Ants Are Everywhere

@sugar_in_your_tea @felsiq

I like the idea of GNU Taler a lot. I honestly didn’t realize it was still around. I’ll have to explore its source code sometime.

> But honestly, I also don’t care what the currency is, I just want a way to pay a website without seeing ads and without making an account.

This is what I would like too. I think there are a few reasons it will be hard to switch to this model. Perhaps the main one is that the advertising model allows sites to charge more and more attention for the same (or degraded) service, and that’s harder to do if people see their money being spent. Another is that sites want to be able to charge more for popular content. That’s easy with advertising, but with real payments as the price increases demand will slow down. So it will be harder for sites to get massive views. Finally, I think most sites overvalue their content and direct payment may increase the amount of spam.

> Mozilla probably wouldn’t be able to convince Google to join, but it could probably be an extension, and they could maybe convince Apple to join.

I don’t think Mozilla is interested in this sort of solution. Meta needs Mozilla and the Anonym ad tracking tech to fight the attacks from Google and Apple made in the name of privacy. Meta has tons of money to make that happen. Previously Google needed Mozilla to prove it wasn’t a browser monopoly. Now that source of cash is gone and Meta’s executives are inside Mozilla. Remember when Facebook made a bunch of people sad just to see if they could? Or when they spied on teens’ phone usage through a VPN app? The people who made those decisions are now making decisions for Mozilla.

@felsiq

> that gets people jailed for visiting lgtbq+ sites or some shit when their payment providers are controlled by fascist governments

If that’s your threat model, then there may be an additional threat of timing analysis on the blockchain.

If your threat actor has the resources of a nation state and is able to tap your ISP, the site’s ISP, and your VPN’s ISP, then you probably also don’t want a permanent pseudonymous record of your activity in the form of a blockchain.

This is just an initial thought; I don’t have any concrete reason to believe that blockchain forensics + timing analysis is any stronger than just one of those on its own.

@tetris11 @GnuLinuxDude

Netscape exited to AOL in 1998. The Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has since then been a successful venture capitalist who loves cryptocurrencies and Donald Trump.

@tetris11 @GnuLinuxDude

Mozilla Corporation – which makes Firefox – is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation. The foundation is a nonprofit.

A nonprofit can’t generate a lot of business income unrelated to its mission. Firefox used to generate a lot of income, so it had to be spun off into a taxable entity called Mozilla Corporation.

The corporation doesn’t have investors in the usual sense.

@felsiq

Good point thanks for catching that. The receipt itself can name any anonymous identifier like a crypto address. I was just intending to note that the blockchain is essentially a wasteful timestamp server that doesn’t seem needed for this application.

As a practical matter, the website has your IP, when you visited, what you looked at etc. So you already have to trust them with your privacy. And there’s a question of whether public policy would allow web traffic to be untraceable by default. But certainly the payment processor doesn’t need to know things like which websites you visit.

@felsiq @sugar_in_your_tea

IMO a solution that doesn’t use a blockchain is better. The premise of a blockchain is that either (1) everybody keeps a copy of every website everyone visits, or (2) there’s a trusted party (or parties) somewhere that compresses the database.

We already have trusted parties on the web, and recording that much duplicate data is bad both for resources (bandwidth, energy consumption, disk usage) and for privacy.

There’s a whole field of blockchain forensics and it will get even more interesting as quantum computers with more qubits start spinning up.

Really sites and visitors just have to agree on a signed bill/receipt and hand the transaction over to any existing payment processor.