I was hoping this would be a browser with better IPFS/IPNS/Tor/I2P support, but sadly it's just another Bitcoin project. They seem to use IPFS, so that's nice, but the cryptocurrency side makes me very wary of this project.
You are right to be wary, if there is a cryptocurrency element to a project I immediately stop paying attention because it is almost certainly geared towards inflating the token values through raising ridiculous amount of money.
The people that come out to defend those projects almost certainly owns token. How is this not an unregistered security?
There's a reason the Bitcoin developers:
- were anonymous
- released bitcoin weeks after the ruling on e-gold
- continues to remain anonymous
They clearly knew the implication of e-gold and US security laws.
I don't want to implement P2P payments. I don't even know what this means. Does it just mean "sending someone money?" Why would I want that to be built into a browser? I'm a bit confused why this is being pushed.
It means there's an easy way to "pay" for "premium" content in very small forms. Like "here's 15 cents for letting me read this article." No ads, no subscription and sending all your personal info, no email spam. I think if it works, it will change everything.
Here's an interesting article from 2003 about microtransactions that argues the main issue is actually mental burden of paying for hundreds of tiny things every day, ie. "mental transaction costs".
https://web.archive.org/web/20031202032448/http://www.shirky...
The concept seems to first appear in Nick Szabo's paper in 1999:
Things like Brave's Basic Attention Token seem to solve this problem in the sense that it's completely automatic based on the amount of time spent on each site. But then you have to use Brave, and you have to use BAT...
In my case, most of the money would go to YouTube, Reddit and HN. (I think Brave actually has a way to send the money to individual creators on a site rather than to the site itself. But I haven't used it personally.)
There is no reason for that to be baked into the browser. That can absolutely be a cross-browser/platform layer that won't need to worry about dying as a walled garden with no visitors.
The cost for the average Bitcoin transaction is a lot higher than 15 cents. And likely to go higher as transaction fees make a higher and higher portion of miners' reward. The power use involved in mining "coin" does not simply pay for itself.
Lightning mitigates high transaction fees by pooling.
I agree with long term concerns as block rewards decrease, though, which is why I prefer Monero’s tail emission to Bitcoin’s model.
Part of the brilliance of block rewards is it actually does pay for itself. Miners are rewarded for their efforts, and the reward amount varies based on the needs of the network.
At least that’s been true for the past decade, prior to getting towards the supply cap. It’ll be extremely interesting to see how miners behave as the rewards decrease in reality vs in theory. My personal belief is that the lack of tail emission and resultant price increase will keep bitcoin alive indefinitely, but make it more and more static overtime, even with stuff like lightning, and turn it into a kind of reserve note. This is not a novel theory and is what many are seeing happening.
I’m most bullish on Monero long term/think it’s extremely under-appreciated as a viable means for the mind of decentralized uncensorable micro-transactions people in the space all fantasize about.
I'm sure some will want to do that, sure. Especially the marketing driven blogs/sites.
But they'll be competing against people that don't do that, so unless their content is really really good and unique, they'll lose in the market and either adapt or die. Maybe some mega celebrities could pull that off, but it would be pretty rare.
I mean, they could easily be doing that right now. $1.99 is high enough that the problem of micro payments isn't really a problem at that price. But they don't because it would be a terrible strategy...
The closest thing to micropayments deployed at scale right now seems to be youtube superchats, which use traditional banking stuff.
I believe there are people creating micropayment superchat like systems for crypto, but its difficult when its not integrated into the browser/not integrated into content as well as it is with youtube.
Brave has a pretty cool tipping feature that I’ve used a handful of times, but it’s not integrated into the user experience in a way that people actually use/very few people seem to know about it or use it.
I don't mean micropayments, I mean we have an ad infested surveillance web competing with an informative web, but because of how browsers work, the mere presence of informative sites doesn't much help escaping from the ads and surveillance. The problem is browsers enabling the surveillance and we should back away from that. Gemini had the right motivation, but made what I'd call newbie errors. I'd rather have something about like HTML3.
I totally disagree. When you visit a website, you're imposing a cost on the website owner because they have to pay for bandwidth and servers to process your request. In my view, crypto has always been about incentive alignment. Filecoin doesn't really work, but their idea was that when requesting a file a small fee to you pay the person who serves it to you. Overall this makes more sense to me than having some guy pay to host the file himself and hope that he decides to keep doing that until the end of time.
HN comments aren't free to host though. There is compute involved. How are they paying for that compute?
If it is out of boredom and good will, that's cool. But I very much am keeping that in mind when I comment here. I don't expect a hobby site to stay up long term because they'll just shut it down when it stops being fun.
If HN is paying for this from advertisements and job postings, well there is your answer. It is commercial.
You can’t get around the fact that HN is pay to play too though. that is my point.
You aren’t paying a fraction of a cent to post comments, but you’re paying in other ways. You just prefer the business model of HN, but i find the fraction of a cent model to be more straightforward and clear.
You can't win this argument, hackernews isn't "pay to play". You are currently playing with it and you didn't pay even a microtransaction. Why do you keep saying it is pay to play? For whatever reason HN providers are doing it as a free service and you aren't paying anything.
You shouldn’t necessarily want it built into the browser but you might want it built into the internet so that you can avoid the layers of fees, commissions and surveillance capitalism.
For better or worse, for most people the browser is the internet right now.
I see a "Pay with Apple" button (doesn't appear if you're not using Safari, I guess). I click it, and Safari pops up an OS-level dialog, prompting for TouchID / FaceID / Apple Watch / password authorisation. I authorise the payment, the goods are paid. Works on Mac, iOS, etc. The card is the same one I use to pay for stuff in a shop, so basically buying groceries and buying things online are like the same thing, one click/tap away. It's pretty neat, if you don't mind Apple being a middle man.
I don’t know about you but I hate ads and like to pay for my content, I also don’t see why I’d want to give money to intermediaries every time I pay for something.
Why would I be against payments being built into browsers in a standardised and open source, open standards way if it might eventually solve those problems?
> I don’t know about you but I hate ads and like to pay for my content
Since when has paying for content meant no ads?
I pay for a newspaper - ads, I pay for cable tv - ads, I pay for the internet - ads, I pay road tax - ads, I go to the cinema - ads, I buy a ticket to a sporting event - ads.
That is before we get to the influencer product placement world.
The ads still exist in the places you have paid for them, in litterally every example you gave. Netflix shows are giant ads. YouTube content has litteral ad reads in them. Newspapers - lol.
You can get ad packed content free, you can get ad-free content, you can get paid content that has ads, or paid content that is ad-free.
The "I paid for it" input has zero weight when it comes to determining if the content has ads is sponsored, infuenced or otherwise paid for.
Hating ads and liking to pay for the content are two separate things. I can do both…
1. As long as they’re paying a reasonable amount, paying customers should be more motivating to the company than whoever’s buying ads (because they provide more revenue), which means they are hopefully trying to keep me happy with their service.
2. I hate ads because I don’t want to see them, much less be distracted, or worse, influenced by them.
So I pay for content and run browser and DNS level ad blockers aggressively on all devices, as well as using reader mode wherever possible.
If I can’t avoid the ads I’ll usually go without. You’ll never find me watching broadcast TV.
It's not a "requirement" but monetizing content is a really hard problem that hasn't been solved real well. The most common strategy is ads, but everybody involved (by that I mean the producer and the consumer of the content, not an unnecessary third part like ad sellers) hate that solution. There are some attempts like Medium and their subscription model and Brave's BAT. These solve the problem of "micro payments" but they still require a third party and they have significant limitations (especially that content providers don't have any say on "price"). Direct payments so far suffer from the "micro payments" issue in that small payments aren't feasible since credit card companies and other third parties take a non-trivial portion.
So yeah, if a browser can fix this problem with P2P payments, that would be huge.
Paying content creators is a very valid problem, however using proof of work in place of CC processor fees is just moving the problem around - and arguably, making it worse: you're essentially taking on environmental debt, which all of us will eventually have to pay down.
What "monetizing content via a crypto browser" really means is "voluntarily submitting yourself to this 'decentralized' control structure we have set up." Which, in the case of Bitcoin, is "controlled" by 5 mining pools at any given time, who are all, one way or another, going to have to submit to government control at some point in the future. Meanwhile the whole thing about "decentralized identifiers" is people using the system will be connecting to central data centers.
As far as 'micropayments,' that is begging for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. I'll give you an example. Netflix users watch about 100 hours of their service a month, for $15.59. So 15 cents an hour. There is no scenario in which Netflix benefits from creating a virtual currency in their system pegged at 15 cents an hour (think Flix-Bux), people are already pushing back hard on these internal 'currencies.' The irony is not lost on me the amount of energy used by smart dudes to create a browser that is proposing virtual currency which has been utilize to nickle and dime gamers from adolescence to adulthood (robux, vbucks, the plethroa of 'money sellers' on many platforms).
Nothing about this is about freedom, this is all about changing one central control structure for another, with little crumbs of implication that it's better for users and sellers alike.
The nice property that well designed cryptocurrency protocols have is that they are censorship resistant - they align incentives and telemetry such that operators shouldn't want to censor transactions, but even if they do they cant differentiate between the transactions they like and the ones they don't. Bitcoin itself doesn't really have this property but there are other ones out there that do.
I suspect a cabal controls exactly what goes on despite bitcoin community claims. They are slowly selling off their positions over time and converting to real world assets for that point when they pull the rug out and it all crashes down around all the other investors ears when the curtain falls and the wizard(s) are exposed.
There are a lot of really hard problems and as big as fixing any such really hard problem would be the question is why this needs to be handled by the browser itself not why this would be a good problem to have solved.
Well sure, it could be implemented without the browser, just like FTP and other things were back in the day before they got implemented in the browser (which made browsing an FTP server accessible to tons of people who didn't know how/why to use an FTP client), but it's a lot less user friendly. Instead of configuring your preferences or clicking an "approve" button or whatever, you have to provision yourself a wallet, click an "I want to pay $0.15 for this article", get the receiver's wallet address, copy it over to your wallet. Copy over a transaction ID, click send, wait for an email confirmation that includes the access code, copy paste that into the original article, and you're golden. Or all of that can just happen seamlessly in the background if the browser knows how to do it. Also, I don't see an average user ever going through those hurdles, so probably the idea dies on the vine and we'll end up stuck with ads or centralized subscription models for eternity.
AFAIK they aren't advocating for the banning of other browsers (like Chrome), so if you don't want to use a browser that has support for that protocol, you can choose one that doesn't.
It's not a matter of requirement, it's a matter that they want to. It's their project. Since they want to, I think crypto is the best technology available for that today.
I might be wrong, but no one responded to my question with an answer of a better solution than crypto. All they say is: "should not do it". Well, the question was not whether they should do it or not. They already did.
"Don't do it" can be an acceptable answer to "what's a better solution" depending if, from your viewpoint, doing nothing is better than doing the proposed. E.g. Q: "what's a better solution for schizophrenia than lobotomy" A: "Not lobotomy, that's sketchy as can be".
You think crypto is on the net positive side of nothing. A great number of HN do not see it as such they see it as a constant source of scams, funding hype source, fraud, speculation, laundering, and so on with little to actually show in the way of being the world changer it is always promised. The point of that isn't to bring up a debate about if crypto is or isn't so, that conversation has been rehashed a thousand times here and nobody really wants to touch it with a 10 foot pole plus much better resources on the topic exist than comments, it's mentioned as why that portion is wary of a product which puts a lot of spotlight on crypto payments being a core part of why it exists instead of just focusing on the initial crypto based revolution it is already promising: a p2p decentralized browsing experience. Combine the two and you've got something that for many is squarely in the "I'm not going to touch this until it is shown to not be like the other stories and wish it wasn't about payments" camp.
I'm going to tell you a short story. Have patience please.
I consider my industry to be Media. I wanted to be a Journalist(TM) when I grew up. Won a contest...went to a major paper in Boston as part of a group of "those that will one day be Woodward and Bernstein." Then Youtube happened. I pooh-poohed it because I couldn't wrap my head around why anyone, in my thoughts at the time, "would want to watch a bunch of amateurs do x."
Fast forward to today. I watch more YouTube than Netflix and Prime Video combined. These are the only two services we still pay for...we used to also have HBO and Acorn, but they are both one trick ponies and are not adding enough compelling content quickly enough. Also after HBO ruined ASOIF, they landed on my no-go list forevermore. Acorn is simply too expensive for what it offers. It might become for compelling if it were to expand to the Scandies...
I currently maintain a folder on my desktop (one of hundreds) called The Olsen Meter. And in the folder I save every article I come across about industry people-in this case finance industry folks-who I feel are making the same mistake I did all those years ago by pooh poohing crypto. The problems will get worked out...they always do. The energy issue is a sideshow. And mainly bandied about by those who (I feel) are reacting out of nervousness about the future and the unknowns. Crypto is constantly maligned because of the hacks and thefts, but the most stolen currency in the World is/was/always will be the US $100 bill. To the tune of Trillions. Crypto and is multi-billions have quite aways to go before it even comes close.
As to whether or not this will solve the micropayments problem, maybe not but I like the idea of it as a stopgap. Until someone builds something newer and better. And if it keeps journalists from selling their souls to corporations via ads, then the Devil I know and like will always be a better deal.
Last thing I'd like you to consider: How does Dr. Beverly Crusher pay for fabric on TNG in Episode 1? Now before you dismiss the question, realize that she has never been on this planet before, this is the first time they (the crew) have met the Bandi and she procures a whole bolt of beautiful fabric with one sentence? How does the vendor know whether or not she's good for it?
What's the big deal? It does a lot more things these days than just "show the web". You are free not to use the feature. Clearly if no one uses it they'll remove it from the code. It doesn't really affect you at all if you never use it. If some people got their way we'd still be using lynx.
> Would there be a better way to implement P2P payments without a cryptocurrency?
There's tons of cool P2P web stuff to do that isn't payments. And I don't want my browser to have a payment mechanism baked in anyway.
Along a different line of criticism, my bet is P2P payments in the long run is a nonstarter because once legislation catches up (which it will) every peer will need to be as compliant with financial regulations as a bank which is no fun to run as a peer so things centralize and we're back where we started.
And Bitcoin is absolutely not a positive. It's incredibly destructive to the environment (and in some cases, national economies and power grids) to the extent even diehard cryptocurrency advocates are warning everyone away from Proof-of-Work in favor of alternative schemes like Proof-of-Stake. Bitcoin is notable for being the one that popularized the tech, but there have been massive improvements on the core idea since then.
Just thought i'd jump in with a couple cool projects I have heard of recently that may interest you (i'm not affiliated in any way, just think they are cool):
Note that development of beakerbrowser has been dropped for a couple years now. The hyper/dat protocol fatigue is also in a heavily unstable state.
Which kind of confirms the previous commenter's argument about all things crypto being about pump n' dump projects that get abandoned quickly after their coin offerings.
> The hyper/dat protocol fatigue is also in a heavily unstable state.
What makes you say that? Hypercore just launched a major upgrade that includes multi-writer support.
> Which kind of confirms the previous commenter's argument about all things crypto being about pump n' dump projects that get abandoned quickly after their coin offerings.
Transport (Tor) or somehow not using your protocol of choice was never the problem. The blocker to solving centralization has always been that people who browse HN suck at making things usable.
Building a usable frontend first is never going to get you excited about a project, but the only way we are going to get mass adoption of decentralization is to make it as simple as TikTok or Chrome.
I'm also sorry it is just "another bitcoin project." If you happen to have $20 million kicking around to fund the project so they don't have to depend on crypto, by all means reach out to them. Alternatively, use that big brain of yours to figure out a better way of funding a company that doesn't make money off its users.
• Zoom, without Zoom.
• Google Docs, without Google.
• Medium, without Medium.
• WhatsApp, without WhatsApp.
• Payments, without banks.
• Identity, without the state.
A few quick points
- The percentage of internet users who care that the above services are centralized is likely less than 1% and probably much less
- If the open source movement is any indication, the percentage of people in that small group who want to pay to build such decentralized services is also very small
- There is no mention of a moderation slash policing mechanism. The idea that "The State" will allow people to trade child porn or buy and sell ghost guns without interference is ludicrous
My intuition tells me that there is a network law that hasn't been formulated yet that says that decentralized networks trend towards centralized super nodes when certain contraints and requirements are placed on the decentralized network (or maybe there is one and I haven't heard about it)
> My intuition tells me that there is a network law that hasn't been formulated yet that says that decentralized networks trend towards centralized super nodes when certain contraints and requirements are placed on the decentralized network (or maybe there is one and I haven't heard about it)
There’s a generalized version, if not one specific to blockchains and cryptocurrencies: In complex, non-linear dynamic systems, the critical resources of the system tend to concentrate and consolidate over time, due to positive feedback, winner-take-all, and similar effects inherent in these systems. Decentralized systems are subject to these dynamics too, as we’re seeing with both mining/validating concentration and ownership of the wealth in these systems.
People are aware of the problem, but it’s probably unsolvable, deterministically at least.
In broader society, in the past, such trends have tended to eventually result in some kind of collapse or revolution (French, Bolshevik, etc). It’s like there’s a natural asymptote to the concentration of resources, that forces a (painful) reset once they become too concentrated.
> In complex, non-linear dynamic systems, the critical resources of the system tend to concentrate and consolidate over time, due to positive feedback, winner-take-all, and similar effects inherent in these systems. Decentralized systems are subject to these dynamics too,
I've come across various essays and posts that make this point tangentially, but not much that investigates it directly. If you are aware of any, links would be appreciated.
> It’s like there’s a natural asymptote to the concentration of resources, that forces a (painful) reset once they become too concentrated.
Likewise, if you know of work to determine how concentrated is too concentrated, that would be interesting.
Game theory applies well to many scenarios in cryptcurrency and decentralized efforts. People always want more power, at least the people who end up at the top do. There is no limit to that desire for power and control so it's inevitable that it ends up concentrated at the top.
You just described a business model for startups. And likely this startup!
Any decentralized network will create abundance, but also all the problems of abundance - identity, filtering, search, stability, etc. Some trusted gateways or intermediaries are then created to solve those problems. And then we're in a race to get a monopoly, one that well-capitalized startups can win.
A "browser" is a play to control or at least have influence over all of these experiences, just like IE was for Microsoft or Chrome is for Google.
If the browser has actual native support for interacting with EVM chains and IPFS, supporting user-friendly features like ENS or UD domains, allowing anyone to publish a page or an app in a decentralized manner, it certainly has value especially with the current centralization (e.g. FB/Twitter/Google: censorship, banks: control over money etc).
If this stack gives the control over data back to the users, there will be some value. But I assume, even with this stack there will again be tendencies towards centralization driven by convenience, efficiency and simply bargaining power...
Finally something that looks interesting and useable coming from the “web3” crowd.
But I’m a skeptic. I’ll remain a skeptic until I see something that works as well as our existing tools. I’ll also remain a skeptic if I need to join the cryptocurrency cult for it to be usable.
Most of the things listed here are worthwhile ideas. I want safety and privacy on the web for everyone. But I don’t want to get involved with Bitcoin if that’s a prerequisite.
The world needs this in a way where they can install a browser like any other, and just start using it. No wallets, no angle. Just let it be a free tool of communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing.
> The world needs this in a way where they can install a browser like any other, and just start using it. No wallets, no angle. Just let it be a free tool of communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing.
If you don't care about identity, payments, etc then is there a reason you couldn't do that with this browser? But also, as much as I don't like the near-monopoly situation, we do have a pretty usable mature set of options for that already in Chrome and Firefox.
Ethereum et al are toy systems. We're only barely scratching the surface of what we can do with them. The early Internet was a toy system, and look how it blossomed into this marvel we call the The (modern) Internet.
Failure is an opportunity to start again more intelligently. I have no doubt the Internet will eventually become distributed and decentralized. Just add time and political will.
Regular money and computers can be tool for many, including bad actors too.
Just because it's an open platform that makes speculative assets emerge doesn't mean the underlying technology and philosophy has great potential. I'm pretty much sure that the killer app of crypto is not here yet, and when it is here, it will change many views.
Convinced? I've been in crypto since 2013 and see where things are going. Also living in a corrupted country with lots of state control over media and money, I see how taking back control would change the society and dynamics.
The misconception here is that the internet is not decentralized. The original idea of the internet is to be decentralized. There are just very large centralized silos built on top of its structure.
I think you and GP are both right. The original idea and design of the internet is decentralized, but we're at a point where it's pretty hard to do that. Email being the best example. I'm quite the self-hoster and I've self-hosted email before, but even I pay for it now because unless you own your IP address and have invested years into building reputation, deliverability is abysmal. And one accidental click of "this is spam" by a recipient and your reputation is shot to hell.
So philosophical you're right, it's decentralized. But practically, it's more complicated.
How do P2P video calls work? For a 10 people call do you need N*(N-1)/2 = 45 connections? Do residential internet connections have that much upload bandwidth ?
It offloaded routing to peers that had better hardware/bandwidth. The downside was that many people were not aware of that at the time, myself included, thus on some computers Skype would seemingly consume more resources than expected.
Not to be confused by: https://impervious.com creators of another browser called Beacon. [0]
As for this, Lightning is not even Bitcoin, so what is the point of even mentioning 'decentralization'? Lightning is known to be significantly (and growing to be) more centralized and defeats the whole point of it all since there is a relentless push for people to use that instead of using Bitcoin on-chain. Lightning's centralization is inevitable.
Hence this, does that also mean Bitcoin has failed in its original purpose if everyone is going to use Lightning?
And we have uninformed comments on Lightning Network (LN - have you ever tried to run on its own? As Elizabeth Stark said Friday - “LN has its own native token called sats and it will be work stacking some”! Education is critical
I'm sure 'Satoshi' also meant that Bitcoin was supposed to be a method for peer-to-peer payments and as an electronic cash system and not hijacked to be a 'store of value' or 'digital gold' to 'HODL' and speculate on.
> I'm sorry, this simply isn't true.
I'm sorry but anecdotes are not 'sources'.
The Lightning Network is an off-chain 'layer 2' system that is NOT Bitcoin. It is centralized by design [0], defeating the entire point of using (and promoting) decentralized on-chain payments for Bitcoin.
I hate to bring it to you, but much has changed after 6 years and the 13 years around the supposed original intention of Bitcoin.
Unless you're part of a centralized settlement network that already has channels between nodes, you have to open and fund channels yourself which doesn't help one-off payments at all.
Yeah, sorry I believe it when I see it. That just reads like a fever dream especially when looking at the credentials of their 11 employees on LinkedIn and reading their "API" documentation.
All of these "X without X" claims seem to be misleading. I thought it was actually able to communicate to people using zoom but it looks like it is just their own conferencing software and so on?
Don't know whether it succeeds or not, but we definitely need more projects like this supporting the decentralized Internet, especially dApps, for better adoption.
How so? It doesn't trade decentralization for speed, but rather it just achieves speed in another way (requiring on-chain consensus only on channel open/close rather than every transaction). The decentralization is still there, except it moves from miners to nodes run by users. Am I missing something obvious?
Wow. An impressive write-up (albeit from a marketing POV). While, I am vaguely familiar with the various P2P and its protocol specs, the other protocols are newer and was not able to “quickly” find its protocol specs.
Now we wait for various 3rd party evaluators to assess and audit (and of course, publish).
Be nice to see a demo ISO or something for evaluation.
What's the business model? A "traditional finance" version of this would likely be aiming to get lots of transactions it could extract a couple basis points out of, but that seems impossible with a p2p architecture.
All those "MSCS required, PhD preferred" hires they're making ain't working for free...
As with all these initiatives, I salute them and morally support their development. However how do I go installing it and start using it right away like very other piece of software I use? If I, a tech savvy guy, can't do it, then how do I even tell my normie friends how to use it?
An interesting concept in theory, minus the cryptocurrency nonsense. Unfortunately, a browser is already a pretty ambitious project even using an open source engine, adding in a gigantic bespoke productivity suite on top of it is a massive undertaking - it's a certainty that this software is going to suck hard compared to the alternatives, but... maybe an MVP is enough to gain traction, if they have a shitton of funding and the project stays alive it might be worthwhile with a few years of engineering time.
