Is this the first example of micropayments actually working on the internet? In Ep#43 we're going to examine the Value tag and how this enables streaming of money within your podcasting app.
Huge thanks to Cole McCormick (America+), McIntosh (Generation Bitcoin) & Gene Bean (Volunteer Technologist) for supporting the show. Absolute legends!
15% of this episode is going to Dave Jones for helping to create all this amazing infrastructure so don't forget to stream some sats!
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Huge thanks to Cole McCormick (America+), McIntosh (Generation Bitcoin) & Gene Bean (Volunteer Technologist) for supporting the show. Absolute legends!
15% of this episode is going to Dave Jones for helping to create all this amazing infrastructure so don't forget to stream some sats!
Value 4 Value Support:
Boostagram: https://www.meremortalspodcast.com/support
Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/meremortalspodcast
Connect With Kyrin/Mere Mortals:
Website: https://www.meremortalspodcast.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/jjfq9eGReU
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/meremortalspods
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meremortalspodcasts/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@meremortalspodcasts
[00:00:00]
Unknown:
Micropayments actually work! Welcome everyone to episode 43 of the Value for Value podcast. My name is Kyrin, host of the Mere Mortals Podcasts and also this one. And this is the show for digital content creators who want to connect more deeply with their audience and also be able to learn and earn a living at the same time. Man, Got to get that out. I want to just reiterate here that I am live on a Wednesday 10 a.m. at UTC plus ten, which is the equivalent of the boundary between a Tuesday, Wednesday, midnight at UTC zero. So easy way of thinking.
This is wherever you are in the world, if you're in a plus zone, just add on those plus hours onto that Tuesday midnight. Or if you're in the minus zone, take it away and you'll know exactly where you are. And if you can listen live to it. I would really appreciate you joining in as well. Let's dive straight into the topic for this week. So I've got a fair few things to talk about. And this is all about micropayments. So in the past couple of episodes, we have really been focusing on the podcasts themselves. We're looking at lit, we're looking at the four properties.
What is podcast emergence of podcasting 2.0. And I kind of promised, okay, this is what's going to be one of the things that has emerged from podcasting 2.0 and this is the value tag, and I want to explain how this works with the RSS feed. And we're going to really be focusing on the micropayment aspect of it for for this time. So first of all, I hope we all know what an RSS feed is. This is where your podcast is is kind of hosted. I guess this is the directions for podcasting apps to be able to see, okay, this is where the audio files are located. This is the descriptions.
They want a real source of information and how to display what it is that you're trying to display in a, you know, mostly an audio format for podcasting. But blogs use RSS as well. And we'll we'll touch upon that in a little bit of a later section. So what the value tag is, is it's essentially a a way for you to put in a wallet and for people to pay you directly without permission, without any strings attached. And we're talking about the permissionless aspect of of Bitcoin and of the RSS and podcasting. So what this does is it's really cool because you can just put something in.
It's there in your feed. You don't have to be changing it for all of the different currencies and bank accounts of the world. Now, there's really no way to do this in podcasting before podcasting 2.0 came along and allowed this. So in this case we are using mostly the Lightning Network, but once again, there's some abilities to change things up. And what people can do is they can send in micropayments to you. So for every minute, every bit that they will listening to you, they can continuously stream some money. So one of the cool things about this is you have the ability to create splits.
And so what I can do and what I do do is put in multiple different levels of splits for everyone who I think is deserving and helping of creating this podcast. So now for me you might say, Okay. Kyrin, but you're just an individual. You can just put in one and that'll be fine. But I actually want to help out other people who make this all happen. My co-host, Juan, who I run the mere mortals with, not on this show, but on my my main show. I guess I like to include a joint wallet that we have as a split because the microphones that I'm using, the room, the sound panels, all the stuff that I've got going on here, he helped to pay for a large portion of that or half of it. Exactly.
So I want to include him on part of it. I want to include a extra person, as I do weekly for for 15% who I think is really helped me out this week or is helping out the the kind of ecosystem I want to include the apps which give me services which really help me and you will see this for this particular podcast. I've got one called Satoshis Stream. I've talked about them before and they are really great for data collection and for being able to surface boosts and be able to connect to the discord and all of these things, which I just wouldn't be able to do myself.
So when you are creating a podcast or when you're creating a piece of artwork or a music, you know, if you're in a band, there's probably going to be a minimum three or four people. And all of those people, if you are trying to monetise that, there's there's no real easy way to do it. You need complicated legal contracts. You need, you know, so many interest industries have these non-productive middlemen who are there kind of solely to provide trust. I feel in the best of cases or who are restrict control while also charging you for it as well. And I think the music industry seems to be rife with this.
I haven't had a firsthand experience myself, so I'm not a musician, but I know people who are musicians and and they say that the process of trying to put your music on Spotify or on Bandcamp or a large portion of these places, it just gets chewed out. You know, they charge high, high fees and what ends up happening is if you get 100,000 streams on Spotify, a big number in the podcasting equivalent, you would get $20 per per thousand. So that'd be $2,000 if you just did standard advertising. If you do that on Spotify, you're not getting two grants.
You're getting, you know, a couple of dollars, maybe $20, maybe maybe 100, who knows? But it's significantly, significantly less. So I think one of the cool things that really is about this value tag and being able to put a a way for people to pay you directly within your your RSS feed is that it just cuts out so much of the kind of bullshit and it can be done on a peer to peer basis. The people who want to pay, you know, that it's going directly to you. And this is really cool because this is basically basically micropayments and I am a slightly too young to know the full history of the Internet.
I was born in 1992, so I was coming up, I guess with it in the 2000, but it seemed that micropayments were this kind of golden thing. Everyone wanted to do it like, wouldn't this be amazing to do? And this would create better incentives for for everyone you would need it. It just seems like something that would solve a lot of problems, but it was never actually implemented. And I was listening to Adam Curry not too long ago and he was saying, Yeah, you know, this probably this might be the first time micropayments has actually been done and is actually working.
So very, very cool for that. The other thing I mentioned was everyone gets a piece of the pie that the podcast app developers hosts if they want to get in on this blueberry, for example, you can use their, their functionality in on their dashboard and they just ask for, I believe it's a 4% or 5% split. You can put in collaborators, you can put in additional services for statistics, you can put in charities. I mean, hell, you can even put in the listener back into it if you want. So what this does is it really one enables a lot of optionality and I think it aligns a lot of incentives and it can cut out a lot of the kind of I won't say bullshit, but I think just a lot of we all know people who have a job where they have a ridiculous amount of time for that, for that work, and they kind of only work 2 hours, 3 hours a day.
I think if you can eliminate a lot of that chaff in the system, it makes for a better world. Now, let's get on to, I guess, the streaming aspect of this. So streaming sets and this is the main use case we see now in podcasting 2.0, and we can see this across a variety of of different apps. And so this how this works is generally it's calculated in one minute intervals, though not necessarily sent being in one minute intervals. So batching occurs. So if you go into the apps itself, you would typically see down at the bottom of the screen it'll say at or have a a little counter or a little circle near the play button or off to the side of that or something like that.
And you can choose as the listener how much that you want to stream in to your favourite podcaster. For me, myself, I like the $0.21 per minute because that's how many bitcoin there are going to be. It's just a kind of symbolic number. And even after listening to this, I might change that because I've got some stats on here on how much that is actually worth. Once again, the micropayment aspect is kind of highlighting the micro ness of it. It's this is intended to be smallish amounts, but you know, small can differ from for different people. If a billionaire was listening into the podcast and they were streaming in, you know, 2100 sets per minute, that would still be relatively small for them in comparison to to my perception of wealth.
So we have this, this aspect here, unlike subscriptions or paywalls, you're only paying for what you actually use. This is why micropayments are so cool and can help a lot of other systems which are in place. And you might say, okay. CORIN But there's there's other ways you can do this. You could do this through the patron model. And this is getting more to the the value for value aspect and getting closer to the heart of that, which is I provide value for you upfront, and then you provide it back to me in whatever number and way that you want. Okay, Well, this is beautiful for two different reasons.
One, you get to choose the value that you send back to me, i.e. you get to choose how many satoshis per minute you want to send to me, and it stops as soon as you stop listening, which is in contrast to something like Patreon where you have to just pay and it just goes automatically and you've kind of paid for a month, I guess. So this is really getting to that aspect where what if I only want to get two weeks worth of value out of this? What if I only want to listen to the show just to kind of test it out and see, do I actually like this show? And so I'm going to jump on to here onto the GitHub for the podcast namespace.
And Dave Jones created this thing, a little caption here called Play to Pay, which I think is really cool because it explains it quite nicely. So I'm just going to read this out. This, this dong can be thought of as play to pay rather than the traditional pay to play pay wall approach. When a media listener such as within a podcasting app presses the play button on an episode whose feed contains a value block, a compatible app will be expected to begin streaming micropayments to the designated recipients on a time interval that makes sense for the app.
So it actually doesn't even need to be in these minute intervals and I'll get on to that soon. The amount of each payment can be any amount the listener chooses, including zero. If the list of the listener chooses not to pay to listen to this media, then the app can ignore the value block of that feed and then it goes down a little bit. Low payment intervals, the time interval for calculating payments is always one minute. However, the actual interval between when payments are sent can be longer. The interval should be chosen with a few factors in mind, such as connectivity.
Is the app currently online transaction fees batched payments together to reduce fee percentage cryptocurrency network load can be given crypto network or API support this payment. Right? So there's a couple of things related to that there which were were pretty much what I was highlighting. This does fit the value for value model more closely than something that takes a paywall approach and it's accessible for people who are just coming in and who are just a little bit uncertain. Do I actually like this content or not? And maybe when you're coming in for this first time, you could have the default a zero because you're listening to a show and you only want to send it when you when you think it's it's worthy of sending.
Now, what I actually really like about this as well is that it's rather passive and doesn't actually require active decision making to be made while also allowing the listener to determine the amount. So this is classic V for V, and I think it's this passive part which is really interesting and intriguing because when we look at the value for value model that is being done on something like No Agenda, for example, it does require a kind of bigger effort on an individual's part. Now what they typically do on that show with this is Adam Curry and John C Dvorak is they've done this largely through PayPal, and PayPal is good enough for one instance and this is being able to set up recurring payments.
And so you can have just this thing which will go every month and go, bam, you know, do I want to send this to the show? Well, it doesn't even ask you if you just set it up. It will just automatically do it as long as you have enough money in your PayPal wallet or maybe even your bank account. And PayPal can can work straight from there. I'm not actually sure I don't use PayPal that often. And this is once again getting closer to the value for value. But the more passive aspect of it, which is I don't you know, if I was trying to decide each and every single time that I listen to a podcast, you know, how much is this worth?
How much do I want to pay? Is this is this show better than this other show? Should I send them this much? It's too much. It is too much overload. Whereas with this system, once again, you can just choose a number. And I've chosen my number and I might change a different number in the future. But once I've chosen that, every show that I listen to from then on, it's just a constant stream and going in. I'm not having to make these active decisions and the more active decision. So something like Booster Grams, which I'll save for the next episode and number 44. So getting on to another aspect of this, which is I think it's relatively simple on the surface, the micropayment aspect, I want to choose an amount of money to go to my favourite artist or content creator as I'm listening, and as soon as I stop listening, I want it to stop.
I think that's pretty simple. I get to choose how much I want and I can just kind of maintain this for as long as I want. Now the complex thing is more on the application side, and this is more just of interest perhaps for for people, which is there's so many different various ways that this could all that they have to make decisions. So this is the application, the podcast app that is tuned, that is receiving these micropayments and then passing them on or enabling this, I should say. So for example, if someone is listening to a show and they want to and they end up sending 545 so they listen for, you know, X amount of time at let's make this even easier, they have the streaming set set at 54 per minute and they listen for 100 minutes.
So that's an hour and 40 minutes worth of content. They will have sent 540. But okay, the the amount that is actually going to individual people in the in the value block. So this is in the actual RSS feed. How's that going to get divvied up? It's pretty easy if there's just one in there or 540 will go to that person and to that that that wallet. But what if there's two of them? Okay, well, I guess you could maybe have it as 270 going to each. Okay. What if there's four of them in the equal splits? Okay. Well, I guess 135. But you can kind of see how this could get into a point where it's like if you have 100 different people all getting 1%, well, you can't divide 40 into 100.
So like without having micro portions. So at some point they're going to have to make some decisions of going, okay, well, this person is too low. So we're just going to send a rough amount of sets to these other people. Another case would be listening at 1.25 speed. What does the person who is streaming it in, do they expect this to be for the actual minutes of the show or the actual minutes of how long they're listening, which will be shorter because they're listening at a faster speed? Or if you do the opposite version at 0.75 speed, what what about in that case?
You can also have mistakes in the podcast aside where you might not have things adding up to 100% and might add up to 99% or 101 and we see this relatively often, How do we do? We then divide that have to do more recalculations, Then there's fees as well, which are probably something I want to just touch upon because I heard someone on another show, a listener being worried about the the fees that are currently occurring and the app developers are smart and they make a lot of decisions and they have to make these choices. And they these are individual ones that they decide to.
In this case, most of them are pretty smart and so they will say, okay, the actual sending through on the minute basis is kind of hard and it's going to rack up some fees. And so what they will typically do is they'll batch these payments. Now, I was chatting with some of them on the Mastodon instance, and that was the kind of various things saying from, you know, every 3 minutes they will send in a batched payment. I think some of them were slightly a bit larger than that, but almost certainly they do it as it's occurring. And so they're not just waiting until you've finished listening to an episode and then sending it all in one big chunk, which I think could be done as well.
I don't see any problems with that. But all of this is just, you know, they're going to have to make their own choices. And so if you're as a listener, you know, a bit concerned about this, just know that it's incredibly complex. And so a lot is happening in this case now that was a section here which I just want to touch upon, which was all of this at the moment is based on lightning, but you could even hear it in that section. I was saying with Dave Jones that he had crypto currency network load and so I'm just going to jump down here to the namespace again.
And this is where it says Support currencies and protocols. The value block is designed to be flexible enough to handle most or any cryptocurrency and even fiat currencies with a given API that exposes a compatible process. Currently, development is centred mostly on lightning, so this is the layer two of bitcoin using the key and method keys and allows for push based payments without the recipient needing to generate an invoice to receive them. Another another method to send spontaneous payments via lightning is amp atomic multiple payments which supersedes key and in many ways in last form robust and larger payments.
However, it is still in beta and thus not widely implemented. As of now. So we can definitely say, okay, this isn't even related to a bitcoin thing, this can be anything. As he mentioned, it could be done with fiat. So this is, you know, actual US dollars or Australian dollars or Canadian dollars or Argentinean pesos or Colombian pesos. But not much of it is actually done through that because it's incredibly complex. This could have you know, we've we've had the ability to do this for for a large while, but it actually no one's actually implemented it. It's more through the digital money like Bitcoin where it it it makes a lot more sense and it's actually doable.
It can cross geographic boundaries and there's no and not as many laws and restrictions and regulations related to the sending of money like there is was. If you wanted to send micropayments to your favourite Iranian podcaster and your US based, I think that is going to be pretty impossible from what I know. From what I gather, how what we actually have seen is that there is room for more. So you can actually do this on the hive blockchain. I wanted to give a small shout out to them and this is because, you know, one of the developers there, Brian of London, he made an active, difficult choice pretty much on his own to help implement this into podcasting.
And we saw this with podcasting, which is also using the Hive blockchain. So it does allow for other people to come in. This isn't just a Bitcoin thing, it's a micropayment thing. Actually sending money, actually sending value. So that being said, it is mostly done on the Lightning Network, which some Bitcoin and I kind of avoided or tried to avoid highlighting that it's a Bitcoin thing and because I think it can extend beyond that, but it is very much centred upon that at the moment. And I would just say that I find Andreas and Antonopoulos to be a really great resource.
If you want to know more about what that is, he's probably the person I've learnt the most about regarding Bitcoin as a whole and then the Lightning Network as well because is very tech based but explains it in pretty simple and clear manners. He's got a book called Mastering the Lightning Network, which I have yet to read myself, but it's a very technical based book, but I've heard good things about it and I've listened to a lot of his podcast, so I would just recommend that. So just getting on to the summary aspect, I suppose, of this direct peer to peer micropayments enable flexibility whilst being a passive activity for the listener consumer.
I think this could be applied outside of podcasting as well. I'm pretty sure there are examples of people who have set this up in some sort of feed or reader that you use on the internet where for every, let's say for a blog, as you're reading, the blog goes down, you know, for each page scroll that you do, or perhaps for each paragraph where you go from one to the next, that is when you, your browser or whatever it is, will automatically send in a micropayment to to the recipient of that. It's very much the same thing. The podcasting version obviously is audio and is done on a minute basis, i.e. you know, I've listened to this many minutes of a podcast, but you can do this for text as in, you know, I'm going to send in a micropayment for this much of a text that I've read, you know, this many paragraphs.
So I think this can apply outside of just audio and video as well. No reason this can't be done with minutes of a video that you've consumed. So I think this is starting to go out to a broader example and you actually can do this with video. For example, if you go on to any of the three speak feeds which show up in podcast apps which support the video version. So once again, going back to what is a podcast, typically it's an MP3, but you can have the video podcast version of that, which is an MP four and you can do this if you actually want to do this, you can type in Miyamoto's podcast without any spaces in between that and you will see a feed that I set up a long time ago on three Speak, which has some clips that I've created, and these clips are much lower quality.
I think I put them in 720p and tried to make them relatively short as well, but you can send micropayments to that as well. So this does work for video. So it's not just a podcasting thing. Micropayments are actually working for, I think for the first time, as far as I'm aware, on the on the Internet and it's going to be very, very cool. No system is perfect. So if you are concerned about this, I would just say maybe don't use super big amounts because it is it can be hard to know exactly how much has gone through to your your favourite podcaster. But I just want to say so if you have a set at ten sites per minute, which is equal to 600 an hour, if you're listening to an hour of content and then 600 sets at today's prices, that's about $0.12 in Australian dollars, which would probably be about $0.10 $0.09 in US dollars.
That's not a whole lot for for an hour's worth of enjoyment that you got. I assume if you're listening to something for an hour, you would get you know, you're only paying $0.10 for that. But let's say you do that for the equivalent across a let's say you're listening to 10 hours of podcasts a week. You know, that's that's about a dollar. You know, is that is that something that you can afford a dollar a week for for listening to to content. Sure sure. That's awesome. And then the micropayments again it matters very little on an individual if someone sends me $0.10.
So it's not going to change my life. But if 10,000 people sent me $0.10, okay, well, that's that's $1,000 that actually makes and makes a difference. So you can kind of see where this can actually add up in the large scale of things. And so you can actually have be supported as and as an artist, as a digital content creator, whatever you want to label yourself as, by a lot of people sending you a little bit amount of money, This is kind of the dream of crowdsourcing, right? Being able to do something like this. Now, typically this changes because even in crowdsourcing models, it's usually a you have this kind of power laws.
The the aspect of that will be a couple of people who will donate the largest amounts and kind of, you know, the 20% of people will send in 80% of the value or the sourcing for that. That's probably always going to happen. That seems to be a natural law of the universe. It happens in galaxies and stars and matter and and light and all of this sort of thing. So where I wouldn't try and fight against that too heavily, but I just think this is really cool and you can so if you've been listening to this, this show will probably go for 45 minutes.
You know, if you send in what I typically do of of 21 sets a minute, you know, that's only going to be about $0.15, something like that. So it's it's not it's not crazy, crazy amounts of money. I think hybrid models using this will probably come into the future, which will probably trend slightly away from pure value for value in its purest form. But I think a probably an enhancement of what we typically see nowadays. So for those who are just wondering, how does your Spotify typical Spotify money actually get divvied up? So they're it's about 220 million.
I think Spotify Premium members each paying, let's just say $9 of $9 a month of that $9 a month. Where does that money actually go? Well, a lot of it goes into the royalty fees for for music. A lot of that will go to the top artists and so they will get. So even if you're not listening to the Taylor Swift's the Justin Bieber's of the World, and you are focussed solely on a niche like me, who listens to this one called free flow flava. And it's kind of a Japanese is unhip. No, not hip hop, Japanese techno, drum'n'bass sort of music which I use for my workouts.
I love listening to that. They're a much, much smaller band and even if I listen to them only exclusively, my money wouldn't go to them. It would go to someone else. So I think there's probably going to be some hybrid models in the future where it will have this aspect of, okay, if I spend $9 a month and I listen to these ten different artists, it will do it based more on who the artist I'm actually listening to. But I think this value for value the micropayment, think of it actually going to them in that time, in that real time aspect has a it has a quality to it, a uniqueness.
Every morning I've got a telegram chat and a telegram bot set up which lets me know real time when people are sending me in micropayments. And it is super, super cool because at any, any given moment I can just check it and it's like, Oh yeah, it's coming in. So I can actually even say there is someone listening to me right now who is streaming in some micropayments. I see value for value three total payments, $0.45, three total payments, $0.45. And this is in the last 5 minutes of ten, 13, 1022, ten, 27 So whoever that is that's listening in, Thank you very much.
I very much appreciate that. So very, very cool. I love it. I love this sort of thing. So, yeah, I think just yes, I'm going it all up. Micropayments are going to pay a large a larger portion of of being able to support people on the Internet. I think incentive creates some really interesting incentives. It enables people to be a lot more flexible with how they use their money and how it gets divvied up. And I think it will create some real big efficiencies of allowing us to not need to go through restricted parties or or going through platforms which are there kind to only only there for the aspect of of trust.
So yeah, I think it's it's really cool and definitely something that you should be looking out for and not discounting a large portion of podcasting 2.0 and of getting podcasters onto the system is emphasising this boost aspect. Like wow, a boost comes in and it can be super big. But I think in one of the coolest things is that unnamed? Well, it's not even unnamed. You can't see people's names, but it is kind of that support which maybe might not get recognised as as clearly and cleanly. I am starting to do for the just mere mortals as a whole for for tax purposes and things like this.
I'm starting to keep a monthly, I suppose you'd call it a budget or just just keeping track of, of how much is, is coming in and being able to then be able to report this to the Australian Tax Office. And what I can see here is for July of 2023, I have let's see how many sets come in. So that was about across the various shows that I've got going on. I had about 336,000 and of that amount there was a 51,000 of that was via people just streaming in. So that's what 161 seventh of the total amount. And that is just a really cool thing to to have come in.
So it's I would actually even love for that to be larger in the future. Um, and yet so it's just very cool, very cool on that aspect and I think it's going to, to change a lot of things. I am now going to get into the Boosta Gram Lounge and I'm going to actually thank some people who have been supporting the show. So take it away. Mr. Adam Curry
[00:32:29] Unknown:
Welcome to the value for value. Boostagram Lounge,
[00:32:37] Unknown:
and boosta Grams for those who don't know, is a payment, a message that has been sent through one of these apps directly to the the wallets the, the address that I put in my RSS feed. So this is different to a the micro streaming because you it now it enables people to actually give some feedback as well some a comment a a message that comes directly to me so this can be very, very beneficial in many ways because I get some content for the show and I get to actually directly thank the people who have been helping to support. So let's kick it off with the first.
Yeah. So this is from Cole McCormick, the host of the America Plus, and he says, I understand the risk with advertising models, but I'm leaning towards using and experimenting with them rather than demonise. Twitter seems like an opportunity that's different from YouTube or Instagram influencer or YouTuber or Instagram influencer. Maybe I'm moving to the bad light. Someone help me and then he sends in his favourite number 5492 sats sent using fountain. So this is just in reference to not even sure I talked about it, particularly on this show where I was saying with Twitter now and enabling the people actually sending money to creators for helping to drive engagement things on the platform.
I was just saying, you know, I could see this turning into a clickbait sort of thing where you you try and get people posting underneath your comments just to be able to, you know, drive some outrage, some something. The because it's based more on I'm not necessarily sure it's based on value, but it's based on attention, which I don't think at the same things. And I think that can go some different ways. But I think his overall strategy is probably the best way to do it, which is experiment, try these things out, Value for value.
I think is the best model, the best model, best method of doing things. And when I experiment out, I want to try and come back into the the critical, critical of it. So as I was talking about with those hybrid models, I think that strays away from value for value, the core principles of it. But they can be interesting nonetheless. And yeah, I would definitely say that just in terms of a life principle, experimenting is is very, very useful. And that was sent using Fountain, one of the apps which enable micropayments and boosting come in actually all of these were from fountain this week another one here from Jean Bean so this is the host of the Volunteer Technologists.
I may be wrong, but I think one peer group instance can mirror content from another. If so, and if the blueberry server you are in now is true, then you should be able to stay there and mirror to any troupe. No idea if that's appealing, but wanted to mention it regardless. And then he sent through a two kilobyte boost 2048 sent using fountain. Yeah, I honestly have no idea. This is I'm I'm at the I'm just getting comfortable with the kind of live aspect, the technological aspect. I'm at the moment and I'm going to be working my way towards trying different ways of doing this.
I might try some video and if I was going to do it, I yeah, I probably would not use YouTube and I would try something like peer group. So this mirroring aspect and getting the stream onto different places, I'm I'm not going to rush that. I was talking about that I think a couple of weeks ago in the live chat as well. I'm yeah I'm at the moment my I've got a whole bunch of other things different to do. For example, I have 48 phone panels sitting on my desk in front of me, which need to go up on the walls to get rid of some of this reverb. So I've got a got all sorts of stuff to do.
But thank you very much, Jane. Been all out. I'm definitely going to look into that. It's just that at what point and when we had Macintosh coming in. So this is the host of generation Bitcoin and he says Music V for V might be bigger than any of us except Adam. I think it will be Mcintosh. And then he sent 2121 sets sent using Fountain. So once again, the bitcoin number there. And yeah, look, honestly, I think it'll be pretty big. I talked about this on one of the shows and I might have neglected to mention it just in here, but I was talking about how I think these hybrid models will emerge.
It was on episode 403 of the Mere Mortals podcast that came out. So if you want to know more about the hybrid models and I was really getting into Spotify and I'm basically I have an open bet out there that I think the Spotify will be bankrupt within eight years. So if you want to, if you're intrigued into what that is all about, I would recommend checking that out. But yeah, I think music value for value is going to be huge and I'll probably be talking about that in about 2 to 3 weeks time. I'm just going to focus more on the ascending of value, the monetary value at the moment, and then get on to how this is being implemented in some really cool ways, such as what Adam Curry is doing with the boostagram Ball The final one I have here is from Gene Bean again coming in and he says, Don't feel icky about fountain advertising.
It's really great and non shady model A one kilobyte boost 1024 cent using fountain as well Yeah I yeah I've changed my tune on that it was my default is just to be sceptical of advertising. I was actually talking with my brother about this last night and he was and I was trying to explain to him the V for V and why I'm so big into it. And there's many different aspects that I I'd try to it. One is I just personally don't like ads and I feel like I've been tricked by ads in the past two is I think strategically relying on I think the censorship aspect of it plays a big part of it.
The strategic aspect of only having one or two advertisers coming in. And if they get can't and that's the weak point, I guess I would much rather have be supported by 500,000 true fans like Kevin Kelly article. I would much rather be supported by a thousand different people across the world in various aspects. All who can make their own individual decision making rather than three advertisers who are very vulnerable to a couple of emails sent by people who dislike me and dislike the show and decide to not sponsor any more. I think just strategically, it's a it's a risky position to be putting yourself in, much like if you build a business based on Instagram or Facebook or YouTube, you don't control that medium.
And so you can get kicked off at any point. You can get throttled with the algorithms. You know, it's it's a tricky game. It's tricky game and a risky game, I think. And that's a risk that I personally am not willing to take, although it might seem that going all in on value for value might might seem slightly risky to some people. I'm going to jump onto my tips. So thank you very much. And thank you, everyone who is streaming as well. It's very, very much appreciated. And that person was streaming and live right now. I really do appreciate it.
I want to give some tips at the moment. So one of the things that I noticed and I've taken this from when I was listening to flooding with Bitcoin, who I talked about the other way, but this is across a few shows as well of only mentioning one service and this service being fountain like I was just mentioning. I think it's just good to be mindful of creating a community on only one app. The Stitcher app, for example, is closing down its service, the Damas app, which was used for Nostr kind of got kicked off of the App Store. It's not hard to imagine the various ways that any of these things could go wrong.
And having just that single point of focus of failure can be a problem. I think what I've seen with this show is really great was it's not just phones and people are using other ways of supporting in. And I'll talk about all of these various apps in a second, but I would just say it is worth at the very least highlighting how other people can help support the show. So I would agree Fountain is a really great app. It's it's my go to at the moment and it's got got a great community there but I would just say just just be mindful, you know, if if you're putting all your chips on one place, once again, it's just a it's just a risky aspect to do so with the app and service highlight.
I just wanted to give a reiteration of all the various different apps that you can use to do micropayments. So obviously I mentioned Fountain. Another great one is podverse, who I mentioned the other week as well, some other cool ones that can do this casta Matic I have yet to really use Castamatic myself because I do not have that phone. I don't. That's only on iOS, so I don't have that phone myself. The Podfans, which at the moment is just on the web, but hopefully will be coming to a a mobile app in the nearest future is also able to do this Podfriend can also do it.
Curiocaster, a great one for the desktop podfriend is also on the desktop. They used to have a I can't remember what it was. The mobile thing would just say it's desktop. The moment podstation also does the stats asset streaming. We also have another one called Breez, which is mostly a lightning wallet, but it does have podcast abilities in there. I'm going to throw this out there because it is doable with the Sphinx dot chat. That's a really old one. I wouldn't recommend it, but it is there and I'm just looking at something in. There's one thing called the value for value calculator, and I don't even know what this is.
Yeah, but if you're really interested in that, you can go on to there. But the main ones I would recommend are fountain castamatic, podverse, Curiocaster, podfriend. Those are probably and breez, those are probably the big apps where you can do this streaming of sets and they're ones which I have personally used Costa Rica a long time ago when I had access to my brother's phone and and could use that out and pod fans coming up. So yeah those are the apps where you can do streaming institutions if you want. Let's jump onto my Value for value section and for this week I'm going to give 15% to Dave.
Dave Jones, the Podsage himself, for putting in a silly amount of effort to make this all happen. Those things that I was just reading off before all of the specs, I believe, that were written by him, so much of what he has done is been helping to create all this backend infrastructure to allow all of this magic Internet money to actually be sent back and forth. He also wrote Helipad, which is a service for you that lets you see export collate the streaming of stats and and boosts. I personally use fountain and Satoshi stream and get I'll be a combination of them.
All of them. I can see the amount the boostagrams but then also the streaming of stats coming in. But if you want a more self-hosted version, you can also go through his helipad. It's not even a service. You don't have to pay for it or anything. It's just free software that is out there and that you can use. So very, very cool and much appreciation to Dave Jones. So what is my final request? Well, one of the things that you could do is you could up your streaming amount here. So you know, what value do put on this show. If you had 100 stats per minute, 45 minutes, that's about one Australian dollars for an episode.
So for the last 45 minutes, was that worth it for you? Did you get one dollars worth of one Australian dollar's worth of value? So that's I think what, 70, $0.67 us something like that out of, out of this podcast. If so you know, set it at 100 cents per minute if it's a little bit less, if it's a little bit more or a lot less or a lot more. In either case, I really am appreciative of people sending in these. The smaller the small amounts, and it gives me a kick of joy every time that I go onto that Telegram app and I just say, okay, you know, someone is streaming sites in through at this very it's so, so cool and I can still see the still doing it at this very moment.
So I really, really do appreciate that. Just in terms of value for value as well, there's many different apps I just listed off a whole portion of them. If you don't want to do it in a monetary form, letting someone know about these cool different things, if you are a podcast fan and you know a podcast app personally, or if you are a podcaster and you want to know how to do more of this, reach out to me via any of the links in the show notes and I'm more than happy to help guide you into how to do this. It is relatively simple and there are ways of doing this now, which you do within five 5 minutes.
It's it's not a hard process if you have some talent, if you know more about the streaming of sets, if you know more or if you know any examples of micropayments working in the past for other services just across the Internet, not even podcasting related, I would I would love to know about that. Some historical history, things like this. And you feel I've done a mis service by not talking about them. I would love to know those things. You know, please boost that in is the best way of doing that, but also just reaching out to me. So very, very cool micropayments.
I think they are going to be a big aspect of the future and yeah, I do just want to thank everyone for, for tuning in for this one today and I will be back once again next week. At the same time 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning Australian Eastern Standard Time and yep until the next time. Chao for now Kyrin out.
Micropayments actually work! Welcome everyone to episode 43 of the Value for Value podcast. My name is Kyrin, host of the Mere Mortals Podcasts and also this one. And this is the show for digital content creators who want to connect more deeply with their audience and also be able to learn and earn a living at the same time. Man, Got to get that out. I want to just reiterate here that I am live on a Wednesday 10 a.m. at UTC plus ten, which is the equivalent of the boundary between a Tuesday, Wednesday, midnight at UTC zero. So easy way of thinking.
This is wherever you are in the world, if you're in a plus zone, just add on those plus hours onto that Tuesday midnight. Or if you're in the minus zone, take it away and you'll know exactly where you are. And if you can listen live to it. I would really appreciate you joining in as well. Let's dive straight into the topic for this week. So I've got a fair few things to talk about. And this is all about micropayments. So in the past couple of episodes, we have really been focusing on the podcasts themselves. We're looking at lit, we're looking at the four properties.
What is podcast emergence of podcasting 2.0. And I kind of promised, okay, this is what's going to be one of the things that has emerged from podcasting 2.0 and this is the value tag, and I want to explain how this works with the RSS feed. And we're going to really be focusing on the micropayment aspect of it for for this time. So first of all, I hope we all know what an RSS feed is. This is where your podcast is is kind of hosted. I guess this is the directions for podcasting apps to be able to see, okay, this is where the audio files are located. This is the descriptions.
They want a real source of information and how to display what it is that you're trying to display in a, you know, mostly an audio format for podcasting. But blogs use RSS as well. And we'll we'll touch upon that in a little bit of a later section. So what the value tag is, is it's essentially a a way for you to put in a wallet and for people to pay you directly without permission, without any strings attached. And we're talking about the permissionless aspect of of Bitcoin and of the RSS and podcasting. So what this does is it's really cool because you can just put something in.
It's there in your feed. You don't have to be changing it for all of the different currencies and bank accounts of the world. Now, there's really no way to do this in podcasting before podcasting 2.0 came along and allowed this. So in this case we are using mostly the Lightning Network, but once again, there's some abilities to change things up. And what people can do is they can send in micropayments to you. So for every minute, every bit that they will listening to you, they can continuously stream some money. So one of the cool things about this is you have the ability to create splits.
And so what I can do and what I do do is put in multiple different levels of splits for everyone who I think is deserving and helping of creating this podcast. So now for me you might say, Okay. Kyrin, but you're just an individual. You can just put in one and that'll be fine. But I actually want to help out other people who make this all happen. My co-host, Juan, who I run the mere mortals with, not on this show, but on my my main show. I guess I like to include a joint wallet that we have as a split because the microphones that I'm using, the room, the sound panels, all the stuff that I've got going on here, he helped to pay for a large portion of that or half of it. Exactly.
So I want to include him on part of it. I want to include a extra person, as I do weekly for for 15% who I think is really helped me out this week or is helping out the the kind of ecosystem I want to include the apps which give me services which really help me and you will see this for this particular podcast. I've got one called Satoshis Stream. I've talked about them before and they are really great for data collection and for being able to surface boosts and be able to connect to the discord and all of these things, which I just wouldn't be able to do myself.
So when you are creating a podcast or when you're creating a piece of artwork or a music, you know, if you're in a band, there's probably going to be a minimum three or four people. And all of those people, if you are trying to monetise that, there's there's no real easy way to do it. You need complicated legal contracts. You need, you know, so many interest industries have these non-productive middlemen who are there kind of solely to provide trust. I feel in the best of cases or who are restrict control while also charging you for it as well. And I think the music industry seems to be rife with this.
I haven't had a firsthand experience myself, so I'm not a musician, but I know people who are musicians and and they say that the process of trying to put your music on Spotify or on Bandcamp or a large portion of these places, it just gets chewed out. You know, they charge high, high fees and what ends up happening is if you get 100,000 streams on Spotify, a big number in the podcasting equivalent, you would get $20 per per thousand. So that'd be $2,000 if you just did standard advertising. If you do that on Spotify, you're not getting two grants.
You're getting, you know, a couple of dollars, maybe $20, maybe maybe 100, who knows? But it's significantly, significantly less. So I think one of the cool things that really is about this value tag and being able to put a a way for people to pay you directly within your your RSS feed is that it just cuts out so much of the kind of bullshit and it can be done on a peer to peer basis. The people who want to pay, you know, that it's going directly to you. And this is really cool because this is basically basically micropayments and I am a slightly too young to know the full history of the Internet.
I was born in 1992, so I was coming up, I guess with it in the 2000, but it seemed that micropayments were this kind of golden thing. Everyone wanted to do it like, wouldn't this be amazing to do? And this would create better incentives for for everyone you would need it. It just seems like something that would solve a lot of problems, but it was never actually implemented. And I was listening to Adam Curry not too long ago and he was saying, Yeah, you know, this probably this might be the first time micropayments has actually been done and is actually working.
So very, very cool for that. The other thing I mentioned was everyone gets a piece of the pie that the podcast app developers hosts if they want to get in on this blueberry, for example, you can use their, their functionality in on their dashboard and they just ask for, I believe it's a 4% or 5% split. You can put in collaborators, you can put in additional services for statistics, you can put in charities. I mean, hell, you can even put in the listener back into it if you want. So what this does is it really one enables a lot of optionality and I think it aligns a lot of incentives and it can cut out a lot of the kind of I won't say bullshit, but I think just a lot of we all know people who have a job where they have a ridiculous amount of time for that, for that work, and they kind of only work 2 hours, 3 hours a day.
I think if you can eliminate a lot of that chaff in the system, it makes for a better world. Now, let's get on to, I guess, the streaming aspect of this. So streaming sets and this is the main use case we see now in podcasting 2.0, and we can see this across a variety of of different apps. And so this how this works is generally it's calculated in one minute intervals, though not necessarily sent being in one minute intervals. So batching occurs. So if you go into the apps itself, you would typically see down at the bottom of the screen it'll say at or have a a little counter or a little circle near the play button or off to the side of that or something like that.
And you can choose as the listener how much that you want to stream in to your favourite podcaster. For me, myself, I like the $0.21 per minute because that's how many bitcoin there are going to be. It's just a kind of symbolic number. And even after listening to this, I might change that because I've got some stats on here on how much that is actually worth. Once again, the micropayment aspect is kind of highlighting the micro ness of it. It's this is intended to be smallish amounts, but you know, small can differ from for different people. If a billionaire was listening into the podcast and they were streaming in, you know, 2100 sets per minute, that would still be relatively small for them in comparison to to my perception of wealth.
So we have this, this aspect here, unlike subscriptions or paywalls, you're only paying for what you actually use. This is why micropayments are so cool and can help a lot of other systems which are in place. And you might say, okay. CORIN But there's there's other ways you can do this. You could do this through the patron model. And this is getting more to the the value for value aspect and getting closer to the heart of that, which is I provide value for you upfront, and then you provide it back to me in whatever number and way that you want. Okay, Well, this is beautiful for two different reasons.
One, you get to choose the value that you send back to me, i.e. you get to choose how many satoshis per minute you want to send to me, and it stops as soon as you stop listening, which is in contrast to something like Patreon where you have to just pay and it just goes automatically and you've kind of paid for a month, I guess. So this is really getting to that aspect where what if I only want to get two weeks worth of value out of this? What if I only want to listen to the show just to kind of test it out and see, do I actually like this show? And so I'm going to jump on to here onto the GitHub for the podcast namespace.
And Dave Jones created this thing, a little caption here called Play to Pay, which I think is really cool because it explains it quite nicely. So I'm just going to read this out. This, this dong can be thought of as play to pay rather than the traditional pay to play pay wall approach. When a media listener such as within a podcasting app presses the play button on an episode whose feed contains a value block, a compatible app will be expected to begin streaming micropayments to the designated recipients on a time interval that makes sense for the app.
So it actually doesn't even need to be in these minute intervals and I'll get on to that soon. The amount of each payment can be any amount the listener chooses, including zero. If the list of the listener chooses not to pay to listen to this media, then the app can ignore the value block of that feed and then it goes down a little bit. Low payment intervals, the time interval for calculating payments is always one minute. However, the actual interval between when payments are sent can be longer. The interval should be chosen with a few factors in mind, such as connectivity.
Is the app currently online transaction fees batched payments together to reduce fee percentage cryptocurrency network load can be given crypto network or API support this payment. Right? So there's a couple of things related to that there which were were pretty much what I was highlighting. This does fit the value for value model more closely than something that takes a paywall approach and it's accessible for people who are just coming in and who are just a little bit uncertain. Do I actually like this content or not? And maybe when you're coming in for this first time, you could have the default a zero because you're listening to a show and you only want to send it when you when you think it's it's worthy of sending.
Now, what I actually really like about this as well is that it's rather passive and doesn't actually require active decision making to be made while also allowing the listener to determine the amount. So this is classic V for V, and I think it's this passive part which is really interesting and intriguing because when we look at the value for value model that is being done on something like No Agenda, for example, it does require a kind of bigger effort on an individual's part. Now what they typically do on that show with this is Adam Curry and John C Dvorak is they've done this largely through PayPal, and PayPal is good enough for one instance and this is being able to set up recurring payments.
And so you can have just this thing which will go every month and go, bam, you know, do I want to send this to the show? Well, it doesn't even ask you if you just set it up. It will just automatically do it as long as you have enough money in your PayPal wallet or maybe even your bank account. And PayPal can can work straight from there. I'm not actually sure I don't use PayPal that often. And this is once again getting closer to the value for value. But the more passive aspect of it, which is I don't you know, if I was trying to decide each and every single time that I listen to a podcast, you know, how much is this worth?
How much do I want to pay? Is this is this show better than this other show? Should I send them this much? It's too much. It is too much overload. Whereas with this system, once again, you can just choose a number. And I've chosen my number and I might change a different number in the future. But once I've chosen that, every show that I listen to from then on, it's just a constant stream and going in. I'm not having to make these active decisions and the more active decision. So something like Booster Grams, which I'll save for the next episode and number 44. So getting on to another aspect of this, which is I think it's relatively simple on the surface, the micropayment aspect, I want to choose an amount of money to go to my favourite artist or content creator as I'm listening, and as soon as I stop listening, I want it to stop.
I think that's pretty simple. I get to choose how much I want and I can just kind of maintain this for as long as I want. Now the complex thing is more on the application side, and this is more just of interest perhaps for for people, which is there's so many different various ways that this could all that they have to make decisions. So this is the application, the podcast app that is tuned, that is receiving these micropayments and then passing them on or enabling this, I should say. So for example, if someone is listening to a show and they want to and they end up sending 545 so they listen for, you know, X amount of time at let's make this even easier, they have the streaming set set at 54 per minute and they listen for 100 minutes.
So that's an hour and 40 minutes worth of content. They will have sent 540. But okay, the the amount that is actually going to individual people in the in the value block. So this is in the actual RSS feed. How's that going to get divvied up? It's pretty easy if there's just one in there or 540 will go to that person and to that that that wallet. But what if there's two of them? Okay, well, I guess you could maybe have it as 270 going to each. Okay. What if there's four of them in the equal splits? Okay. Well, I guess 135. But you can kind of see how this could get into a point where it's like if you have 100 different people all getting 1%, well, you can't divide 40 into 100.
So like without having micro portions. So at some point they're going to have to make some decisions of going, okay, well, this person is too low. So we're just going to send a rough amount of sets to these other people. Another case would be listening at 1.25 speed. What does the person who is streaming it in, do they expect this to be for the actual minutes of the show or the actual minutes of how long they're listening, which will be shorter because they're listening at a faster speed? Or if you do the opposite version at 0.75 speed, what what about in that case?
You can also have mistakes in the podcast aside where you might not have things adding up to 100% and might add up to 99% or 101 and we see this relatively often, How do we do? We then divide that have to do more recalculations, Then there's fees as well, which are probably something I want to just touch upon because I heard someone on another show, a listener being worried about the the fees that are currently occurring and the app developers are smart and they make a lot of decisions and they have to make these choices. And they these are individual ones that they decide to.
In this case, most of them are pretty smart and so they will say, okay, the actual sending through on the minute basis is kind of hard and it's going to rack up some fees. And so what they will typically do is they'll batch these payments. Now, I was chatting with some of them on the Mastodon instance, and that was the kind of various things saying from, you know, every 3 minutes they will send in a batched payment. I think some of them were slightly a bit larger than that, but almost certainly they do it as it's occurring. And so they're not just waiting until you've finished listening to an episode and then sending it all in one big chunk, which I think could be done as well.
I don't see any problems with that. But all of this is just, you know, they're going to have to make their own choices. And so if you're as a listener, you know, a bit concerned about this, just know that it's incredibly complex. And so a lot is happening in this case now that was a section here which I just want to touch upon, which was all of this at the moment is based on lightning, but you could even hear it in that section. I was saying with Dave Jones that he had crypto currency network load and so I'm just going to jump down here to the namespace again.
And this is where it says Support currencies and protocols. The value block is designed to be flexible enough to handle most or any cryptocurrency and even fiat currencies with a given API that exposes a compatible process. Currently, development is centred mostly on lightning, so this is the layer two of bitcoin using the key and method keys and allows for push based payments without the recipient needing to generate an invoice to receive them. Another another method to send spontaneous payments via lightning is amp atomic multiple payments which supersedes key and in many ways in last form robust and larger payments.
However, it is still in beta and thus not widely implemented. As of now. So we can definitely say, okay, this isn't even related to a bitcoin thing, this can be anything. As he mentioned, it could be done with fiat. So this is, you know, actual US dollars or Australian dollars or Canadian dollars or Argentinean pesos or Colombian pesos. But not much of it is actually done through that because it's incredibly complex. This could have you know, we've we've had the ability to do this for for a large while, but it actually no one's actually implemented it. It's more through the digital money like Bitcoin where it it it makes a lot more sense and it's actually doable.
It can cross geographic boundaries and there's no and not as many laws and restrictions and regulations related to the sending of money like there is was. If you wanted to send micropayments to your favourite Iranian podcaster and your US based, I think that is going to be pretty impossible from what I know. From what I gather, how what we actually have seen is that there is room for more. So you can actually do this on the hive blockchain. I wanted to give a small shout out to them and this is because, you know, one of the developers there, Brian of London, he made an active, difficult choice pretty much on his own to help implement this into podcasting.
And we saw this with podcasting, which is also using the Hive blockchain. So it does allow for other people to come in. This isn't just a Bitcoin thing, it's a micropayment thing. Actually sending money, actually sending value. So that being said, it is mostly done on the Lightning Network, which some Bitcoin and I kind of avoided or tried to avoid highlighting that it's a Bitcoin thing and because I think it can extend beyond that, but it is very much centred upon that at the moment. And I would just say that I find Andreas and Antonopoulos to be a really great resource.
If you want to know more about what that is, he's probably the person I've learnt the most about regarding Bitcoin as a whole and then the Lightning Network as well because is very tech based but explains it in pretty simple and clear manners. He's got a book called Mastering the Lightning Network, which I have yet to read myself, but it's a very technical based book, but I've heard good things about it and I've listened to a lot of his podcast, so I would just recommend that. So just getting on to the summary aspect, I suppose, of this direct peer to peer micropayments enable flexibility whilst being a passive activity for the listener consumer.
I think this could be applied outside of podcasting as well. I'm pretty sure there are examples of people who have set this up in some sort of feed or reader that you use on the internet where for every, let's say for a blog, as you're reading, the blog goes down, you know, for each page scroll that you do, or perhaps for each paragraph where you go from one to the next, that is when you, your browser or whatever it is, will automatically send in a micropayment to to the recipient of that. It's very much the same thing. The podcasting version obviously is audio and is done on a minute basis, i.e. you know, I've listened to this many minutes of a podcast, but you can do this for text as in, you know, I'm going to send in a micropayment for this much of a text that I've read, you know, this many paragraphs.
So I think this can apply outside of just audio and video as well. No reason this can't be done with minutes of a video that you've consumed. So I think this is starting to go out to a broader example and you actually can do this with video. For example, if you go on to any of the three speak feeds which show up in podcast apps which support the video version. So once again, going back to what is a podcast, typically it's an MP3, but you can have the video podcast version of that, which is an MP four and you can do this if you actually want to do this, you can type in Miyamoto's podcast without any spaces in between that and you will see a feed that I set up a long time ago on three Speak, which has some clips that I've created, and these clips are much lower quality.
I think I put them in 720p and tried to make them relatively short as well, but you can send micropayments to that as well. So this does work for video. So it's not just a podcasting thing. Micropayments are actually working for, I think for the first time, as far as I'm aware, on the on the Internet and it's going to be very, very cool. No system is perfect. So if you are concerned about this, I would just say maybe don't use super big amounts because it is it can be hard to know exactly how much has gone through to your your favourite podcaster. But I just want to say so if you have a set at ten sites per minute, which is equal to 600 an hour, if you're listening to an hour of content and then 600 sets at today's prices, that's about $0.12 in Australian dollars, which would probably be about $0.10 $0.09 in US dollars.
That's not a whole lot for for an hour's worth of enjoyment that you got. I assume if you're listening to something for an hour, you would get you know, you're only paying $0.10 for that. But let's say you do that for the equivalent across a let's say you're listening to 10 hours of podcasts a week. You know, that's that's about a dollar. You know, is that is that something that you can afford a dollar a week for for listening to to content. Sure sure. That's awesome. And then the micropayments again it matters very little on an individual if someone sends me $0.10.
So it's not going to change my life. But if 10,000 people sent me $0.10, okay, well, that's that's $1,000 that actually makes and makes a difference. So you can kind of see where this can actually add up in the large scale of things. And so you can actually have be supported as and as an artist, as a digital content creator, whatever you want to label yourself as, by a lot of people sending you a little bit amount of money, This is kind of the dream of crowdsourcing, right? Being able to do something like this. Now, typically this changes because even in crowdsourcing models, it's usually a you have this kind of power laws.
The the aspect of that will be a couple of people who will donate the largest amounts and kind of, you know, the 20% of people will send in 80% of the value or the sourcing for that. That's probably always going to happen. That seems to be a natural law of the universe. It happens in galaxies and stars and matter and and light and all of this sort of thing. So where I wouldn't try and fight against that too heavily, but I just think this is really cool and you can so if you've been listening to this, this show will probably go for 45 minutes.
You know, if you send in what I typically do of of 21 sets a minute, you know, that's only going to be about $0.15, something like that. So it's it's not it's not crazy, crazy amounts of money. I think hybrid models using this will probably come into the future, which will probably trend slightly away from pure value for value in its purest form. But I think a probably an enhancement of what we typically see nowadays. So for those who are just wondering, how does your Spotify typical Spotify money actually get divvied up? So they're it's about 220 million.
I think Spotify Premium members each paying, let's just say $9 of $9 a month of that $9 a month. Where does that money actually go? Well, a lot of it goes into the royalty fees for for music. A lot of that will go to the top artists and so they will get. So even if you're not listening to the Taylor Swift's the Justin Bieber's of the World, and you are focussed solely on a niche like me, who listens to this one called free flow flava. And it's kind of a Japanese is unhip. No, not hip hop, Japanese techno, drum'n'bass sort of music which I use for my workouts.
I love listening to that. They're a much, much smaller band and even if I listen to them only exclusively, my money wouldn't go to them. It would go to someone else. So I think there's probably going to be some hybrid models in the future where it will have this aspect of, okay, if I spend $9 a month and I listen to these ten different artists, it will do it based more on who the artist I'm actually listening to. But I think this value for value the micropayment, think of it actually going to them in that time, in that real time aspect has a it has a quality to it, a uniqueness.
Every morning I've got a telegram chat and a telegram bot set up which lets me know real time when people are sending me in micropayments. And it is super, super cool because at any, any given moment I can just check it and it's like, Oh yeah, it's coming in. So I can actually even say there is someone listening to me right now who is streaming in some micropayments. I see value for value three total payments, $0.45, three total payments, $0.45. And this is in the last 5 minutes of ten, 13, 1022, ten, 27 So whoever that is that's listening in, Thank you very much.
I very much appreciate that. So very, very cool. I love it. I love this sort of thing. So, yeah, I think just yes, I'm going it all up. Micropayments are going to pay a large a larger portion of of being able to support people on the Internet. I think incentive creates some really interesting incentives. It enables people to be a lot more flexible with how they use their money and how it gets divvied up. And I think it will create some real big efficiencies of allowing us to not need to go through restricted parties or or going through platforms which are there kind to only only there for the aspect of of trust.
So yeah, I think it's it's really cool and definitely something that you should be looking out for and not discounting a large portion of podcasting 2.0 and of getting podcasters onto the system is emphasising this boost aspect. Like wow, a boost comes in and it can be super big. But I think in one of the coolest things is that unnamed? Well, it's not even unnamed. You can't see people's names, but it is kind of that support which maybe might not get recognised as as clearly and cleanly. I am starting to do for the just mere mortals as a whole for for tax purposes and things like this.
I'm starting to keep a monthly, I suppose you'd call it a budget or just just keeping track of, of how much is, is coming in and being able to then be able to report this to the Australian Tax Office. And what I can see here is for July of 2023, I have let's see how many sets come in. So that was about across the various shows that I've got going on. I had about 336,000 and of that amount there was a 51,000 of that was via people just streaming in. So that's what 161 seventh of the total amount. And that is just a really cool thing to to have come in.
So it's I would actually even love for that to be larger in the future. Um, and yet so it's just very cool, very cool on that aspect and I think it's going to, to change a lot of things. I am now going to get into the Boosta Gram Lounge and I'm going to actually thank some people who have been supporting the show. So take it away. Mr. Adam Curry
[00:32:29] Unknown:
Welcome to the value for value. Boostagram Lounge,
[00:32:37] Unknown:
and boosta Grams for those who don't know, is a payment, a message that has been sent through one of these apps directly to the the wallets the, the address that I put in my RSS feed. So this is different to a the micro streaming because you it now it enables people to actually give some feedback as well some a comment a a message that comes directly to me so this can be very, very beneficial in many ways because I get some content for the show and I get to actually directly thank the people who have been helping to support. So let's kick it off with the first.
Yeah. So this is from Cole McCormick, the host of the America Plus, and he says, I understand the risk with advertising models, but I'm leaning towards using and experimenting with them rather than demonise. Twitter seems like an opportunity that's different from YouTube or Instagram influencer or YouTuber or Instagram influencer. Maybe I'm moving to the bad light. Someone help me and then he sends in his favourite number 5492 sats sent using fountain. So this is just in reference to not even sure I talked about it, particularly on this show where I was saying with Twitter now and enabling the people actually sending money to creators for helping to drive engagement things on the platform.
I was just saying, you know, I could see this turning into a clickbait sort of thing where you you try and get people posting underneath your comments just to be able to, you know, drive some outrage, some something. The because it's based more on I'm not necessarily sure it's based on value, but it's based on attention, which I don't think at the same things. And I think that can go some different ways. But I think his overall strategy is probably the best way to do it, which is experiment, try these things out, Value for value.
I think is the best model, the best model, best method of doing things. And when I experiment out, I want to try and come back into the the critical, critical of it. So as I was talking about with those hybrid models, I think that strays away from value for value, the core principles of it. But they can be interesting nonetheless. And yeah, I would definitely say that just in terms of a life principle, experimenting is is very, very useful. And that was sent using Fountain, one of the apps which enable micropayments and boosting come in actually all of these were from fountain this week another one here from Jean Bean so this is the host of the Volunteer Technologists.
I may be wrong, but I think one peer group instance can mirror content from another. If so, and if the blueberry server you are in now is true, then you should be able to stay there and mirror to any troupe. No idea if that's appealing, but wanted to mention it regardless. And then he sent through a two kilobyte boost 2048 sent using fountain. Yeah, I honestly have no idea. This is I'm I'm at the I'm just getting comfortable with the kind of live aspect, the technological aspect. I'm at the moment and I'm going to be working my way towards trying different ways of doing this.
I might try some video and if I was going to do it, I yeah, I probably would not use YouTube and I would try something like peer group. So this mirroring aspect and getting the stream onto different places, I'm I'm not going to rush that. I was talking about that I think a couple of weeks ago in the live chat as well. I'm yeah I'm at the moment my I've got a whole bunch of other things different to do. For example, I have 48 phone panels sitting on my desk in front of me, which need to go up on the walls to get rid of some of this reverb. So I've got a got all sorts of stuff to do.
But thank you very much, Jane. Been all out. I'm definitely going to look into that. It's just that at what point and when we had Macintosh coming in. So this is the host of generation Bitcoin and he says Music V for V might be bigger than any of us except Adam. I think it will be Mcintosh. And then he sent 2121 sets sent using Fountain. So once again, the bitcoin number there. And yeah, look, honestly, I think it'll be pretty big. I talked about this on one of the shows and I might have neglected to mention it just in here, but I was talking about how I think these hybrid models will emerge.
It was on episode 403 of the Mere Mortals podcast that came out. So if you want to know more about the hybrid models and I was really getting into Spotify and I'm basically I have an open bet out there that I think the Spotify will be bankrupt within eight years. So if you want to, if you're intrigued into what that is all about, I would recommend checking that out. But yeah, I think music value for value is going to be huge and I'll probably be talking about that in about 2 to 3 weeks time. I'm just going to focus more on the ascending of value, the monetary value at the moment, and then get on to how this is being implemented in some really cool ways, such as what Adam Curry is doing with the boostagram Ball The final one I have here is from Gene Bean again coming in and he says, Don't feel icky about fountain advertising.
It's really great and non shady model A one kilobyte boost 1024 cent using fountain as well Yeah I yeah I've changed my tune on that it was my default is just to be sceptical of advertising. I was actually talking with my brother about this last night and he was and I was trying to explain to him the V for V and why I'm so big into it. And there's many different aspects that I I'd try to it. One is I just personally don't like ads and I feel like I've been tricked by ads in the past two is I think strategically relying on I think the censorship aspect of it plays a big part of it.
The strategic aspect of only having one or two advertisers coming in. And if they get can't and that's the weak point, I guess I would much rather have be supported by 500,000 true fans like Kevin Kelly article. I would much rather be supported by a thousand different people across the world in various aspects. All who can make their own individual decision making rather than three advertisers who are very vulnerable to a couple of emails sent by people who dislike me and dislike the show and decide to not sponsor any more. I think just strategically, it's a it's a risky position to be putting yourself in, much like if you build a business based on Instagram or Facebook or YouTube, you don't control that medium.
And so you can get kicked off at any point. You can get throttled with the algorithms. You know, it's it's a tricky game. It's tricky game and a risky game, I think. And that's a risk that I personally am not willing to take, although it might seem that going all in on value for value might might seem slightly risky to some people. I'm going to jump onto my tips. So thank you very much. And thank you, everyone who is streaming as well. It's very, very much appreciated. And that person was streaming and live right now. I really do appreciate it.
I want to give some tips at the moment. So one of the things that I noticed and I've taken this from when I was listening to flooding with Bitcoin, who I talked about the other way, but this is across a few shows as well of only mentioning one service and this service being fountain like I was just mentioning. I think it's just good to be mindful of creating a community on only one app. The Stitcher app, for example, is closing down its service, the Damas app, which was used for Nostr kind of got kicked off of the App Store. It's not hard to imagine the various ways that any of these things could go wrong.
And having just that single point of focus of failure can be a problem. I think what I've seen with this show is really great was it's not just phones and people are using other ways of supporting in. And I'll talk about all of these various apps in a second, but I would just say it is worth at the very least highlighting how other people can help support the show. So I would agree Fountain is a really great app. It's it's my go to at the moment and it's got got a great community there but I would just say just just be mindful, you know, if if you're putting all your chips on one place, once again, it's just a it's just a risky aspect to do so with the app and service highlight.
I just wanted to give a reiteration of all the various different apps that you can use to do micropayments. So obviously I mentioned Fountain. Another great one is podverse, who I mentioned the other week as well, some other cool ones that can do this casta Matic I have yet to really use Castamatic myself because I do not have that phone. I don't. That's only on iOS, so I don't have that phone myself. The Podfans, which at the moment is just on the web, but hopefully will be coming to a a mobile app in the nearest future is also able to do this Podfriend can also do it.
Curiocaster, a great one for the desktop podfriend is also on the desktop. They used to have a I can't remember what it was. The mobile thing would just say it's desktop. The moment podstation also does the stats asset streaming. We also have another one called Breez, which is mostly a lightning wallet, but it does have podcast abilities in there. I'm going to throw this out there because it is doable with the Sphinx dot chat. That's a really old one. I wouldn't recommend it, but it is there and I'm just looking at something in. There's one thing called the value for value calculator, and I don't even know what this is.
Yeah, but if you're really interested in that, you can go on to there. But the main ones I would recommend are fountain castamatic, podverse, Curiocaster, podfriend. Those are probably and breez, those are probably the big apps where you can do this streaming of sets and they're ones which I have personally used Costa Rica a long time ago when I had access to my brother's phone and and could use that out and pod fans coming up. So yeah those are the apps where you can do streaming institutions if you want. Let's jump onto my Value for value section and for this week I'm going to give 15% to Dave.
Dave Jones, the Podsage himself, for putting in a silly amount of effort to make this all happen. Those things that I was just reading off before all of the specs, I believe, that were written by him, so much of what he has done is been helping to create all this backend infrastructure to allow all of this magic Internet money to actually be sent back and forth. He also wrote Helipad, which is a service for you that lets you see export collate the streaming of stats and and boosts. I personally use fountain and Satoshi stream and get I'll be a combination of them.
All of them. I can see the amount the boostagrams but then also the streaming of stats coming in. But if you want a more self-hosted version, you can also go through his helipad. It's not even a service. You don't have to pay for it or anything. It's just free software that is out there and that you can use. So very, very cool and much appreciation to Dave Jones. So what is my final request? Well, one of the things that you could do is you could up your streaming amount here. So you know, what value do put on this show. If you had 100 stats per minute, 45 minutes, that's about one Australian dollars for an episode.
So for the last 45 minutes, was that worth it for you? Did you get one dollars worth of one Australian dollar's worth of value? So that's I think what, 70, $0.67 us something like that out of, out of this podcast. If so you know, set it at 100 cents per minute if it's a little bit less, if it's a little bit more or a lot less or a lot more. In either case, I really am appreciative of people sending in these. The smaller the small amounts, and it gives me a kick of joy every time that I go onto that Telegram app and I just say, okay, you know, someone is streaming sites in through at this very it's so, so cool and I can still see the still doing it at this very moment.
So I really, really do appreciate that. Just in terms of value for value as well, there's many different apps I just listed off a whole portion of them. If you don't want to do it in a monetary form, letting someone know about these cool different things, if you are a podcast fan and you know a podcast app personally, or if you are a podcaster and you want to know how to do more of this, reach out to me via any of the links in the show notes and I'm more than happy to help guide you into how to do this. It is relatively simple and there are ways of doing this now, which you do within five 5 minutes.
It's it's not a hard process if you have some talent, if you know more about the streaming of sets, if you know more or if you know any examples of micropayments working in the past for other services just across the Internet, not even podcasting related, I would I would love to know about that. Some historical history, things like this. And you feel I've done a mis service by not talking about them. I would love to know those things. You know, please boost that in is the best way of doing that, but also just reaching out to me. So very, very cool micropayments.
I think they are going to be a big aspect of the future and yeah, I do just want to thank everyone for, for tuning in for this one today and I will be back once again next week. At the same time 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning Australian Eastern Standard Time and yep until the next time. Chao for now Kyrin out.
