TECHNOLOGY: Micropayments using bitcoin might solve the problem of revenue sharing

https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/zgytrl/left_murder_scene_because_my_manager_complained/

Left murder scene because my manager complained about overtime
r/MaliciousCompliance
•Posted by u/Longjumping_Bad9555
6 hours ago

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In a past work life I worked at a small newspaper where corporate insisted on paying me hourly, despite the job not being capable of being done in 40 hours.

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fishter_uk
4 hr. ago

This was several years ago, that newspaper no longer exists.

DreamOfTheEndlessSky
Avid Voter ·
4 hr. ago

Less funny when you consider how many newspapers have disappeared.

BigRiverHome
Monthly Top 5% Karma+2 ·
2 hr. ago

Funny what happens when you keep decreasing the value of your product.

I used to get the paper and I truly enjoyed reading it every morning. But, it kept getting smaller and smaller, and eventually it was bought out by Gannett, the people behind USA Today. That was pretty much it for me, it just became another version of the USA Today with a thin veneer of local news.

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I’m a retired IT guy. I personally have always been surprised that “newspapers” didn’t figure out and implement a micropayment system.

Imagine if you were asked for 0.0001 of something (i.e., a dollar; a bitcoin; a ruble; a yen) for an article. Not some number of dollars for a year, or month, or such.

When you get on internet scale, it’s not hard to imagine getting 50k readers each paying say a penny for an article. That translates to 500$ for that one article.

The current payment technology doesn’t pay to scale that price point.

But now, a paper could collect a fraction of a bitcoin from someone’s public key and encrypt the article so that only the person’s private key could decrypt it. At that level, it wouldn’t be worth pirating it or sharing you private key to deprive the sender of the revenue.

I think that would be the way to save the “local” paper with digital distribution of content.

FWIW YMMV

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