paying $0.05 at a time, for example).
| orf wrote:
| Imagine a world where not everyone used the dollar. Then
| imagine having to support different currencies and ensuring
| that your price per article stayed in line with currency
| fluctuations.
| mdoms wrote:
| Why would you have to support different currencies?
| imtringued wrote:
| Youtube has an international audience.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Translate the payments to some abstract credits with
| consistent rate across currencies. Then just forex the
| money received to euros or dollars or what ever your
| local currency is.
|
| Actually, there is already a massive platform that does
| this sort of thing with what really are microtransactions
| too and even in local currencies, namely Steam.
| orf wrote:
| Yep, and I bet that's non trivial and takes a lot of
| resources to maintain. Selling games is also their core
| business.
|
| Seems like a cryptocurrency fits nicely into "abstract
| credits with a consistent rate across currencies".
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| I think the answer looks different when you talk about NYT
| (a large organization most of us probably trust to not
| steal) vs smaller websites/blogs. I wouldn't pre-pay some
| no-name blogger $5 and trust them to charge me properly.
|
| With the pre-pay model, you may even end up with each site
| dictating it's own payment terms, which would naturally
| create opportunities for scammy terms that users don't
| understand until their money is gone.
|
| A tipping model incentivized quality content and keeps
| funds under the user's control.
|
| In this specific case, it looks like some Strike-related
| company will have custody of funds, which does defeat the
| purpose of using a decentralized payment method.
| joelbondurant wrote:
| HN is for communist betacuck soy bois.
| markkat wrote:
| It's really consistent and strange considering the ostensive
| nature of the site.
| astoor wrote:
| The problem is that HN actually _does_ understand crypto and
| blockchain. The layperson might believe the myth that NFTs,
| for example, are "amazing tools with huge potential for
| monetization of all sorts of digital goods", but most of HN
| will know the reality - you are "buying" nothing more than a
| URL in a JSON file (i.e. no legal ownership of anything),
| almost all artists will lose money (there are over 20M
| listings on OpenSea and almost every one of those will not
| sell or sell at a loss to the artist given all the costs in
| making a listing), and most "investors" will too (unless they
| are one of the rings of anonymous bidders who collaborate to
| artificially inflate the price of their selected "artists").
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| Art is one application of NFTs, but NFTs are not
| specifically made to represent digital art. Gods Unchained
| cards are a much better use case since there is built-in
| utility.
|
| Artists can also mint on ImmutableX without paying any fee
| at all.
| rjknight wrote:
| > you are "buying" nothing more than a URL in a JSON file
| (i.e. no legal ownership of anything),
|
| This is wrong. I can see why you think it, but it is wrong.
|
| The URL in the JSON file is free, as is the artwork that it
| points to. It's very hard to restrict the copying of
| digital artworks anyway, so why bother trying to?
|
| The person buying the NFT is not "buying a URL". This
| phrase doesn't even mean anything! What they are buying is
| control of a record on the blockchain, which (with some
| slight hand-waving) contains a list of the signatures of
| the previous owners, including the original creator or
| their agent. While it is trivial to copy a JPEG, it is not
| at all trivial to copy the list of signatures from one part
| of a blockchain to another, unless you happen to have the
| private keys of all of the previous owners.
|
| As such, the JPEG is abundant but the record is scarce.
| This mirrors the physical world, in which Picasso prints
| are abundant but signed originals are rare and hard to
| copy. What you're paying for is the uniqueness of the
| signature, not the ability to look at the content of the
| artwork, which you can probably already do for free on the
| internet.
|
| "No legal ownership of anything" is not really true. You do
| legally own the blockchain record! You can decide whether
| to sell it or keep it, and you can generally dispose of it
| as you would with any other property. You don't legally own
| the copyright of the artwork, but as we've already
| established, that copyright probably isn't worth very much.
|
| Your other statements may be perfectly accurate - I can't
| imagine 20M artists on OpenSea all turning a profit, and I
| imagine that a lot of the investors are likely to lose some
| money too. I just don't think that this has anything to do
| with faulty assumptions about how NFTs work.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _The person buying the NFT is not "buying a URL". This
| phrase doesn't even mean anything!_
|
| "Buying a URL" (a pointer to a thing) means more than
| "buying a blockchain record" (a pointer to a pointer to a
| thing).
|
| What is the value of a blockchain record whose URL no
| longer works, or has been changed to point to something
| worth nothing?
| rjknight wrote:
| So, what we have is the artwork. The artwork, as a
| digital artifact, continues to exist as long as there is
| a copy of it anywhere. A copy that was hosted at a
| particular URL may cease to exist, though.
|
| "Buying a URL" doesn't make sense because there's no
| transfer of rights. I already have the URL! There's no
| meaningful mechanism by which I can take control of the
| URL, and there are no rights over the URL that anyone can
| sell to me. The reason people mock the idea of "buying a
| URL" is because they rightly observe that it doesn't make
| sense.
|
| The value of the record is not directly related to the
| URL. The value of the record is that it has the artist's
| signature on it (or the signature of someone I believe to
| be the artist, or the artist's designated agent; fraud is
| definitely possible here!). Notably, the URL does not
| have the artist's signature on it (how could it? This
| also does not make sense as an idea). The artwork pointed
| to by the URL might or might not have the artist's
| signature on it, but if it does then the signature is
| easily copyable, because the image itself is easily
| copyable.
|
| The thing that is not easily copyable is the blockchain
| record. This is because it contains an encrypted
| transaction signed by the artist's key, and I can't make
| a duplicate of this unless I have the artist's private
| key.
|
| If I'm buying an NFT, I'm doing it because I think the
| artwork is going to be popular or important in some way.
| If this is true, there are going to be _many_ copies of
| it. I don 't really care about what happens to any single
| copy, even if it's the copy that was presented as the
| reference copy at the time I bought the NFT. If I'm truly
| concerned that the image might disappear entirely, I will
| download a copy to my laptop and save some backups. If it
| turns out that the thing I bought was so unpopular and
| unimportant that months later nobody anywhere saved a
| copy of it, then I suppose that sucks for me.
| dvt wrote:
| > You do legally own the blockchain record!
|
| No you don't. In fact, I don't think NFT ownership has
| been litigated in any court of law (yet). The deed/title
| analogy is pretty good. But what makes a deed a deed is
| that it has the force of the law behind it. NFTs do not.
| rjknight wrote:
| This might depend on your jurisdiction, but in general
| legal systems are quite lazy: if it walks like a duck and
| quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If it's something that I
| have exclusive control over, and I paid someone else
| money for that exclusive control, then it's my property.
| There doesn't need to be a written contract or a deed,
| any more than there needs to be a written contract or a
| deed for me to sell you, say, my bicycle. If I agree to
| accept payment, and you provide payment and I provide you
| with the bicycle, there is no sense in which you are not
| now the owner of the bicycle.
|
| The crypto space does have an unfortunate history with a
| kind of legal mysticism, in which people ignore legal
| practice in favour of attempts to re-derive everything
| from half-remembered Locke, or something from Nick
| Szabo's blog, or some weird way of doing things that
| turns out to be an elaborate attempt to evade securities
| law rather than any actual legal requirement for sale of
| property. The term "smart contract" takes this tendency
| and multiplies it. Ignore this stuff and focus on simple
| principles: party A paid party B for something that party
| A was indeed able to transfer to party B in return for
| the agreed payment. Unless there was an agreement
| specifying otherwise, B has just acquired some property
| from A.
| dropnerd wrote:
| don't think any of these assertions capture the
| possibilities of the space
|
| > no legal ownership
|
| the market is moving towards licensing the image to the nft
| owner or dispensing with restrictive licenses altogether
|
| > artists will lose money
|
| opensea's lazy minting means that you don't have to pay
| until you sell
|
| > investors will lose money
|
| it's not a zero-sum system
| lottin wrote:
| Indeed, the mainstream media talks about NFTs as if they
| were property titles, completely misleading the public into
| thinking NFTs are something they are not. A lot of people
| also think Bitcoin spends a lot of electricity because it
| needs to do super complicated calculations. When you
| explain them how bitcoin actually works they usually can't
| believe it. The misinformation floating around with regards
| to cryptocurrencies is staggering.
| akgoel wrote:
| The Diablo 3 real-money auction house was better implemented
| than most NFT schemes. At least that involved an actual
| transfer of virtual goods.
| JCVI-syn10 wrote:
| What's an "actual" transfer of a "virtual" good?
|
| When an NFT is sold a unit of data stored on a digital
| ledger is transferred. When a D3 item was sold a unit of
| data stored on in the database was transferred. Why are
| those meaningfully different?
| almostkorean wrote:
| I don't understand OPs point, but the meaningful
| difference is that the digital ledger is decentralized.
| If Blizzard shuts down D3, your virtual goods are gone
| forever. NFTs and ownership of NFTs live as long as the
| blockchain lives
| frazbin wrote:
| Thanks for asking! The difference is that Diablo 3
| represents 10E6~ dev hours invested into making a fun
| game, and items make it more fun. The items are a kind of
| 'share' in the total fun of the game. Now if we imagine
| NFTing the Diablo 3 item system, that's interesting.
|
| Mostly what's interesting about it is why it hasn't
| happened. I've noticed that actors in public blockchain
| ecosystems VERY strongly seek 'incentive wells' i.e.
| locally maximized extraction mechanisms. This might be a
| property of certain general public-ledger economic
| systems, because it sure comes up a lot. Basically the
| law is: as long as a blockchain/Dapp/pattern makes money,
| the people writing it won't improvements to it outside
| the core extractive mechanic; at least not without some
| rare external inputs, which inputs are surprisingly rare
| in practice.
|
| So if your application is on an incentive hill from this
| perspective, you know it will never get written.
|
| The Diablo 3 Dapp won't get written by Blizzard because
| it lies on an incentive hill from blizzard's perspective,
| simply because: assets would (1) increase item prices due
| to fees and (2) Blizzard would be cut out as a middleman
| for at least some transactions.
|
| Only once you find public-ledger tech that fixes those
| incentives (and probably other incentives I've missed)
| will you start to see interesting and complex distributed
| applications
| clpm4j wrote:
| It's a spectrum of course. Some people thoroughly understand
| it and still think it's rather boring or dumb. Some people
| thoroughly understand it and, like yourself, think it's a
| revolutionary game changer. And most people don't understand
| it and either (a) think it's dumb and downvote it, or (b)
| think it's awesome and are fanatical about it.
|
| (edit: spelling)
| seany wrote:
| Would love to see more of this stuff done with privacy coins
| instead.
| aazaa wrote:
| > Strike works in all US states except New York and Hawaii, and
| the country of El Salvador.
|
| That's odd, because Strike is the company on which El Salvador's
| Bitcoin experiment is based.
|
| https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/what-is-strike-E...
|
| Also, this article has a completely different take:
|
| > A video was released on Thursday of Jack Mallers demonstrating
| the service with the firm's integration of the Strike API. In the
| video Mallers sent Bitcoin from Chicago to El Salvador via
| Twitter.
|
| https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/jack-dorsey-twitter-roll...
|
| What am I missing?
| neb_b wrote:
| Confusing sentence. It could be rewritten as
|
| "Strike works in El Salvador and all US states except New York
| and Hawaii"
| babyshake wrote:
| Will Twitter offer APIs to do things like allow a user to
| authenticate to allow an app or service to track tips they
| receive? I haven't seen any information about this.
| jjnoakes wrote:
| This (this specific news as well as crypto in general) still
| feels like externalizing a fairly important cost - the energy
| usage required to keep this world-wide distributed ledger going.
|
| Change my mind?
| JonathanBeuys wrote:
| Bitcoin's energy consumption depends on mining revenue.
| Currently the main component of mining revenue is block reward.
| Block reward will go to zero over time. How much energy Bitcoin
| will use then is not known today. It is a new experiment that
| mankind is performing for the first time.
|
| The old financial system is not very efficient. In the USA
| alone, millions of people work in the finance sector.
| Automating those tasks via crypto systems might save a lot of
| energy.
|
| There is a good chance that Bitcoin's energy usage will be
| completely solar based in the long run.
| CJefferson wrote:
| The bits of the old financial system which duplicate bitcoin
| (doing simply electronic transactions) are very efficient.
|
| I see no reason all the other stuff wouldn't still be around
| in a world where bitcoin replaced the dollar.
|
| Also, there is no way bitcoin can come close to scaling to
| even a tiny fraction of the transactions which happen every
| day.
| ulzeraj wrote:
| > The bits of the old financial system which duplicate
| bitcoin (doing simply electronic transactions) are very
| efficient.
|
| Its all very efficient until Mastercard and Visa decide
| that your line of business should not be allowed to receive
| money and they blacklist you and your descendants from the
| financial system forever.
| JonathanBeuys wrote:
| Bitcoin does not only do transactions. It has a smart
| contract language which allows more and more types of smart
| contracts all the time. (Yes, Bitcoin is not static as many
| people think).
|
| The old system is not at all efficient for transactions.
| Vendors hate credit cards for a reason. Visa alone made 20
| Billion Dollars in revenue last year for a reason.
|
| Bitcoin can scale infinitely via the Lightning Network.
| mdoms wrote:
| Visa is "inefficient" because they supply many many more
| services than simply transacting. Dispute resolution,
| fraud detection, customer service, card issuing, and on
| and on. You know, all of this stuff we'll have to build
| from scratch for Bitcoin to become even remotely viable
| as a currency. There's no reason to believe that Bitcoin
| can make these services any more efficient.
| JonathanBeuys wrote:
| Dispute resolution:
|
| This "service" has pros and cons. It is one reason why
| vendors hate credit cards. You never know when you can be
| sure that the payment really was done. Or if it will
| suddenly disappear again.
|
| Fraud detection:
|
| One reason why fraud detection is needed is that the
| whole system of "whoever has the number can pull money"
| is insane.
|
| Customer service:
|
| What do you mean?
|
| Card issuing:
|
| Who wants cards? Those will go away anyhow.
| easrng wrote:
| Dispute resolution is trivial with a 2-of-3 multisig. The
| customer locks up funds until service has been provided
| and then in the ideal case the customer and merchant
| agree and pay the merchant. If there's a dispute, the
| dispute resolver can forcibly send funds with the
| cooperation of either party.
| cheeze wrote:
| Talk about beating a dead horse. Read literally any HN thread
| ever posted about cryptocurrencies to see this discussed ad
| nauseum.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| There are many ways to re-internalize the costs of
| CO2-producing energy use, such as putting a carbon tax on
| energy providers which emit CO2.
|
| In contrast, writing specific policies to target (specific uses
| of) specific cryptocurrencies, without exempting the renewable
| energy used in their production, and without targeting other
| "frivolous" uses of energy, would be an inelegant approach.
| exolymph wrote:
| Honestly, the main argument is "I don't care about following
| your priorities for 'legitimate' energy usage and you can't
| stop me."
| dropnerd wrote:
| price the energy cost correctly then
| fksadfji12 wrote:
| Because noone cares about that.
| gregwebs wrote:
| This uses the lightning network. The energy cost of a lightning
| payment is orders of magnitude lower than bitcoin.
|
| This kind of usage actually demonstrates bitcoin's valuable use
| case (a base layer for final settlement) whereas in recent
| years a lot of energy was being burned effectively just for
| speculation.
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| microtransactions via the Lightning network is wonderful part of
| the bitcoin vision. But I don't think this sentence at the bottom
| of the "Strike" app page is holding up to the promise: "Custody
| of your funds and bitcoin trading are offered through Prime
| Trust, LLC." [1]
|
| [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/strike-send-and-spend-
| bitcoin/...
| m348e912 wrote:
| Thanks for bringing this up. While the idea of blockchain
| payments hitting a mainstream app is kind of exciting, adding
| Strike support to twitter isn't much different than adding
| something like Venmo support. Both require a banking style
| intermediary that require KYC from their users.
| bmking wrote:
| I don't agree. This way it is a) easier to onboard
| _receivers_, and b) stays open in the sense that _senders_
| can send bitcoins by any app they want (including non-
| custodial of course).
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| Ok, I understand (a). Regarding (b) I guess I don't fully
| understand their implementation, but are you suggesting
| that any 3rd party app could implement the payments? I
| guess if any app or user can pull the twitter user's
| lightning address one can tip then yeah I guess so. So I
| guess they are just using "Strike" as an officially-
| supported app?
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > Bitcoin isn't the extent of Twitter's crypto plans: the company
| said it is also planning to support authentication for NFTs, or
| non-fungible tokens, by letting people connect their crypto
| wallets. "NFT authentication will come in the form of a badge,
| shown on profile pictures, marking the owner's NFT as authentic,"
| a company spokesperson said.
|
| No talk about the NFTs yet. My gut tells me that ultimately,
| personally speaking, NFTs are going to be about telling me what I
| can't do. "You can't post that meme, you can't quote that person,
| etc." Maybe I just don't get it?
| blhack wrote:
| Absolutely incredible news.
|
| Micropayments are one of the paths out of advertiser hell and
| were one of the original dreams of many crypto nerds and
| advocates.
|
| I still think that twitter is pure mind cancer, but I have to
| give it to Jack on this. Great move, and something I hope gets
| repeated to the rest of the web.
|
| For those who aren't very familiar with the crypto space: this
| uses a bitcoin side chain called lightning; transactions are
| effectively free and instant, but still denominated in BTC.
| Geee wrote:
| Lightning Network is not a side chain. It's basically a way to
| interactively update transactions between nodes before they're
| broadcasted and settled on blockchain. It forms a network where
| payments are routed through nodes without having to trust
| anyone. It's scalable and private.
| zapdrive wrote:
| You conveniently forgot to mention that you have to have a
| lightning node connected to the network 24/7 to protect
| yourself from fraud. Or, you have to use and trust a third
| party node.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Leaving BTC and lighting aside, I don't think most people would
| opt out of ads in favor of micro payments. There is a minority
| who have the money that would but I see nothing in society that
| points to making such a change possible. Do you have any
| studies that show people would pay for news/socials/etc. in
| exchange for no ads/tracking/+privacy? Even the paid streaming
| services have ads and even when you pay, I'm sure they are
| still selling tracking data.
| mdoms wrote:
| I pay for Youtube and multiple podcasts on Patreon for
| exactly this reason. I think both ad-supported and
| subscription-supported are viable, and where possible
| creators should support both.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| Perhaps not everybody, but this is a core business model for
| a lot of mobile apps. "Pay and we remove the ads". I've paid
| for quite a few apps just to get the ads out of the way.
| blhack wrote:
| Many people already have opted out of ads. People like Glenn
| Greenwald and Matt Taibbi who have massive, lucrative
| substacks, for instance.
|
| Many others have done patreon. Many, many youtube creators
| and podcasters have strong incomes due to that.
| sjtindell wrote:
| Twitch and similar platforms are absolutely inundated with
| users who are quickly growing used to regularly donating via
| micropayment of sorts, not even via subscription but just as
| one-off donations. And they hate ads. It's very common for
| the wealthier streamers to run the absolute minimum number of
| ads required by their contract. When users don't have the
| money to donate, they will explicitly say "give me ads" and
| the streamer will run them.
| trident5000 wrote:
| I pay for youtube premium to avoid ads. Paying in a micro
| form over a lump sum form wouldnt matter for me as long as
| its reasonable in price and easy.
|
| Really micro payments add-value is that most things on the
| internet are just not worth a visa charge or the slow fraud
| detection calcs on the back end. Like access to someones
| tweets. Its basically opening up a new economy and suitable
| for the metaverse in general.
|
| Like imagine you have augmented reality glasses and are
| walking through a city outside a restaurant, and a digital
| food menu third party gives you access for 5 cents btc or
| eth.
|
| Bit of a tangent here but the use case is fascinating.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Do we know why they're not doing it off-chain, similar to the
| way a crypto exchange will transfer crypto from one user to
| another off-chain?
| mraudiobook_com wrote:
| LN is off chain, that's the whole point, LN is a custodial
| solution to the problem Blockstream introduced when they
| introduced the block size limit.
|
| Bitcoin Cash is the on chain solution, LN is just as
| centralized as PayPal.
| bmking wrote:
| Lightning network is "off-chain". Basically a network of
| 2-of-2 locked bitcoins called _channels_ that exchange valid
| Bitcoin transactions to update the balances within these
| channels, but only need to settle them by broadcasting them
| to the Bitcoin network in case of disputes.
| blhack wrote:
| I don't know the specifics of this, but:
|
| Because they don't need to. My guess is that you just
| associate a lightning address with your username, and all
| Twitter does is present that to a wallet. This way twitter
| doesn't need to do KYC, or ever hold any funds. They're just
| the phone book.
| kokomjolk wrote:
| LN doesn't have addresses, it has invoices that can't be
| reused.
| blhack wrote:
| Ah, okay. I'll admit that it's been quite a few years
| since I've used lightning.
|
| (I used it back when it was in beta to buy something from
| blockstream, but that was it. Back then it was an
| extremely complex process.)
| zapdrive wrote:
| Exactly. LN is like opening a "tab" in a bar. You
| ultimately settle on the chain, just like how you settle
| the final tab on your credit card.
|
| LN is an unnecessary solution to a made up problem. Other
| cryptos have proved that much much more transactions can
| be easily processed by merely increasing the blocksize.
| bradwood wrote:
| Increasing the blocksize makes running a node much more
| expensive (due to storage, mainly) which in turn makes
| the network less decentralised. Bitcoin (rightly) selects
| for decentralisation over transaction speed, hence LN as
| an L2...
| zapdrive wrote:
| Bitcoin blockchain size: 350 gb
|
| 12tb harddrive: $199.
|
| Bitcoin blockchain is increasing at less than 100gb per
| year. The storage cost of 100gb is about $1.6
|
| I'm sure people running nodes can spend more than 1.6 a
| year to store a bigger chain.
| xur17 wrote:
| I'm guessing they also don't want to. If they took custody
| of the Bitcoin, I believe that would make them a MSB, and
| hence get to do all of the "fun" associated with that.
| Also, the additional security and financial implications of
| holding money for their users.
| satronaut wrote:
| they're doing it via lightning, which is off-chain until
| payment channels are settled.
| zapdrive wrote:
| But you still have to make a transaction to open a channel.
| fksadfji12 wrote:
| Because it already comes out of the box with
| bitcoin/lightning.
| [deleted]
| shawn-butler wrote:
| Isn't this what Brave tried doing in their browser circa 2016?
|
| Doesn't seem like micropayments fit the current consumer
| mindset the way periodic subscriptions do.
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| lightning network wasn't available in 2016. Lightning network
| makes micro-transactions feasible with bitcoin by almost
| eliminating the fee.
| wmeredith wrote:
| Yes, but Brave made their own token (BAT)
| arcticbull wrote:
| Micropayments are something we've had available to us forever,
| there's no reason a custodial wallet like PayPal can't offer
| them - or couldn't have offered them at any point in the last
| two decades. People don't want them. And they certainly don't
| want them at up to $60 a pop haha. Or over LN which still
| requires an on chain transaction to open a channel.
|
| Nick Szabo has a great write up that outlines my thoughts
| exactly [1]
|
| [1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-
| and-...
| thinkmassive wrote:
| Nobody used micropayments when they were a hassle. Today
| there are already Lightning-based apps breaking down that
| barrier, live in production using mainnet BTC.
|
| Spinx[0] and Zion[1] are chat apps that offer room hosts the
| option to set a fee for joining and/or sending messages to a
| channel, for the purpose of spam reduction. Another cool
| feature already live in the app is pay-per-minute streaming
| of podcasts and videos.
|
| [0]: https://sphinx.chat/ [1]: https://www.getzion.com/
| maccolgan wrote:
| The reason that people typically don't accept tips in
| anything but crypto is that it would eliminate the
| pseudonymity that crypto would offer...
| cwkoss wrote:
| Also accepting tips via CC exposes you to chargebacks, were
| people can actually financially damage you (ex. they donate
| and chargeback, they get their money back, you get nothing
| + a ~$20 chargeback fee)
| space_rock wrote:
| People that call bitcoin "crypto" are likely to describe
| bitcoin technology incorrectly
| arenaninja wrote:
| I don't use twitter but maybe now I have a reason to, and I'm not
| particularly pro-crypto (I hold maybe $8 worth of bitcoin)
| meheleventyone wrote:
| I use Twitter and it has the opposite effect. I'm not surprised
| though.
| gcampos wrote:
| I'm sure Jack Dorsey selling an NTF of the first tweet ever had
| nothing to do with this plan.
| barcoder wrote:
| BitClout already does this although there's a lot of speculation
| that BitClout will fail where as Twitter has lasted for a decent
| amount of time.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Sounds like initial plans are to not take a fee for Bitcoin
| payments. Which is awesome but a bit surprising.
|
| I wonder whether they'll be able to keep this fee-less over the
| longer term. If/when they start facilitating billions of dollars
| moving per year, I'd imagine intense pressure from shareholders
| to take a cut.
| kneel wrote:
| They're using the 2nd layer lightning network, fees are not an
| issue.
| javert wrote:
| They can profit simply by holding bitcoin, which they're
| increasing demand for.
|
| Bitcoin has always been the kind of thing that rewards
| insiders.
|
| Companies and government officials can profit just by holding
| bitcoin and then incentivizing its wider use. It makes more
| sense to become an insider than to fight bitcoin. Arguably,
| that's even true for major financial institutions.
| blhack wrote:
| How would they take a cut?
| JonathanBeuys wrote:
| Why does Twitter need to enable anything for users to receive
| Bitcoin?
|
| Couldn't the users just pin a tweet to the top of their profile
| "Hey, if you want to tip us, here is our Bitcoin address: ..."?
|
| And for receiving Bitcoin via the Lighnight Network, I would
| expect it is similar?
| corysama wrote:
| The problem with tipping online is not that people are
| unreasonably stingy. It's that people are reasonably lazy. A
| lot of people are happy to toss a few coins to their Witcher.
| But, it has to be trivially easy to do so or they won't bother.
| Requiring even trivial effort to give away money is
| unreasonable.
| egypturnash wrote:
| See, the problem with your methods is that Twitter's not taking
| a cut. They might even require a user to leave Twitter for
| another site! And we can't have that.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| As someone who often tips people with crypto, having a button
| at the point where I'm consuming the content is helpful.
| Otherwise I have to go search for their address, or hope they
| have something like an ENS name as their display name so I can
| easily address a tip to them.
| tgraves83 wrote:
| The current implementations of the lightning network don't
| easily allow transactions to an address (A method called
| keysend does exist but isn't widely used).
|
| In order to receive a lightning payment, the receiver has to
| generate an invoice that anyone with a lightning wallet can pay
| (usually by scanning a QR code or copy/pasting the invoice).
| These invoices are meant to be single use.
|
| There is a draft spec (BOLT12) that would make it easier to be
| able to just pin a link or QR code on a webpage or profile and
| receive bitcoin via the lightning network.
|
| https://bolt12.org/
| aqme28 wrote:
| A lot of business is just taking something that is possible and
| making it accessible. See: the famous Dropbox detractor comment
| on hacker news.
| mettamage wrote:
| But it's just a bitcoin address. All you need to do is go to
| an exchange (or a wallet), click withdraw enter the public
| key of the other person, type in the amount and you're done.
|
| Dropbox is also silly. It's just rsync with a UI, just spin
| up a command-line and transfer all your fi-... Wait a minute.
| This is what you meant! ;-)
|
| I'd love to hear a version where a chef would talk about food
| this way or some other field that I know next to nothing
| about.
|
| Edit: I didn't realize it was using the lightning network.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| This uses the Lightning Network, which requires an invoice
| (unless the node has keysend payments enabled, but most end
| users don't run their own node). It's not the same as a
| Bitcoin address, and address re-use is a dirty habit
| anyway.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| > But it's just a bitcoin address. All you need to do is go
| to an exchange (or a wallet), click withdraw enter the
| public key of the other person, type in the amount and
| you're done.
|
| Or you could just click the button on the tweet and not do
| all that?
| throwaway158497 wrote:
| Twitter will hold the bitcoins and collect interest before
| transfering to person tweeting?
| plebianRube wrote:
| Yes, they will enter a Defi contract for the few seconds it
| takes to send the lightning payment. They will scalp
| fractions of fractions of a cent, making them wealthier
| beyond their wildest dreams.
|
| Try harder.
| throwaway158497 wrote:
| Well, technologically it is possible to transfer almost
| impossible That doesn't mean they will do it. They will
| hold it for a few days. At scale, it will add some money to
| twitter coffers(if they are successful that is)
| DylanBohlender wrote:
| Lightning network theoretically makes micropayments possible, and
| that should be celebrated for enabling new ways of online
| monetization that the tech world writ large can explore.
|
| Imagine if you could buy access to a paywalled news article for
| $0.02 (on an article-by-article basis) instead of having to
| purchase a monthly subscription. Or imagine being able to pay
| $0.10 to watch a particular episode of a show without needing to
| subscribe to the streaming service. How many people would prefer
| doing that instead of using current SaaS subscription models
| (which exist largely because it's a huge hassle to implement
| credit card-based micropayments)?
|
| Subscription businesses should be on guard: micropayments open up
| advertising-independent ways for creators to monetize content.
| With all the well-deserved criticism of ad-based businesses in
| recent years (particularly social media), it's possible that
| micropayments enable business models that don't rely on ads the
| way many online businesses have up to this point. That's huge,
| and kudos to Twitter for taking the leap.
| [deleted]
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I also think if we remove advertising from existence another
| plus for the society would be getting rid of "articles" about
| "look this dog how much barks when he sees the postman", maybe
| some would pay for that, but I think having micropayments to
| access content would force the content to be meaningful
| Imnimo wrote:
| I'm having a very hard time imagining a scenario in which I would
| feel the need to tip someone for a Tweet.
|
| I understand why I might want to pay someone for, say, a Youtube
| video, or a substack article. But is there really enough value
| packed into a tweet that I'd want to send someone money for it?
|
| Maybe I'm just not imaginative enough. Or maybe the answer is
| porn.
| joedevon wrote:
| Here's an example.
|
| Journalist spends a year on a story. Puts it on her blog.
| Shares the post via a tweet. You love the story, appreciate the
| hard work and give a tip.
| rstarast wrote:
| "Any tips for this tweet will be sent back double!"
| trident5000 wrote:
| Might be good for journalism. People get paid for their
| analysis and being a trusted source. Hopefully revenue drops
| off when lying or sloppy work occurs.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| Maybe local news channels can start compensating people who's
| media they want to broadcast and profit from.
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| (1) to communicate to others that the particular tweet is
| valuable, by sending something with more scarcity than a
| mouseclick. (2) to help fund the creator of the tweet. (3) "is
| there really enough value packed into a tweet that I'd want to
| send someone money for it"? Well a tweet can be much more
| concise than a youtube video.
| paxys wrote:
| It doesn't just have to be for the content in the tweet. For
| example you could link to an article on your blog.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| There's a lot of sex work on Twitter so porn isn't a silly
| answer at all.
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