To some non-trivial minority of content creators that is reason enough to not use it. As someone who makes youtube vids and is thinking about scaling a brand, I want nothing to do with a tech platform that believes it should be the sole arbiter of who can and cannot solicit p2p donations/payments for their videos. I want a politically-neutral technology / payment mechanism.
Brave seems to be more ideologically aligned with myself, so I would rather go that route. Even though the current iteration has quite a few centralized stop-gates, I think it's feasible that Brave and the BAT system could ultimately provide a way for me to monetize my video content directly from users with BAT tokens and not have to deal with Jack Conte's moral grandstanding as a single point of failure for my revenue streams.
The internet isn't run by the government, it's mostly run by private companies. These private companies want to create and enforce a sort of tax policy around internet consumption. Companies can tax you in multiple ways (slowing page load speeds, censoring content, denying access to services etc...) and they can do it for multiple reasons (business interests, lobbying from their friends, censoring dissent etc...) Net Neutrality is the idea that private companies should not be able to create tax policy on core internet infrastructure, and instead it should remain tax-free for all users.
The ultimate irony here, is that this battle is pitched as Silicon Valley vs. the U.S. government, with Silicon Valley fighting for a free and open internet and the government trying to pass legislation to pave the way for private companies to enforce tax policy. But in actuality the battle for a free and open internet has morphed into the people vs. Silicon Valley, with tech companies as the villains in the story.
The arbitrary censorship on social media sites (such as Facebook, and Twitter) has gotten really bad. Platforms like Youtube for content-hosting and Patreon for fundraising have begun demonetizing and delisting their political opponents. Lower level infrastructure such as GoDaddy and Cloudflare have even now begun to enforce political delisting.
Wake up. Private companies are already enforcing a tax on your internet consumption if you are guilty of wrongthink. Whether it's Verizon, Twitter, Patreon or Cloudflare, who cares, it's the same thing.
The part of Kickstarter you're describing isn't worth any significant fraction of these $500m. If it were, Indiegogo, Gofundme and all others in the space would need to be well on the unicorn track.
A saying goes "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything". That's where this value of $500m comes in. It's in the brand reputation the company has built. In the traffic they generate by people browsing their site and discovering projects they might back. In the UI they've set up, and most of all, it's in the trust that they actually do some amount of quality checking. In the thought that projects on Kickstarter stand a better chance of executing than projects on competitor's sites.
You can get someone to write the necessary code for "if funded send to x, else return funds" on any freelance site for a four-digit amount, whether you want it in Solidity or PHP. That's the easy part. The hard part then is building a better platform, policing the projects on there, ensuring quality and attracting backers.
> Can you do so in a way that I as a funder don't need to trust you the intermediary?
No, and you can't with smart contracts either (the intermediary being the creator of the contract), unless funders are restricted to people with the skill to analyze the contract code. As proven by the DAO.
And even if you could, you've replaced only a small-and-useless-in-isolation piece of Kickstarter by doing so.
It moves the trust to the code rather than the entity. Code analysis does not need to be done by all, either.
I'm not saying it's the entirety of kickstarter but I think you're being overly dismissive of the concept. It could work well for things like bug or feature bounties, or other similar situations where having a company to sit in the middle and hold cash requires building up too much reputation than it is worth. Running costs become just the transaction & code running costs on whatever network you're using too.
> It moves the trust to the code rather than the entity. Code analysis does not need to be done by all, either.
For everyone who doesn't do it on their own, they either have to trust the originator or trust someone who has done it, so for most users you aren't eliminating the need for a trusted third party.
> For everyone who doesn't do it on their own, they either have to trust the originator or trust someone who has done it, so for most users you aren't eliminating the need for a trusted third party.
Which is a different trust model.
There are a few major things:
1. Not everyone has to trust the originator
2. It's possible for me to trust a third party which is different from the one asking for my money
3. It's possible for me to trust a combination of many third parties, given that any one reliable third party that cries foul would be enough
So there's a huge difference between "trust me and give me your money" and "trust that not all the third parties that checked the code are co-conspirators".
> That was the upthread claim.
Yes, but I'm not making that claim, and I think your statement saying this piece is "useless in isolation" is overly dismissive.
It blows my mind how so many people proliferate how useful blockchain companies can be yet despite all of the different blockchains, ICO's..., practically none [1] have taken off because they are technologically and economically worse than current market products and services.
[1]: Illegal markets are the only market I have seen that do like it because companies/governments have specifically made it harder for illegal transactions to take place over traditional currencies.
How you take funds for your campaign is configurable. The projects which took USD raised millions more than the projects which took various cryptocurrencies at the time of funding. The upside of having a smart contract 'guarantee' your funds was outweighed by the downside of drop-off in getting your potential customers to acquire and pay you using an obscure financial instrument.
He is saying that more people are used to USD than cryptocurrencies. If you have two companies, one which uses a "donate here in USD" button and one which has a "donate using Ethereum smart contracts", the donations for the first one will drown the second so the second will look like a failure by comparison.
Nobody has done it because it's inefficient right now, and the ecosystem is still only trusted by a relatively small minority of nerds like myself and others here. This proposal is a solution to one of those problems.
All blockchains rely on re-computing the same transaction across many different entities due to mistrust. However, despite the common sentiment that computers are cheap; at scale, the are definitely not. Every additional computation to validate something increases the cost of business and 99% of businesses are cutthroat when it comes to cost.
Add in the other downsides/costs of crypto.* (my insights on the downsides of blockchain specifically: hard to use, one way transactions, high transfer costs due to low block size, super easy to get hacked and lose all your money...) and it's no wonder they are all failing.
99.999% of the time, the costs outway the benefits.
This thinking is a common mistake I see from teams that think only about tech.
User acquisition is critical in the success of marketplaces. Usability is often ignored too.
Even today, if you create an eBay (granted, a much stickier marketplace than Kickstarter) with no fees, it's not as simple as throwing the doors open and expecting everyone to switch.
If you ever want, I'm happy to have the debate with you (email in profile). If you really want to compete, you're going to need to be aware of what it'll really take to win, not just decentralized/blockchain and no fees.
(And as a nit, I can also build a website in a week that takes 2% credit card vig without blockchain - sure I know you'll argue that I can raise the price later, but I'm still not going to win against Kickstarter without something more than just a cheaper price)
I'm sceptical about the use-case. Collecting money for the projects is so much about other things as well, not just the money collection phase - you need a services around it, it is not just the payment collection. That said, I think it would be quite useful for kickstarter to accept btc/eth.
Exactly. The problem is that even if the core service can be replicated in a decentralized manner on the blockchain, any periphery services (discussion boards, dispute resolution) need to exist in some centralized place, developed and maintained by some centralized entity. Hell, even the crypto code itself needs to be developed/maintained by someone. It's hard to avoid centralization when somebody has to do the work of maintaining the platform, because maintenance costs money, which requires stakeholders, who will not pass up an opportunity to "collect rent" if the platform has any sort of network lock-in.
> What about Kickstarter? A $500 million+ company that takes a 5% vig on all transacted funds can effectively be replaced with a few lines of code.
No, it can't.
> If total ETH sent to contract address by date X > Amount Y then send the ETH to the fundraiser, else return the ETH.
Somehow missing the tracking of backers and rewards, the mutual identification of the parties, and the enforceable obligations with regard to rewards. Kinda key features of Kickstarter.
I think the 5% doesn't even include the financial transaction which is another 3% that goes to stripe. People give Kickstarter the 5% for the marketing and trust the platform tries to build.
In my imagination, I can replace anything with some equivalent and cost much less.
But how?
How can you replace kickstarter with a few lines of code? Through your wonderful imagination that can bend reality? Or through your convincing argument that kickerstarter volunteered to turn itself into a few lines of code.
You do know people can launch a crowdfunding project that is decentralized, They don't need an ICO or blockchain, just a website.
But there is a reason people don't do that, something to do with the value centralized platforms provide.
Plus I'm not entirely sure anyone should trust smart contracts to actually perform such a function, next thing you know someone other than the project created takes all the funds pursuant to the smart contract, but hey that's the beauty of a smart contract it's infallible, so what ever it does it was intended to do, be damned with what people thought and understood it would do.
Kickstarter outcompetes other competitors and individuals trying to raise their own money due to network effect and native distribution you get for your project.
Here's an hour long interview with Patreon's CEO, Jack Conte, where he goes through some ridiculous mental gymnastics trying to justify why it's ok he is kicking conservative journalists off his platform.
Yes, now white supremacists trying to make sure brown people die in the ocean using patreon funds are conservative journalists. Won't anyone think of free speech? Next he'll ban patreon crowdfunding the creation of snuff films, what a monster. It's almost like he doesn't want to be knowingly complicit in murder.
I'll give you this, though, the man is devious -- can you imagine the mental gymnastics involved in watching a video proudly filmed and posted online by these people of them doing a thing and discussing that very thing in the middle of doing it? And using that as evidence? Truly disgusting.
Not having watched the whole thing, it sounds like this Lauren Southern (the journalist in question) was using funds from Patreon to help blockade a ship in the Mediterranean. They though the ship was leaving to collect migrants, apparently it was being used by doctors without borders for search and rescue operations.
The CEO states in the first couple of minutes that they wouldn't be supporting that kind of activity and is apparently against their terms of service. This seems pretty obviously not about freedom of speech but about what illegal activities Patreon could be accused of supporting financially.*
Does he go on later in the video to justify removing other accounts because of political beliefs? I haven't made it much further in.
*EDIT: So after watching another video on the subject, the official statement has less to do with what Patreon doesn't want to be seen funding but more about a section of their content policy stating they will not allow action that might endanger the life of another person, i.e. blockading search and rescue vessels.
Sure, assuming Doctors Without Borders is in the people smuggling business now, it is still a seaworthy vessel instead of a makeshift raft, the kind that is responsible for that drowned toddler washing up on European shores which is specifically used as an example of the possible harm that would be in breach of the company's content policy.
One of the reasons North African smugglers put people on makeshift rafts is because they know that NGO vessels will rescue them. The African smugglers and NGOs are in cahoots - effectively making the NGOs smugglers as well.
Does that change the fact without the NGO craft, people aboard the raft are at greater risk of drowning? All of this just sounds like justification for allowing people to drown. I'm sure there are better ways to prevent people smugglers than blockading the part of the operation that prevents human deaths.
Picking up people 20 miles off of Libya's coast and bringing them to Italy instead of to the much (!) closer African shore is not exactly "search & rescue".
Ignoring your apparent political motivation to keep these people out of Europe (which is not really what is being discussed), the fact still stands that without these ships, human people are at greater risk of drowning. As I stated in an earlier post, there are better ways to stop people smuggling than letting the people being smuggled, drown at sea.
Yes, the better way is to make it clear that trying to illegally enter Europe is useless. If there is no motivation to cross the sea in a rubber dinghy, there will be no drowning people, either.
But this is apparently out of the question, for reasons of "humanity".
I'm not disagreeing with you, but we aren't talking about immigration policy here, we are talking about whether or not Patreon's content policy was violated.
Interesting - Presto-As-A-Service is hard to do because of the way it handles permissions / auth. With an inherently shared resource like a blockchain it becomes a lot more feasible.
I'm not interested in the charging so much as how they handle privacy and security for multiple users/accounts in (supposedly) a single Presto cluster.
Querying the blockchain does not cost anything, just making changes to it. Otherwise, verifying transactions would be a recursive cost. I could be wrong though, but pretty sure since it's distributed reads are free, writes are where it costs.
Payment channels alone are only a good solution if you consider it acceptable to establish a payment channel with everyone you want to pay. So, in other words, it only makes sense for recurring payments to the same merchant, and you pay the blockchain fee once for each merchant you want to pay. Consequently, if you only pay once you pay the same fee as an on-chain transaction, and if you pay 1000 times you pay, in average, 1000th the blockchain fee per payment.
Because it's conceptually more like a contract. Someone writes the contract code, and then by uploading and depositing money into the contract it's as if they signed it. After that point it works without anyone needing to trust the signer.
And they can include conditions about arbitrary information that is reported on the blockchain (weather data, stock prices, etc...)
And multiple people can sign these things. They really are like contracts.
Bitcoin also only has one client with one development team whereas Ethereum has multiple clients with multiple development teams. Tell me more about that legendary Bitcoin decentralization.
Having one or more clients doesn't mean much. Eth is organizationally centralized because of the eth foundation. It literally has a dear leader (vitalik), and no different from crypto issued by, say, the fed.
The entire point of crypto is that it tries to solve the problem with existing currency (fiat), which is too tightly controlled by a few individuals.
Is this actually solved by bitcoin? Is this actually solvable? I feel we're butting up against the Iron Law of Oligarchy, here.
What I mean is, Ethereum Foundation or not, only some small set of people will have commit access to the upstream bitcoin repository. Additionally, because of economies of scale, it makes more sense to pool resources under one central roof to solve the proof-of-work.
There might be a convoluted and informal political process involved before merging changes to the protocol. Mining companies might choose to limit their size in order to protect the network and thus their income streams. But ultimately, the number of core developers and miners, i.e., those with real power, is much, much less than the number of merchants and users.
From my understanding, and what I can read from what they said:
They're suggesting Bitcoin is not practical for what the current average rate of transactions on other payment networks would require of it, should it even take on a lesser portion of those transactions (eg. X-thousand transactions per second).
It is useful however for a value store. Eg. You can't rightly trade units of gold 50,000 times per second, but it's a good bet that if you buy some and stow it that it will at least hold or even appreciate in value.
Believe it or not, Bitcoin isn't actually transactional these days. A new feature called "replace by fee" was introduced that allows coins that were used in a transaction which is still in queue for processing (hasn't yet been included in block by the miners) to be spent in a different transaction as long as the spender pays a high enough fee to jump to the front of the queue.
I was under the impression that that had always been allowed by the protocol, it's just an implementation detail on if a node will relay the tx and which tx the miner will choose.
Imagine if your visa card took anywhere from 10 minutes with high fees to 30 minutes with "average" fees. It would be fairly annoying to use on an everyday basis.
The flaw in their plan is that the intersection of people capable of figuring out how to pay a ransom payment in Bitcoin, and people still using Windows XP, is pretty small.
But their price point was set too high for their market.
Turns out that for a lot of victims wiping their old computer was deemed less expensive than the cost, nuisance, and risk of paying criminals through some shady internet fake money thing to possibly avoid having to wipe their computer.
For anyone with a recent backup of their data, I can't think of why they'd pay.
A lot of the high-profile systems getting hit are embedded mission-critical systems. They'd be getting some amount of IT attention. And systems that aren't that important might not be important enough to ransom - just wipe and start over.
Patreon censors conservatives off their platform. [Context if you don't know what I'm talking about -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofpbDgCj9rw]
To some non-trivial minority of content creators that is reason enough to not use it. As someone who makes youtube vids and is thinking about scaling a brand, I want nothing to do with a tech platform that believes it should be the sole arbiter of who can and cannot solicit p2p donations/payments for their videos. I want a politically-neutral technology / payment mechanism.
Brave seems to be more ideologically aligned with myself, so I would rather go that route. Even though the current iteration has quite a few centralized stop-gates, I think it's feasible that Brave and the BAT system could ultimately provide a way for me to monetize my video content directly from users with BAT tokens and not have to deal with Jack Conte's moral grandstanding as a single point of failure for my revenue streams.