[muggermuch]

I like this a lot!

But: I feel the more of these services come to being, the more likely it is that every website starts putting up gates to keep the bots away.

Sort of like a weird GenAI take on Cixin Liu's Dark Forest hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis).

(Edited to add a reference.)

[marcellus23]

Responding just because it's a pet peeve of mine: Cixin Liu did not invent the dark forest hypothesis. People were discussing it, and writing science fiction books about it, for decades before the 3BP books were published. Nothing against him, and he definitely helped popularize the concept, but I think it's incorrect to refer to it as "Cixin Liu's hypothesis".

[sooheon]

Was curious as a lover of the 3BP series, google gave me this:

"We've been sitting in our tree chirping like foolish birds for over a century now, wondering why no other birds answered. The galactic skies are full of hawks, that's why." (The Forge of God, Legend edition, 1989, pg 315).

Yeah, same concept and even the same imagery.

Source: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/research/astro/people/...

[marcellus23]

The Forge of God and its sequel, Anvil of the Stars, are amazing books for anyone interested in the dark forest theory, by the way. A bit slow and contemplative, so you have to be in the right mood, but they're one of my favorite reads of the last few years.

I think there's a passage that even uses an analogy of a forest, though I'm not sure.

[dankwizard]

But he is responsible for the name, not the concept. So yes it is Cixin Liu's Dark Forest hypothesis.

[diggan]

Just like Amerigo Vespucci put the name "America" on a map and people starting referring to the New World as such, although he didn't discover it himself.

[throw10920]

> I feel the more of these services come to being, the more likely it is that every website starts putting up gates to keep the bots away

That's why we need microtransactions, because I'd rather be able to have both nice AI services and useful data repositories that they pull from, than have to choose just one. (and that one would be AI services, because you can't stop all the scrapers, so data sources will just keep tightening their restrictions)

[pjc50]

We're never going to have microtransactions because of microfraud - and AI makes this problem worse rather than better.

[throw10920]

What is this thing you've invented, "microfraud", and where's the evidence it exists?

[pjc50]

All financial transactions have a fraud risk. Microtransactions are no different. But any microtransaction system faces a choice: continually pop up payment confirmations (unusably annoying), or automatically accept charges (vulnerable to fraud).

Click fraud on adverts is a form of microfraud, and pay-per-click is the existing form of microtransaction.

[throw10920]

There's zero evidence that this exists, if only because there's very few examples of working microtransactions systems at all. Adverts are not micro transactions. (I don't care how you want to use that word - nobody else uses it like that)

But, all of the systems that I've seen (Blendle, video games) have had no problem at all with fraud, and a very small amount of annoyance to value delivered.

There's simply no reason to believe that this will be a problem, either empirically or theoretically.

[pjc50]

"I'm going to build a system for transferring money, and I am confident that nobody will ever try to defraud it" -- someone who is about to lose all their money

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15592192

Unsolved, difficult problems of micropayments:

- pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?

- so do you give refunds a la steam?

- pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying

- pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?

- pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)

- pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off

- pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?

- pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?

> If it was that easy, it would have been done.

Part 2: business model problems!

- getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of card TX for pure digital goods

- nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%

- winner-take-all effects are strong

- Play store et al already exist, why not use that?

- Free substitute goods are just a click away

- Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is

- No real consumer demand for micropayments

=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero

- existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money

- friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned

- first most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)

- Internet has actually killed previously working micro-ish payment systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.

- accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?

[tremarley]

This would be amazing