@serapath My question is very specifically about it 'catching on', though. Sure, it would have probably *existed*, but the early broad adoption was primarily driven by frustrations with the US banking system, and the then-promises of lower transaction fees.

I'm not sure it would have ever reached that point of mass interest if it weren't for the terrible banking structures in the US inviting people to look for alternatives. Only very few people ever cared about the *philosophical* underpinnings really.

@serapath (Also, "unbanked" is a bit of a misnomer because these metrics often include people who *do* have access to eg. mobile payment systems that functionally act as a bank for them, but just aren't recognized as such by eg. the ECB or Federal Reserve)

@joepie91

I assume it is cheaper and faster than traditional bank transfers to anywhere around the world.

bitcoin itself is probably quite expensive if you send small amounts, but lightning has almost no fees at all and i have never seen the kind of micropayments nostr supports and calls "zaps".

people share them like "likes" ...worth fractions of cents

@serapath Anywhere within SEPA, bank transfers are typically free, including internationally; and stuff like Wise is also very low-cost and, crucially, much simpler and faster to use than cryptocurrencies.

Like, that's the whole thing with cryptocurrencies and so many things like it that are hyped - sure, they do something that could be useful, but they don't actually do it *better* than the things that already exist.

(Also, I'm extremely not a fan of trying to 'monetize' social interactions. It creates toxic dynamics. I'd consider that an anti-feature.)

@joepie91

i havent seen a social network yet or any payment platform that allows to pay fractions of cents to others by pressing "like".

Integrating a servixe like paypal or stripe or others into an app is also quite a bit of an undertaking depending on what features you want.

So i assume thats something where things never tet managed to became developer or usee friendly enough then?

@serapath No, literally, it's just a terrible idea. Attaching monetary value to social interactions makes things worse for everybody. It shouldn't be done.

(Flattr did try something similar in the past and it was a failure)

@joepie91

why did flattr fail?
i mean given how underfunded open source is, it doesnt sound too bad to allow people to tip and support folks.
also, not everyone is a coder, some people make different things.

i dont have a strong opinion on it, but who knows, maybe it can help with getting more ppl funded 🤷‍♀️

@serapath Flattr failed due to a combination of low interest (it wasn't worth it for people for tiny amounts), and the operation of the service itself not being sustainable with the low revenue.

And yes, supporting people's work is a good thing, but that is crucially something *very* different from "attaching monetary value to social interactions", and you don't need tiny microtransactions for that. Entirely different problem space.

While donation systems as they exist today certainly are not perfect, the funding issues people have broadly aren't technical in nature. They're a mix of political, cultural, and most of all "if a bunch of capitalists are hoarding all the money, there's simply not a lot of money to go around". Those are the real problems that need to be addressed, and you can't do that with an app.

(A big part of the cultural issue is actually that people think of donations as a special case of payments, in terms of "you need to distribute donations across everyone whose work you enjoy"; in reality that model doesn't make sense for donations at all, it just needs to work out on the whole and it doesn't actually matter who sends money to who.)

@joepie91

yeah, to set up an extra accoubt just for tiny amounts it annoying. at least would need to be "tap to pay" easy with existing accounts i guess.

i like that bitcoin makes money itself open source too 🙂. i guess thats one reason why you can use it anywhere without empowering again a single billionaire who owns such a service.

@serapath The problem is that you can't. The existing capitalist power relations have long been replicated in the Bitcoin ecosystem, just in a slightly different form.

You just fundamentally cannot fix a political problem with technology.

@joepie91
hmm...

one thing i wonder though, thinking of the big billionaires... where di they get there money from?

customers? the many nornal ppl giving them their savings?
or maybe money printers? ...governments, banks, etc..

So without the money printer, if it was instead open source money, they would never be able to get so much ridiculous money it seems to me, no?

@serapath Exploitation, especially labour exploitation, same as with any other kind of money. "Printing money" isn't how billionaires get rich.

@joepie91 yeah,
bowdo billionaires even pay salaries for labour?

who has so much money to pay for all the salaries? 10-20 years ago, they werent that rich.
They got money from investors/investment banks and governments too.

They didnt get any money from "the litle ppl" to try and start spaceX or tesla or airbnb or uber, etc..., no?

@joepie91

i dont perceive it as social interaction, more like tipping a bar tender or donations for a cause or sponsoring stuff on opencollective. some who have and are inspired can tip the creator of anything, not just open source code.

i definitely wish traditional services would make it as easy as bitcoin to tip what ppl make. to me its a blocker AND any traditional service would need to have so much adoption... it would create yet another bezos?

@serapath The problem is that that is not how it would actually work in practice, as has been demonstrated by basically every single "earn money by posting" platform in existence.

What will actually happen is that you make "earning money" the core metric in your system, and therefore people will start hyper-optimizing for that, and in a matter of months your entire platform will just be profit-optimized slop of no authentic value to try and maximize income.

Quite literally the worst thing you can do to *anything* is to make money the primary objective. It should only ever exist as an auxiliary thing, at most, and "you can tip anything trivially" is the opposite of that. The friction is necessary to not create a capitalist hellscape.

@serapath (You can see this reflected in how basically every single thing that cryptocurrency touches, immediately goes to shit and becomes miserable)

@joepie91 yes, but so far, all the scams seem to always be connected to "web3" and not bitcoin. ...with their startup mentality, their finance folks, their big crypto investors and presales and pump and dumps and so on, "shilling" new tokens all the time.

so i assume they are not all the same.
i imagine the tech bros and scammers of this world just jumped "on board" wen they saw and learn about bitcoin? 🤷‍♀️

@joepie91 i dont really know, but i really tried many open source funding platforms, applied many times to NGI, and other forms of grants, used open collective ...
i am hesitant to use "github sponsors", to not empower yet another closed source proprietary platform by microsoft.

...i think and personally feel the need to get sustainable funding for open source work and open source money seems generally like a better idea than what we otherwise had so far.

@joepie91

agree.

..., maybe it needs p2p focused social networks to empower users with full control to consent to what is seen from whom.

ppl shouldnt just come, cold call me, knock on my door, sell vaccum cleaners & stuff. they should be decent, not just spam me with ads.
i would never tip/sponsor anyone who is so rude.

to me, the "capitalist hellscape" seems to come from $$ printers govs/banks who enrich musk/bezos & co.

@joepie91 like...
wouldnt all the tech bro billionaires since ...i guess gates, probably earlier, never be so rich to buy the whole world if it wasnt for money printing investors who just shuffle it to them to buy and pay everyone?

it would become much harder and they would actually need to create some value for society to get anyone to give them funding.
ooen source money seems to have some potential - what we have now will otherwise never change it feels

@joepie91
interesting. from what i see on social media, bitcoiners are quite reluctant to any other form of crypto (they call shitcoin), because
- better distributied than other crypto
- 21 million hard limit
- proof of work

Also, not sure if banking in EU or elsewhere is really better than in the US, but then again, probably depends how you look at it 🙂

@serapath Oh, sure, but "Bitcoiners" is a very very very small group, and that group alone would have never caused Bitcoin to catch on.

The mass "adoption" of Bitcoin happened in roughly two stages; first, a bunch of actual shops and companies accepting it as a payment method, while it was being marketed as a fast and low-fees money transfer method, and then a ton of 'traders' (ie. capitalists, including commercial miners) trying to extract profit from it.

The traders then went on to spawn a lot of other cryptocurrencies, with a fig leaf of functionality that never actually became reality, because they fundamentally didn't offer much over Bitcoin anyway.

It's that first group that I'm thinking of here - in the US the existing payment infrastructure is generally nightmarish, both for consumers and vendors, and this functioned as a selling point for that group to adopt Bitcoin. Which then made it interesting to traders, which eventually sustained the hype themselves.

Had that first group not been there, the second group likely also would not have been, and it would likely have forever remained a weird nerd thing.

@joepie91 interesting.

maybe. i have no clue what did and didnt help bitcoin. i see a pattern between average bitcoiners and average non-bitcoin crypto person. Non-bitcoin crypto (web3) seems to be a mix of silicon valley and wallstreet investors and is mostly about schemes and scams 😄
The narrative around bitcoin i see these days is "end all money printing" to "save/heal the world".