There are some old topics on this, and as far as I can tell the position on ‘The Economics of SAFE Coin’ is still broadly similar to the blog post below, but I haven’t seen much chat lately, and to my mind it seems a really important part of the wider appeal and development of the SAFE network. Apologies if any of what I’m saying is based on misconceptions, or if it seems insultingly obvious - I’m fairly new here.
As we know, one of the major problems with the legacy internet is its reliance on advertising revenue, which is unsatisfactory to both users, who pay with their personal privacy and exposure to low quality clickbait nonsense, and content creators, who are unable to be paid honestly for their work, partly due to the ‘free’ culture of the internet, and partly because of the inconvenience and/or insecurity of many payment systems. I am thinking of any services that can be delivered digitally, such as knowledge, art, music, video - the things that many people spend most of their time on the internet consuming. Journalism as a dying industry is perhaps a particularly good example.
On the other side of the issue, one of the problems with Bitcoin is that for a variety of reasons it has not yet managed to break out to having much utility for people in the wider world, although I am sure this will only be a matter of time.
However, as far as i understand, it should be easy for the SAFE network to address the first problem, and in doing so leapfrog bitcoin in the utility stakes, and take a large step towards helping the network achieve mass adoption.
This part of the economy seems to me potentially huge, but I haven’t seen much talk of it on the forum, and in the blog it is more in passing that Nick Lambert mentions ‘paying for access to third party apps.’
I imagine a plug-in that developers can use in their Safenet sites, which then communicates with Authenticator, would be one way to implement this. If from the client side it was part of the SAFE network package it would engender a lot of trust in it to the extent that people are happy to use it with one click, whereas on the internet one of the problems for this type of one click convenience is that people are used to being very wary of pop-ups, and of authorising payments to third parties. To avoid being too click-happy one could put payment caps on one’s own Authenticator! Perhaps even to avoid too much clickbait the minimum payment for access time to a site could be a day, rather than just micro payments for access to one page at a time.
Having a revenue app like this available early in the project would be useful in attracting big websites onto the SAFE network, and thus making the network more attractive for clients as well. It is hard for a website to have any dignity when they are constantly begging you to turn off your ad blocker!
Apologies if this has all been gone through before, or if someone is already working on it (I’m sure market forces will bring it into being eventually anyway,) but I think it’s also an issue that raises some interesting questions about things like copyright, whether culture should be professional (and therefore to at least some extent centralised,) and what people’s attitudes are as to whether this sort of payment structure would price some clients out of the Safenet. Personally I would be happy to have a convenient, flexible and secure way of paying for a more civilised and better quality internet, but i’m also aware that not everyone has that privilege.
I guess the point is that in order for the Safenet to really rival the internet in the quality and variety of its content, it surely has to find a way of plugging the funding gap caused by being less attractive to advertisers, and this is the most obvious one to me, so I thought I’d start a discussion about it…