that’s because you are charged with fiat. but if this charge is in safecoins (that you earn by letting a vault running when you do another work on pc or when you sleep), you will see the things differently. you will love to buy items that have price tags and you will leave away items that are free.
take for example a computer game in which you are required to pay for special set of boots (for example). if you are charged with fiat (via in app purchase), you won’t buy it because it’s not free. BUT if the boots cost is in the game’s currency that you earn by defeating monsters, you will gladly buy the boots. not just buy them, but always look for better and more expensive boots.
the man stated this explicitely here:
i totally agree that the barrier should be break forever(but by rich i understand whales or people who cannot MORALLY and RESPECTFULLY spend in their lifetime the wealth they have). but in my opinion you can’t do that by not letting people set prices for their work. let the people set prices. if they set them too big, nobody will buy and it’s their loss, not yours, not mine, not the network’s. what you can really do to break the barrier is to limit a person’s maximum number of safecoins he could get and store. that’s how you can break barriers. take for example todays world wealth distribution: 1% of people own 70% of world’s wealth. 80% of people own only 3% of the world total wealth. does this sound logic to anyone? to me it’s an hypocrisy. take the example of the ‘wales’ that recently dumped their safecoins and caused economic turbulences.
how on earth can we have a network max capacity of safecoins and not a maximum capacity a person (account) can hold???
lets take a kindergarden example:
network issues a maximum of 10 safecoins. 2 ‘whales’ control 6 safecoins of them. the rest of the 4 safecoins have to be used and traded between the other 30 people (smaller fishes than the big whales). big problems inevitably arrive: divisibility, inflation and other economic aspects that could be avoided better if the system does not allow whales. why is it so hard to accept the fact that there has to be a max limit between the wealth spread among people?
let the people do their proffession to get to the max wealth (let the artists charge what they think their works is worth, let programmers charge what their applications they think they are worth, let pornographers charge what they think their ‘work’ is worth). let people do what they do best to achieve that maximum wealth limit. DO NOT tell artists what their work is worth and DO NOT let them accumulate wealth infinitely, because safecoins are not infinitely. same as with developers, pornoraphers and others.
hope this helps
The way I’d previously perceived how SAFE would work (and what got me super excited), is somewhat a combination of the two approaches being bandied around these days.
Baked in network payments via GETs (which are always free)
Some APP that achieves the above.
So either you put your content up in the standard SAFE way: free (to access). And you make some cash that way. But you also gain the option for anyone using said app to contribute more (at a price recommended).
I’d hope that whatever app was made would make this easy, with amounts that are tiny and pain free as @DavidMtl mentions above. So the network might encourage this app to be installed, and there could be a base rate X, so any content you access (with app enabled) garners this fee by default (if a wallet is set) as well as the network GET reward.
Then your CC could opt to charge 1.5X or something. And a little notification warns you before you access the content. “This is 1.5 times the base X. That cool with you?”.
Added onto that, the ‘app’ purpose could be for an ad free / fair content experience. So the user is encouraged to opt in because the content is ‘guaranteed’ to be ad free.
*not actual guarantee, but I’d hope the network / reuploader effect would keep people in line here.
TL;DR: Network remains free. Optional layer for ‘ad free content support’ which achieves the above. Super win for all.
Aside: I’m pretty excited about the potential of SAFE on this basis. I’m a novelist (struggling / attempted), and I’m going to go down the self publish route. My plan was to put it up for free and ask for donations (I don’t want Amazon to make any money off of my work). SAFE would be perfect with such a system in place. I’d still keep a WWW presence /version, but I’d direct them here.
I’d thought about adding in ads in between chapters (hate the idea), or maybe just ads for donations / ePub versions etc. But I dislike all that. SAFE, would be my ideal. And I’m pretty much itching to get it up on a live network to test out the possibilites here. I honestly think some SAFE combo could change content creation drastically, which would be rad.
Yes, very true. However, people still find ways to earn an income, just using different routes.
Case in point: A couple of years ago, our software company was sold to a bigger company. We used to sell the application as a yearly subscription model. Now it is free. Yet… We are generating more revenue than before.
In short, the software has become a conduit to enable the selling of something else. Something more important to both our those who used to pay us annually and (critically) their (new) customers. We increased the size of the pie, rather than trying to grab a bigger piece.
We see this repeating all over the place. We don’t need the crutch of IP and its enforces. We just need to find ways to allow other models to easily flourish.
The hybrid way suggested above was endorsed by David Irvine where he suggested PtP would not bar tipping.
@bugsbunny personally I love the idea of wealth limits because it keeps people engaged and collaborative instead of insulated and controlling. It could be adapted in a way to the suggestions above.
Hybrid system:
Voidable Auto Micropayments Capped per Work
Auto micropayment per view that can be after-the-fact vetoed with a grace period like retail exchange. Crucially this individually voidable micro payment collection system would have a collective cap per work and a velocity limit, and a small annual cap per artist or creative person. Its purpose would be to support the developing producer in trying to find their footing kind of like a creative welfare system.
End User Centric Creative Production System
The true driver would be a “like” system designed to sustain the mature producer’s ability to maximize their creative contribution over their life time. This “like” system would have an auto increment preset by the end user, maybe set to zero but but possibly with a system notation about what the global indexed system optimum minimum increment might be, but a rate that the end user could easily and safely up increment (maybe right click with smooth dial slider) with grace period on revocation. The “like,” the up vote, and the payment could be easily switched on/off independently both in preset and on the fly.
You don’t necessarily have to like to pay. And you’d want anonymous factor tree checks to filter false likes.
Due Process to Prevent Gaming the System
But there is due process here. We want people to pay only from a position where they can fairly appraise and set a value. Only they know what it is and save for a very very controlled amount with robust voidability that should always come after the fact and be understood as simply a means to support the continued production of creative works. Crucially its the end user that sets this cost as in a tip because only the end user is in a position to evaluate what a work is worth to them in a system of abundance where the cost to reproduce the work is marginal.
Such a system shouldn’t be part of the core network as its a security concern. Its kind of like a escrow system in a way.
free market will mean free for some, slavery for others.
Free market means voluntary interactions. It’s not slavery if one choose to be a slave. Plus, even if he choose to be a slave. the slave cannot make a promise to not to break the contract. The slave would null the contract, and go do something else. The slaver cannot enforce it because the slave would simply run away.
To OP, I like this idea. Very similar to my other idea, pay to download.
I think the ability to effortlessly make micropayments already solves the problem(s) of piracy and funding open source development.
Agreed, open source communities are more thriving more than ever thanks to micro-payments. Take valve/steam for example, giving users the ability to earn in game item, and allow it be exchange on the market. Some users landed a lucky 200 dollar item. One could use it to brag, or sell it for 200 dollars based on market value. With 200 dollars, he could invest that into indie developers, or items, or something else inside of that network. Valve is thriving based on digital cosmic items, and games. Item is synonymous to stocks. You invested and use the stock it given to you for entertainment values. If nobody cared about those digital items, valve would lose money. The downfall is that it is pegged to the dollar. You can’t cash out the steam credit.
Safe is huge update for gamers, and indie developers. We channel our money into the system that benefits the users. This is called the osmotic strategy. Get users to use the system, while the godvernment is becoming obsolete. This will flourish micro-payments. I rather get paid right after the action is completed. Instead of waiting for two+ weeks to get a paycheck, then take it to the bank. This will incentize users to get paid by the minutes. One could automate micropayment, when he is clocked in for work, he starts earning safecoins.
But what if you could reset everything. Reset all debts, all wealth, all ownership and start from scratch. What if you could create a market where the barrier of entry is the lowest possible. A place where anyone is free to enter any industries with a minimum amount of investment. A place where no gouvernement can give you an edge. A place where the amount of oil your country controls has no meaning. Where the wealth of your family is irrelevant. A place where the only thing that matter to determine your success is your own creativity. What kind of wealth distribution would we see in that kind of world?
I like micro-paywalls because it’s empowering. It creates the first ever free market and it puts every single soul on an equal footing regardless of their origin and their status. I might be an optimist but I can’t help but wonder what kind of marvoulous progress this would lead to.
When you put everyone on the same market and reduce the barrier of entry to nothingness something interesting happens. It gives an edge to the people living in countries where the cost of living is lower. The reason is simple, what is cheap to buy for the rich becomes extremely profitable to create for the poor. What is unsustainable for one is sustainable for another. Wealth is being naturally redistributed to raise the quality of living of the poorer.
This was not possible in the physical world because the barrier of entry is always very high but in the digital world where ideas are the product this is very achievable and Safe is in a very good position to make it happen.
Micro-paywalls may not be perfect but I think it’s a pretty good place to start off. It will bring unique contents to the network, it feeds creativity, it will make the economy fluid, it’s not gameable, it’s easy to understand and it gives you hell of a sells pitch to get people on board. I mean seriously, what else do we want? End world hunger? Actually, it helps with that too. So how about we give it a try?
I’m talking about this being backed right in the network. It could be done by an app but it would be much much more useful if it was a feature of the network, this way, any app or process can tap into it.
It can work technically maybe but realistically app devs would tell MaidSafe to screw itself six ways from Sundays.
It doesnt take into account user-generated content the likes of Facebook, Youtube, Imgur, Reddit etc.
It cant.
How can SAFE tell an app dev what, how much and how the network pays his users. And not only this but now you have this overly complex beast of a system which no doubt will have issues, how do you manage it all? How do you manage what the network wants with what the user AKA content creator wants and what the app developer wants? You cant.
I have been saying all along SAFE should not involve itself in what an app developer and his content creators decide to do.
This should all be up to those two parties SAFE > APP DEVELOPER > CONTENT CREATOR
If they want to offer an incentive to content creators then they need to incentivise app developers to build apps that allow their content creators to get paid. These could be third party apps that app devs place onto their sites or it could be a holistic solution within the site itself.
Not so. While on Second Life I’m a little more generous and willing to spend money in the form of Lindens because they’re automatically distributed I’m still aware that I need to wait for them to be distributed. Therefore income = time. This is even more explicit in your example about safecoin as it would be, as you say, generated as you sleep. Therefore money = time. So one could equate money to the amount of time it takes to generate the safecoin. How much are those boots worth? A few minutes? An hour? A whole night? While one might be more liberal with one’s spending one also has to compare with what else one wants to pay for relative to how fast the income is generated. The value of money can be determined by what it can be traded for, including time and energy.
Also keep in mind there is a fiat cost to generate safecoin as well as one needs to pay internet and electricity bills and other annoying costs like that. Granted you don’t pay those costs directly to the network but good luck generating safecoin with no power to your computer.
How do you think one GETS Lindens above and beyond the monthly distribution? (Which costs like $80 a year.) You pay for them. Also you have to pay, in Lindens, to upload content to SL. So you are at all active on SL and do anything halfway exciting you end up paying or needing to get a job. Either way $L are just another form of controlled fiat currency. Frankly I think games should start adopting cryptocurrency. It would make life so much simpler for them and for everyone else.
Ok, I’m not familiar with how second life works. But it seems Lindens is relatively tide to fiat. For safecoin, it’s more like gold in wow. Of course you will be careful how you spend it, but there’s a lot less friction then if it was fiat directly.
@goindeep I think you misunderstand what I’m proposing. The network doesn’t decide anything. It’s just the uploader who is able to set a price on any public content he uploads. It’s really simple, you can see it as a shopping cart for data built-in. For app dev we can have other incentives, but that’s another topic.
Sounds good. The goal is to empower people with options on how to get value out of their work. Maybe when you set your paywall at 0 it defaults to that.