satotious's comments

The system has been built to track you in order to show you more relevant ads. Whilst micropayments wont solve every problem pointed out in the documentary, it will offer an alternative business model which doesn’t require pervasive tracking to work. We are working on this problem, shameless plug: satotious.com

Yes that would work for them as they aggregate and pay publishers at the end of the month. Problem with that is Blendle needs to track what users are viewing. If something like that ever got big, it would have everyone's browsing history

The content is encrypted, users get the key when pay or view an ad. We dont host anything

If you are trying to pay on the paywall: You will see a QR code if you click pay - you need a Lightning wallet to be able to scan it. Or, our browser extension acts as a wallet so makes it accessible for non-crypto users. It is very new and a goal for slightly into the future but if you wanted to test it today then download it and email us (ruby at satotious.com) and we will credit your account with 10 Sats so you can test it for free.

Yes I see where you are coming from but I dont think it matters for smaller purchases. You have $10 this month, maybe $10.25 next month, you want to read an article which costs $0.005, are you going to hold off for such a small amount?

Id also like to add, maybe the reason there is so much clickbait/rubbish is because there isn't a viable business model for good quality content? How many subscriptions can people have?

Yes, our initial target audience was users that most likely already had wallets so we didn't want to make it difficult for them to pay. We will be focusing more on UX for non-cyrpto users for the future. We actually hope that both regular and cyrpto users will opt for the extension as it acts as a wallet and also has the auto pay feature. It is very new but if you wanted to test it today then download it and email us (ruby at satotious.com) and we will credit your account with 10 Sats so you can test it for free.

Thanks for your feedback :)

No, we are focusing on paywalls for now. There are quite a few tipping systems using bitcoin lightning if you're interested

Also, whilst the patreon style model has been successful for some, for most creators it simply isn't effective. Unfortunately, a tipping system just doesn't seem to work

Well I would argue ads are micropayments, roughly an ad view is like $0.001. A model based around few users making macropayments, influencing the content that is produced, doesnt speak for everybody.

The flow we are aiming for: users visit a site, they navigate a paywall and see the content is good. They add that domain to the auto-pay list. If it's clickbait, they dont. Hopefully by letting creators charge whatever amount they want, we can produce not just clickbait but well researched articles.

The problem with traditional payment methods like credit cards, visa, paypal etc is the transaction costs. You can't make a $0.01 payments unless you aggregate those. The problem with aggregation for us is the fact we would need to track the sites users visit(huge privacy problem)

Yes, I believe theres a few startups(escher, lastbit, strike) working on converting lightning BTC <-> USD

Thanks :) In terms of our difference with BAT, we are much simpler. Content creators set their price and users pay, we dont track the amount of time spent on a site, we dont make a browser, we haven't created our own coin. It takes 5minutes for a content creator to add the paywall, as easy as adding a script tag. We hope to bring micropayments to the masses, having the option to view an ad hopefully solves the chicken and egg problem as users dont need to convert to micropayments straight away for creators to make money.

To make the process are simple as possible for non-crypto users we are working on a browser extension/app which will act as a wallet and autopay to create a seamless experience. We are working to integrate with an exchange so that users can top up straight from their credit cards and don't need to know anything about Bitcoin.

I guess the biggest threat for the user is the wallet/extension being drained. We recommend users don't store lots of money in there, but given that we are dealing with micropayments there shouldn't be need for high amounts anyway. Giving users more control comes with more risk, but that's the tradeoff and we aim to help educate on ways to mitigate these risks.

We use Bitcoin Lightning Network as it lets us do micropayments without tracking users, we aren't interested in creating a coin or doing an ico.

Thank you for your feedback

Or micropayments :) I understand the aversion to ads but content creators(journalist, musicians, artists, programmers creating oss, etc) and the web as a whole produces useful stuff, it would be good to find a business model which supports them.

Hi :D, thank you for the positive feedback. Hopefully this will incentivize people to host their own content and not rely on centralized platforms.

Thank you so much! If you email us(ruby at satotious.com) your userID, we will credit it with a small amount of btc so you can test the extension auto-pay feature for free.

So far we are getting 95% picking ads vs micropayments, I guess thats to be expected as most people dont have bitcoin lightning wallets yet.

Right now we have demo ads which we create. Our ads are slightly different as they incorporate a captcha.

The permissive permission on the extension is so we can inject the auto-pay functionality. We dont collect your browsing data. Open sourcing the browser extension and paywall is on the road map. The future plan is that users connect their own lightning wallet to the browser extension and publishers do the same for the paywall, therefore we wont see any of those interactions and keep everything private

Hi HN, long time lurker, first time poster. We've been working on a new funding model for the web as we believe content creators should be paid for their hard work. satotious.com is a unique twist on paywall, users can access content by viewing ads or with micropayments(on the Bitcoin Lightning Network).

We think the time is right to try micropayments again as an increasing amount of content is going behind subscriptions and ad revenue is declining. Reasons we are different: 1. We have a free option with ad views. 2. We run on the Bitcoin Lightning Network as it makes micropayments feasible without the need to track users. 3. We tackle cognitive cost associated with micropayments with our browser extension/app which can auto-pay the paywalls.

For more details of our vision have a look at our site and blog posts, satotious.com. Right now we're in beta and are looking for content creators, no matter how big or small, please get in touch: [email protected]

You can test out the paywall on our site, all feedback welcome :)

Really interesting. It's good to see an opensource competitor to Google's reCaptcha.