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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Unknown:
Micropaymentsactually work! Welcome everyone to episode 43 of the Valuefor Value podcast. My name is Kyrin, hostof the Mere Mortals Podcasts and also this one. And this is the show for digital contentcreators who want to connectmore deeply with their audienceand also be able to learn and earna living at the same time. Man, Got to get that out. I want to justreiterate here that I am liveon a Wednesday 10 a.m. at UTC plus ten, which is the equivalentof the boundary between a Tuesday, Wednesday,midnight at UTC zero. So easy way of thinking.
This is wherever you arein the world, if you're in a plus zone, just add on thoseplus hours onto that Tuesday midnight. Or if you're in the minuszone, take it away and you'll knowexactly where you are. And if you canlisten live to it. I would really appreciateyou joining in as well. Let's dive straight intothe topic for this week. So I've got a fairfew things to talk about. And this is all aboutmicropayments. So in the pastcouple of episodes, we have really been focusing on the podcaststhemselves. We're looking at lit, we're lookingat the four properties.
What is podcast emergenceof podcasting 2.0. And Ikind of promised, okay, this is what's going to beone of the things that has emergedfrom podcasting 2.0 and this is the value tag, and I want to explain how this workswith the RSS feed. And we're goingto really be focusingon the micropayment aspect of itfor for this time. So first of all, I hope we all knowwhat an RSS feed is. This is where your podcastis is kind of hosted. I guess this is thedirections for podcasting apps to be able to see,okay, this is where the audiofiles are located. This is the descriptions.
They want a real source of informationand how to display what it is that you'retrying to display in a, you know, mostly an audioformat for podcasting. But blogs use RSS as well. And we'll we'll touch uponthat in a little bit of a later section. So what the value tag is,is it's essentially a a way for youto put in a wallet and for people to pay you directlywithout permission, without any stringsattached. And we're talkingabout the permissionless aspect of of Bitcoin andof the RSS and podcasting. So what this doesis it's really cool because you can justput something in.
It's there in your feed. You don't have to be changing it for all of the differentcurrencies and bankaccounts of the world. Now, there's reallyno way to do this in podcastingbefore podcasting 2.0 came alongand allowed this. So in this casewe are using mostlythe Lightning Network, but once again,there's some abilities to change things up. And what people can do is they can sendin micropayments to you. So for every minute, every bit that they willlistening to you, they can continuouslystream some money. So one of the coolthings about this is you have the abilityto create splits.
And so what I can doand what I do do is put in multipledifferent levels of splits for everyonewho I think is deserving and helpingof creating this podcast. So now for meyou might say, Okay. Kyrin, but you'rejust an individual. You can just put in oneand that'll be fine. But I actually wantto 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 walletthat we have as a split because the microphonesthat I'm using, the room,the sound panels, all the stuff thatI've got going on here, he helped to pay for a large portion of thator half of it. Exactly.
So I want to include himon part of it. I want to include a extraperson, as I do weekly for for 15%who I think is really helped me out this weekor is helping out the the kind of ecosystemI want to include the apps which give me serviceswhich really help me and you will see this forthis particular podcast. I've got one calledSatoshis Stream. I've talkedabout them before and they are really greatfor data collection and for being able tosurface boosts and be able to connect to the discordand all of these things, which I just wouldn'tbe able to do myself.
So whenyou are creating a podcast or when you're creating a piece of artworkor a music, you know, if you're in a band, there's probably goingto 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 complicatedlegal contracts. You need, you know, so many interestindustries have these non-productive middlemenwho are there kind of solelyto provide trust. I feel inthe best of cases or who are restrictcontrol while also charging youfor it as well. And I thinkthe music industry seems to be rifewith this.
I haven't had a firsthandexperience myself, so I'm not a musician, but I know peoplewho are musicians and and they say thatthe process of trying to put your music on Spotifyor on Bandcamp or a large portionof these places, it just gets chewed out. You know, they charge high, high feesand what ends up happening is if you get 100,000streams on Spotify, a big number in the podcasting equivalent,you would get $20 per per thousand. So that'd be $2,000 if you justdid standard advertising. If you do that on Spotify, you're not getting twogrants. You're getting, you know,a couple of dollars, maybe $20, maybemaybe 100, who knows?
But it's significantly,significantly less. So I think one of the coolthings that really is about this value tagand being able to put a a way for people to payyou directly within your your RSS feed is that it just cuts outso much of the kind of bullshitand it can be done on a peer to peer basis. The peoplewho want to pay, you know, that it'sgoing directly to you. And this is really coolbecause this is basically basically micropayments and I am a slightly tooyoung to know the full historyof the Internet. I was born in 1992,so I was coming up, I guesswith it in the 2000, but it seemedthat micropayments were this kind of golden thing.
Everyone wanted to do it like, wouldn'tthis be amazing to do? And this would createbetter incentives for for everyoneyou would need it. It just seems likesomething that would solvea lot of problems, but it was neveractually implemented. And I was listeningto Adam Curry not too long agoand he was saying, Yeah, you know, this probably thismight be the first time micropaymentshas actually been done and is actually working. So very,very cool for that. The other thingI mentioned was everyonegets a piece of the pie that the podcastapp developers hosts if they want to get inon this blueberry, for example,you can use their, their functionalityin 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 servicesfor statistics, you can put in charities. I mean, hell, you can even put in the listener back into itif you want. So what this does is it really one enablesa lot of optionality and I think it alignsa lot of incentives and it can cut outa lot of the kind of I won't say bullshit,but I think just a lot of we all know people who have a jobwhere they have a ridiculous amountof time for that, for that work, and they kind of only work2 hours, 3 hours a day. I think if you can eliminate a lot of that chaffin the system, it makes for a betterworld.
Now, let's get on to,I guess, the streaming aspect of this. So streaming sets and this isthe main use case we see nowin podcasting 2.0, and we can see this across a varietyof of different apps. And so this how this worksis generally it's calculatedin one minute intervals, thoughnot necessarily sent being in one minuteintervals. So batching occurs. So if you go into the appsitself, you wouldtypically see down at the bottomof the screen it'll say ator have a a little counter or a little circle near the play button or off to the side of thator something like that.
And you can chooseas the listener how much that you want to stream in to your favouritepodcaster. For me, myself,I like the $0.21 per minute because that'show many bitcoin there are going to be. It's just a kind ofsymbolic number. And even afterlistening to this, I might change thatbecause I've got some stats on here on how muchthat is actually worth. Once again,the micropayment aspect is kind of highlightingthe micro ness of it. It's this is intendedto be smallish amounts, but you know, small can differfrom for different people. If a billionaire was listeninginto the podcast and they were streamingin, you know, 2100 sets per minute, that would still berelatively small for them in comparison to tomy perception of wealth.
So we have this, thisaspect here, unlike subscriptionsor paywalls, you're only payingfor what you actually use. This is why micropayments are so cool and can helpa lot of other systems which are in place. And you might say, okay. CORIN But there's there's other waysyou can do this. You could do thisthrough the patron model. And this is getting moreto the the value for value aspect and getting closerto the heart of that, which is I providevalue for you upfront, and then you provide itback to me in whatever numberand way that you want. Okay, Well,this is beautiful for two different reasons.
One, you get to choosethe value that you sendback to me, i.e. you get to choose how many satoshis per minuteyou want to send to me, and it stops as soonas you stop listening, which is in contrastto something like Patreon where you have to just payand it just goes automatically and you've kind of paid for a month,I guess. So this is really gettingto that aspect wherewhat if I only want to get two weeks worth of valueout of this? What if I only want to listen to the show just to kind of test it out and see, doI actually like this show? And so I'm goingto jump on to here onto the GitHubfor the podcast namespace.
And Dave Jonescreated this thing, a little captionhere called Play to Pay, whichI think is really cool because it explains itquite nicely. So I'm just goingto read this out. This, this dong can be thought of as play to pay rather than the traditional payto play pay wall approach. When a media listener such aswithin a podcasting app presses the play buttonon an episode whose feed containsa value block, a compatible appwill be expected to begin streamingmicropayments to the designatedrecipients on a time interval that makes sensefor the app.
So it actually doesn'teven need to bein these minute intervals and I'll get on tothat soon. The amount of each paymentcan be any amount the listenerchooses, including zero. If the list of the listener chooses not to pay to listento this media, then the app can ignorethe value block of that feed and thenit goes down a little bit. Low payment intervals,the time interval for calculating paymentsis always one minute. However,the actual interval between when paymentsare sent can be longer. The intervalshould be chosen with a few factors in mind,such as connectivity.
Is the appcurrently online transaction fees batched payments togetherto reduce fee percentage cryptocurrency networkload can be given crypto network or APIsupport this payment. Right? So there'sa couple of things related to that therewhich were were pretty much what I washighlighting. This does fit the valuefor value model more closelythan something that takesa paywall approach and it's accessiblefor people who are just coming inand who are just a little bit uncertain. Do I actually like thiscontent or not? And maybe when you're coming infor this first time, you could havethe default a zero because you'relistening to a show and you only want to send itwhen you when you think it'sit's worthy of sending.
Now, whatI actually really like about this as wellis that it's rather passiveand doesn't actually require active decisionmaking to be made whilealso allowing the listener to determine the amount. So this is classicV for V, and I think it'sthis passive part which is really interesting and intriguing because when we lookat the value for value modelthat is being done on something like No Agenda,for example, it does requirea kind of bigger effort on an individual's part. Now what they typically doon that show with this is AdamCurry and John C Dvorak is they've done this largelythrough PayPal, and PayPal is good enoughfor one instance and this is being able to set uprecurring payments.
And so you can havejust this thing which will go every monthand go, bam, you know, do I want to send thisto the show? Well,it doesn't even ask you if you just set it up. It will justautomatically do it as long as you have enough moneyin your PayPal wallet or maybe even your bankaccount. And PayPal can can workstraight from there. I'm not actually sureI don't use PayPal that often. And this is once again getting closerto the value for value. But the more passiveaspect of it, which is I don't you know, if I was tryingto 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 showbetter than this other show? Should I send themthis much? It's too much. It is too much overload. Whereas with this system, once again, you can justchoose a number. And I've chosen my number and I might change a different numberin the future. But once I've chosen that,every show that I listen to fromthen on, it's just a constantstream and going in. I'm not having to make these active decisions and the moreactive decision. So something like BoosterGrams, 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 relativelysimple on the surface, the micropayment aspect, I want to choose an amountof money to go to my favourite artist or content creatoras I'm listening, and as soon as I stoplistening, I want it to stop.
I think that's prettysimple. I get to choosehow much I want and I can justkind of maintain this for as long as I want. Now the complex thingis more on the application side, and this is morejust of interest perhaps for for people,which is there's so many different various waysthat this could all that they have tomake decisions. So this is the application, the podcast app that is tuned, that is receivingthese micropayments and then passing them on or enabling this,I should say. So for example, if someone is listeningto a show and they want to and they end up sending545 so they listen for, you know, X amount of time at let's makethis even easier, they have the streamingset set at 54 per minute and they listenfor 100 minutes.
So that's an hour and 40minutes worth of content. They will have sent 540. But okay, the the amountthat is actually going to individual peoplein the in the value block. So this is in the actualRSS feed. How's that going to getdivvied up? It's pretty easy if there's just onein there or 540will go to that person and to thatthat that wallet. But what if there'stwo of them? Okay, well,I guess you could maybe have it as 270going to each. Okay. What if there's four ofthem in the equal splits? Okay. Well, I guess 135. But you can kind ofsee how this could get into a pointwhere it's like if you have 100 differentpeople all getting 1%, well, you can'tdivide 40 into 100.
So like withouthaving micro portions. So at some point they're going to haveto make some decisions of going,okay, well, this person is too low. So we're just goingto send a rough amount of setsto these other people. Another case would belistening at 1.25 speed. What does the person who is streaming itin, do they expect this to be for the actual minutesof the show or the actual minutes of how longthey're listening, which will be shorter because they're listeningat a faster speed? Or if you do the oppositeversion at 0.75 speed, whatwhat about in that case? You can also have mistakes in the podcast aside where you might not havethings adding up to 100% and might add up to99% or 101 and we see thisrelatively often, How do we do?
We then dividethat have to do more recalculations,Then there's fees as well, which are probably somethingI want to just touch upon becauseI heard someone on anothershow, a listener being worried about the the fees that arecurrently occurring and the app developersare smart and they make a lot of decisionsand they have to make these choices. And they these are individual onesthat they decide to. In this case, most of themare pretty smart and so they will say,okay, the actual sending throughon the minute basis is kind of hardand it's going to rack up some fees.
And so what they will typically do is they'llbatch these payments. Now, I was chatting withsome of them on the Mastodon instance,and that was the kind of various thingssaying from, you know, every 3 minutesthey will send in a batched payment. I think some of themwere slightly a bit larger than that, but almost certainly theydo it as it's occurring. And so they're not justwaiting until you've finishedlistening to an episode and then sending itall in one big chunk, which I thinkcould be done as well. I don't seeany problems with that. But allof this is just, you know, they're going to haveto 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 happeningin this case now that was a sectionhere which I just want to touch upon,which was all of this at the momentis based on lightning, but you could even hear itin that section. I was sayingwith Dave Jones that he had cryptocurrency network load and so I'm just goingto jump down here to the namespace again. And this is where it says Support currenciesand protocols. The value blockis designed to be flexible enough to handle mostor any cryptocurrency and even fiat currencieswith a given API that exposes a compatibleprocess.
Currently,development is centred mostly on lightning, so this is the layertwo of bitcoin using the key and method keys and allows for pushbased payments without the recipientneeding to generate an invoiceto receive them. Another another methodto send spontaneous paymentsvia lightning is amp atomic multiple payments which supersedes key and in many waysin last form robust and largerpayments. However,it is still in beta and thus not widelyimplemented. 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, itcould be done with fiat. So this is, you know, actual US dollarsor Australian dollars or Canadian dollarsor Argentinean pesos or Colombian pesos. But not much of it isactually done through that becauseit's incredibly complex. This could have you know, we'vewe've had the ability to do this forfor a large while, but it actually no one'sactually implemented it. It's morethrough the digital money like Bitcoin where it it it makes a lot more senseand it's actually doable. It can cross geographicboundaries and there's no and not as many laws and restrictionsand regulations related to the sending ofmoney like there is was.
If you wanted to send micropayments to your favouriteIranian podcaster and your US based,I think that is going to be pretty impossiblefrom what I know. From what I gather, how what we actually haveseen is that there is room for more. So you can actually do this on the hiveblockchain. I wanted to give a small shout out to themand this is because, you know, one of the developersthere, Brian of London, he made an active, difficult choicepretty much on his own to help implementthis into podcasting. And we saw thiswith podcasting, which is also usingthe Hive blockchain.
So it does allow forother 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 avoidedor tried to avoid highlightingthat it's a Bitcoin thing and because I thinkit can extend beyond that, but it is very much centred uponthat at the moment. And I would just say that I find Andreasand Antonopoulos to bea really great resource. If you want to know moreabout what that is, he's probably the personI've learnt the most about regarding Bitcoinas a whole and then the LightningNetwork as well because is very tech basedbut explains it in pretty simple and clearmanners.
He's got a book called Masteringthe Lightning Network, which I have yetto read myself, but it's a very technicalbased book, but I've heardgood things about it and I've listenedto a lot of his podcast, so I would justrecommend that. So just getting onto the summary aspect, I suppose, of this directpeer to peer micropayments enable flexibility whilst being a passive activityfor the listener consumer. I think this could beapplied outside of podcasting as well. I'm pretty sure there are examples of peoplewho have set this up in some sort of feedor reader that you useon the internet where for every, let's sayfor a blog, as you're reading,the blog goes down, you know,for each page scroll that you do, or perhapsfor each paragraph where you go fromone to the next, that is when you,your browser or whatever it is, willautomatically send in a micropayment toto the recipient of that.
It's very muchthe same thing. The podcasting versionobviously is audio and is done on a minute basis, i.e. youknow, I've listened to this many minutes of a podcast, but you can do thisfor text as in, you know, I'm going to send in a micropaymentfor this much of a text that I've read, you know,this many paragraphs. So I think this can applyoutside of just audio and video as well. No reasonthis can't be done with minutes of a videothat you've consumed. So I think this isstarting to go outto a broader example and you actuallycan do this with video. For example, if you go on to any of the three speak feeds which show up in podcastapps which support the video version.
So once again, going backto what is a podcast, typically it's an MP3,but you can have the video podcast version ofthat, which is an MP four and you can do this if youactually want to do this, you can type in Miyamoto's podcast without any spacesin between that and you will see a feedthat I set up a long time agoon three Speak, which has some clipsthat I've created, and these clips are muchlower quality. I think I put them in 720p and tried to make them relatively short as well,but you can send micropaymentsto that as well. So this does workfor video.
So it's not justa podcasting thing. Micropaymentsare actually working for, I thinkfor 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 concernedabout this, I would just say maybe don't use super big amountsbecause it is it can be hard to knowexactly how much has gone through to youryour favourite podcaster. But I just want to say soif you have a set at ten sitesper minute, which is equal to 600an hour, if you're listeningto an hour of content and then 600 setsat today's prices, that's about $0.12in Australian dollars, which would probably be about $0.10 $0.09 in USdollars.
That's not a whole lot forfor an hour's worth of enjoymentthat you got. I assumeif you're listening to something for an hour,you would get you know, you're onlypaying $0.10 for that. But let's say you do that forthe equivalent across a let's say you're listening to 10 hoursof podcasts a week. You know, that'sthat's about a dollar. You know, is that is that somethingthat you can afford a dollar a week for forlistening to to content. Sure sure. That's awesome. And then the micropaymentsagain it matters very little onan individual if someone sends me $0.10.
So it's not going tochange my life. But if 10,000 peoplesent me $0.10, okay, well, that's that's $1,000that actually makes and makes a difference. So you can kind of see where this canactually add up in the large scale of things. And so you can actuallyhave be supported as and as an artist, as a digital contentcreator, whatever you wantto label yourself as, by a lot of peoplesending you a little bit amount of money, This is kind of the dreamof crowdsourcing, right? Being ableto do something like this. Now, typicallythis changes because even in crowdsourcingmodels, it's usually a you havethis kind of power laws.
The the aspect of thatwill be a couple of people who will donate the largest amountsand kind of, you know, the 20% of people willsend in 80% of the value or the sourcing for that. That's probablyalways going to happen. That seems to be a naturallaw of the universe. It happens in galaxiesand stars and matter and and light and all of thissort of thing. So where I wouldn't try and fightagainst that too heavily, but I justthink this is really cool and you can so if you've been listening to this,this show will probably go for45 minutes. You know, if you send in what I typically do ofof 21 sets a minute, you know, that's onlygoing 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 usingthis will probably come into the future,which will probably trend slightly awayfrom pure value for valuein its purest form. But I think a probably an enhancement of whatwe typically see nowadays. So for thosewho are just wondering, how does your Spotifytypical Spotify money actually get divvied up? So they're it's about220 million. I think SpotifyPremium members each paying,let's just say $9 of $9 a month of that$9 a month. Where does that moneyactually go? Well, a lot of it goes into the royalty feesfor for music.
A lot of that will go to the top artistsand so they will get. So even if you're notlistening to the Taylor Swift's the Justin Bieber'sof the World, and you are focussedsolely on a niche like me, who listens to this onecalled free flow flava. And it's kind of aJapanese is unhip. No, not hip hop, Japanese techno, drum'n'basssort of music which I usefor my workouts. I love listening to that. They'rea much, much smaller band and even if I listento them only exclusively, my money wouldn'tgo to them. It would goto someone else. So I think there'sprobably going to be some hybrid modelsin the future where it willhave this aspect of, okay, if I spend $9 a month and I listen to theseten different artists, it will do itbased more on who the artistI'm actually listening to.
But I think this value forvalue the micropayment, think of it actually going to themin that time, in that real timeaspect has a it has a qualityto it, a uniqueness. Every morningI've got a telegram chat and a telegram bot set up which lets me knowreal time when people are sending mein micropayments. And it is super,super cool because at any, any given momentI can just check it and it's like,Oh yeah, it's coming in. So I can actually even say there is someonelistening to me right now who is streamingin some micropayments. I see value for valuethree total payments, $0.45, threetotal payments, $0.45.
And this is in the last5 minutes of ten, 13, 1022, ten, 27So whoever that is that's listening in,Thank you very much. I verymuch appreciate that. So very, very cool. I love it.I love this sort of thing. So, yeah, I think justyes, I'm going it all up. Micropaymentsare going to pay a large a larger portion ofof being able to support people on the Internet. I think incentive creates some really interestingincentives. It enables people to be a lot more flexible with howthey use their money and how it getsdivvied up. And I think it will create some realbig efficiencies of allowing usto not need to go through restricted parties or orgoing through platforms which are there kind to only only there forthe aspect of of trust.
So yeah, I think it's it's really cooland definitely something that you should be looking out forand not discounting a large portionof podcasting 2.0 and of getting podcastersonto the system is emphasisingthis boost aspect. Like wow, a boost comes inand it can be super big. But I think in one of the coolest thingsis that unnamed? Well, it'snot even unnamed. You can't seepeople's names, but it is kind of that supportwhich maybe might not get recognisedas as clearly and cleanly. I am startingto do for the just meremortals as a whole for for tax purposesand things like this.
I'm startingto keep a monthly, I suppose you'dcall it a budget or just just keeping track of, ofhow much is, is coming in and being able tothen be able to report this tothe Australian Tax Office. And what I can see here is for July of 2023, I have let'ssee how many sets come in. So that was about across the various showsthat I've got going on. I had about 336,000 and of that amountthere was a 51,000 of that was viapeople just streaming in. So that's what 161 seventhof the total amount. And that is justa really cool thing to to have come in.
So it's I would actually even lovefor that to be larger in the future. Um, and yetso it's just very cool, very cool on that aspectand I think it's going to, to changea lot of things. I am now going to get intothe Boosta Gram Lounge and I'm going to actually thank some peoplewho have been supporting the show. So takeit away. Mr. Adam Curry
[00:32:29] Unknown:
Welcometo the value for value. Boostagram Lounge,
[00:32:37] Unknown:
and boosta Gramsfor those who don't know, is a payment, a messagethat has been sent through one of these apps directlyto the the wallets the, the addressthat I put in my RSS feed. So this is different to athe micro streaming because you it now itenables people to actually give some feedback as wellsome a comment a a message that comesdirectly to me so this can be very, very beneficialin many ways because I get some contentfor the show and I get to actually directly thank the peoplewho have been helping to support. So let's kick it offwith the first.
Yeah. So this is from ColeMcCormick, the host of the AmericaPlus, and he says, I understand the riskwith advertising models, but I'm leaning towardsusing and experimenting with themrather than demonise. Twitterseems like an opportunity that's different from YouTubeor Instagram influencer or YouTuberor Instagram influencer. Maybe I'mmoving to the bad light. Someone help me and then he sendsin his favourite number 5492 sats sentusing fountain. So this is just inreference to not even sure I talked about it,particularly on this showwhere I was saying with Twitter nowand enabling the people actually sending money to creatorsfor helping to drive engagementthings on the platform.
I was just saying,you know, I could see thisturning into a clickbait sort of thing where you you try and get peopleposting underneath your comments just to be ableto, you know, drive some outrage,some something. The because it's basedmore on I'm not necessarilysure it's based on value, but it's based on attention, which I don'tthink at the same things. And I think that can gosome different ways. But I thinkhis overall strategy is probably the best wayto 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 tryand come back into the the critical,critical of it. So as I was talking aboutwith those hybrid models, I think that strays away from valuefor value, the core principles of it. But they can beinteresting nonetheless. And yeah,I would definitely say thatjust in terms of a life principle, experimentingis is very, very useful. And that was sentusing Fountain, one of the appswhich enable micropayments and boosting come in actually all of these werefrom fountain this week another one here from Jean Bean so this is the host of the VolunteerTechnologists.
I may be wrong, but I think one peer group instance can mirrorcontent from another. If so, and if the blueberry serveryou are in now is true, then you should be able to stay there and mirrorto any troupe. No ideaif that's appealing, but wanted to mention itregardless. And then he sent through atwo kilobyte boost 2048 sent using fountain. Yeah,I honestly have no idea. This is I'm I'm at the I'm just gettingcomfortable with the kind of live aspect,the technological aspect. I'm at the moment and I'm going to beworking my way towards trying differentways 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 trysomething like peer group. So this mirroring aspect and getting the streamonto different places, I'm I'm not going to rushthat. I was talking about thatI think a couple of weeks agoin the live chat as well. I'm yeah I'm at the momentmy I've got a whole bunch of other thingsdifferent to do. For example,I have 48 phone panels sitting on my desk in front of me, which need to go upon the walls to get ridof some of this reverb. So I've got a gotall sorts of stuff to do.
But thank you very much,Jane. Been all out. I'm definitely goingto look into that. It's just that at what point and when wehad Macintosh coming in. So this is the host of generation Bitcoin and he says Music V for V might bebigger than any of us except Adam. I thinkit will be Mcintosh. And then he sent 2121sets sent using Fountain. So once again,the bitcoin number there. And yeah, look, honestly, I thinkit'll be pretty big. I talked about thison one of the shows and I might have neglectedto mention it just in here, butI was talking about how I think thesehybrid models will emerge.
It was on episode403 of the Mere Mortals podcast that came out. So if you want to know more about the hybrid modelsand I was really getting into Spotifyand I'm basically I have an openbet out there that I think the Spotifywill be bankrupt within eight years. So if you want to, if you're intriguedinto what that is all about, I would recommendchecking that out. But yeah, I think music value for valueis going to be huge and I'll probably betalking about that in about 2 to 3 weekstime. I'm just going tofocus more on the ascending of value,the monetary value at the moment,and then get on to how this is being implementedin some really cool ways, suchas what Adam Curry is doing with theboostagram Ball The finalone I have here is from Gene Bean againcoming in and he says,Don't feel icky about fountainadvertising.
It's really greatand non shady model A one kilobyteboost 1024 cent using fountain as wellYeah I yeah I've changed my tuneon that it was my default is just to be scepticalof advertising. I was actually talking with my brotherabout this last night and he was and I was tryingto explain to him the V for V and why I'mso big into it. And there's many different aspectsthat I I'd try to it. One is I just personally don't like adsand I feel like I've been trickedby ads in the past two is I thinkstrategically relying on I think the censorship aspect of it playsa big part of it.
The strategic aspect of only having one or twoadvertisers coming in. And if they get can't and that's the weak point,I guess I would much ratherhave be supported by 500,000 true fanslike Kevin Kelly article. I would much ratherbe supported by a thousand different peopleacross the world in various aspects. All who can make their ownindividual decision making rather than threeadvertisers who are very vulnerableto a couple of emails sent by peoplewho dislike me and dislike the showand decide to not sponsor any more. I think juststrategically, it's a it's a risky position to be putting yourselfin, much like if you build a businessbased on Instagram or Facebook or YouTube, you don'tcontrol that medium.
And so you can getkicked off at any point. You can get throttledwith the algorithms. You know, it's it'sa tricky game. It's tricky gameand a risky game, I think. And that's a risk that I personallyam not willing to take, although it might seem that going all in onvalue for value might might seem slightlyrisky to some people. I'm goingto jump onto my tips. So thank you very much. And thank you, everyonewho is streaming as well. It's very,very much appreciated. And that person was streamingand live right now. I really do appreciate it. I want to give some tipsat the moment.
So one of the things that I noticed and I've taken this from when I was listeningto flooding with Bitcoin, who I talkedabout the other way, but this isacross a few shows as well of only mentioning one service and this servicebeing fountain like I was justmentioning. I think it's just good to be mindfulof creating a community on only one app. The Stitcherapp, for example, is closing downits service, the Damas app,which was used for Nostr kind of got kickedoff of the App Store. It's not hard to imaginethe various ways that any of these thingscould go wrong.
And havingjust that single point of focus of failurecan be a problem. I think what I've seen withthis show is really great was it's not just phonesand people are using other ways of supporting in. And I'll talk about all of these variousapps in a second, but I would just say it is worthat the very least highlightinghow other people can help support the show. So I would agree Fountainis a really great app. It's it'smy go to at the moment and it's got gota great community there but I would just say just just be mindful,you know, if if you're putting allyour chips on one place, once again, it's justa it's just a risky aspect to do so with the appand service highlight.
I just wanted to givea reiteration of all the various different appsthat you can use to do micropayments. So obviously I mentionedFountain. Another greatone is podverse, who I mentionedthe other week as well, some other cool onesthat can do this casta Matic I have yet to really useCastamatic myself because I do not have thatphone. I don't. That's only on iOS,so I don't have that phone myself. The Podfans, which at the momentis just on the web, but hopefully will be comingto a a mobile app in the nearest futureis also able to do this Podfriendcan also do it.
Curiocaster, a great one for the desktop podfriendis also on the desktop. They used to have a I can't remember whatit was. The mobile thing wouldjust say it's desktop. The moment podstation also doesthe stats asset streaming. We also haveanother one called Breez, which is mostlya lightning wallet, but it does have podcastabilities in there. I'm going to throw this out therebecause 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 justlooking at something in. There's one thingcalled the value for value calculator, and I don't even knowwhat this is.
Yeah, but if you're really interested in that,you can go on to there. But the main ones I wouldrecommend are fountain castamatic, podverse,Curiocaster, podfriend. Thoseare probably and breez, those are probably the big appswhere you can do this streaming of setsand they're ones which I have personally used Costa Rica a long time ago when I had accessto my brother's phone and and could use that outand pod fans coming up. So yeah those are the appswhere you can do streaming institutionsif you want. Let's jump onto my Valuefor value section and for this week I'mgoing to give 15% to Dave.
Dave Jones,the Podsage himself, for putting in a sillyamount of effort to make this all happen. Those things thatI was just reading off before all of the specs, I believe,that were written by him, so much of what he hasdone is been helping to create all this backendinfrastructure to allow all of this magic Internet money to actuallybe sent back and forth. He also wrote Helipad,which is a service for you that lets you see exportcollate the streaming of stats andand boosts. I personally use fountainand Satoshi stream and get I'll bea combination of them.
All of them. I can see the amount the boostagramsbut then also the streaming of statscoming in. But if you want amore self-hosted version, you can also go throughhis helipad. It's not even a service. You don't have to payfor it or anything. It's just free software that is out thereand that you can use. So very, very cooland much appreciation to Dave Jones. So what is my finalrequest? Well, one of the thingsthat you could do is you could up yourstreaming amount here. So you know, what value doput on this show. If you had 100 statsper minute, 45 minutes, that's aboutone Australian dollars for an episode.
So forthe last 45 minutes, was that worth it for you? Did you get one dollarsworth of one Australian dollar'sworth of value? So that's I think what, 70, $0.67 ussomething like that out of, out of this podcast. If so you know, set itat 100 cents per minute if it's a little bit less,if it's a little bit more or a lot lessor a lot more. In either case,I really am appreciative of peoplesending in these. The smaller the small amounts, and it gives me a kickof joy every time that I go onto that Telegram appand I just say, okay, you know,someone is streaming sites in through at this very it'sso, so cool and I can still see the still doing itat this very moment.
So I really,really do appreciate that. Just in terms ofvalue for value as well, there's manydifferent apps I just listed offa whole portion of them. If you don't want to do itin a monetary form, letting someone knowabout these cool different things,if you are a podcast fan and you know a podcastapp personally, or if you are a podcasterand you want to know how to do more of this, reach out to me via any of the linksin the show notes and I'm more than happyto help guide you into how to do this. It is relatively simpleand there are ways of doing this now,which you do within five 5 minutes.
It's it's not a hard processif you have some talent, if you know more aboutthe streaming of sets, if you know moreor if you know any examplesof micropayments working in the pastfor other services just across the Internet, not even podcastingrelated, I would I would love to knowabout that. Some historical history,things like this. And you feelI've done a mis service by not talking about them. I would love to knowthose things. You know, please boost that in is the best wayof doing that, but also just reaching outto me. So very,very cool micropayments.
I think they are going to be a big aspectof the future and yeah, I do just want tothank everyone for, for tuning in for this onetoday and I will be backonce again next week. At the same time 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning Australian EasternStandard Time and yep until thenext time. Chao for now Kyrin out.
Micropaymentsactually work! Welcome everyone to episode 43 of the Valuefor Value podcast. My name is Kyrin, hostof the Mere Mortals Podcasts and also this one. And this is the show for digital contentcreators who want to connectmore deeply with their audienceand also be able to learn and earna living at the same time. Man, Got to get that out. I want to justreiterate here that I am liveon a Wednesday 10 a.m. at UTC plus ten, which is the equivalentof the boundary between a Tuesday, Wednesday,midnight at UTC zero. So easy way of thinking.
This is wherever you arein the world, if you're in a plus zone, just add on thoseplus hours onto that Tuesday midnight. Or if you're in the minuszone, take it away and you'll knowexactly where you are. And if you canlisten live to it. I would really appreciateyou joining in as well. Let's dive straight intothe topic for this week. So I've got a fairfew things to talk about. And this is all aboutmicropayments. So in the pastcouple of episodes, we have really been focusing on the podcaststhemselves. We're looking at lit, we're lookingat the four properties.
What is podcast emergenceof podcasting 2.0. And Ikind of promised, okay, this is what's going to beone of the things that has emergedfrom podcasting 2.0 and this is the value tag, and I want to explain how this workswith the RSS feed. And we're goingto really be focusingon the micropayment aspect of itfor for this time. So first of all, I hope we all knowwhat an RSS feed is. This is where your podcastis is kind of hosted. I guess this is thedirections for podcasting apps to be able to see,okay, this is where the audiofiles are located. This is the descriptions.
They want a real source of informationand how to display what it is that you'retrying to display in a, you know, mostly an audioformat for podcasting. But blogs use RSS as well. And we'll we'll touch uponthat in a little bit of a later section. So what the value tag is,is it's essentially a a way for youto put in a wallet and for people to pay you directlywithout permission, without any stringsattached. And we're talkingabout the permissionless aspect of of Bitcoin andof the RSS and podcasting. So what this doesis it's really cool because you can justput something in.
It's there in your feed. You don't have to be changing it for all of the differentcurrencies and bankaccounts of the world. Now, there's reallyno way to do this in podcastingbefore podcasting 2.0 came alongand allowed this. So in this casewe are using mostlythe Lightning Network, but once again,there's some abilities to change things up. And what people can do is they can sendin micropayments to you. So for every minute, every bit that they willlistening to you, they can continuouslystream some money. So one of the coolthings about this is you have the abilityto create splits.
And so what I can doand what I do do is put in multipledifferent levels of splits for everyonewho I think is deserving and helpingof creating this podcast. So now for meyou might say, Okay. Kyrin, but you'rejust an individual. You can just put in oneand that'll be fine. But I actually wantto 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 walletthat we have as a split because the microphonesthat I'm using, the room,the sound panels, all the stuff thatI've got going on here, he helped to pay for a large portion of thator half of it. Exactly.
So I want to include himon part of it. I want to include a extraperson, as I do weekly for for 15%who I think is really helped me out this weekor is helping out the the kind of ecosystemI want to include the apps which give me serviceswhich really help me and you will see this forthis particular podcast. I've got one calledSatoshis Stream. I've talkedabout them before and they are really greatfor data collection and for being able tosurface boosts and be able to connect to the discordand all of these things, which I just wouldn'tbe able to do myself.
So whenyou are creating a podcast or when you're creating a piece of artworkor a music, you know, if you're in a band, there's probably goingto 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 complicatedlegal contracts. You need, you know, so many interestindustries have these non-productive middlemenwho are there kind of solelyto provide trust. I feel inthe best of cases or who are restrictcontrol while also charging youfor it as well. And I thinkthe music industry seems to be rifewith this.
I haven't had a firsthandexperience myself, so I'm not a musician, but I know peoplewho are musicians and and they say thatthe process of trying to put your music on Spotifyor on Bandcamp or a large portionof these places, it just gets chewed out. You know, they charge high, high feesand what ends up happening is if you get 100,000streams on Spotify, a big number in the podcasting equivalent,you would get $20 per per thousand. So that'd be $2,000 if you justdid standard advertising. If you do that on Spotify, you're not getting twogrants. You're getting, you know,a couple of dollars, maybe $20, maybemaybe 100, who knows?
But it's significantly,significantly less. So I think one of the coolthings that really is about this value tagand being able to put a a way for people to payyou directly within your your RSS feed is that it just cuts outso much of the kind of bullshitand it can be done on a peer to peer basis. The peoplewho want to pay, you know, that it'sgoing directly to you. And this is really coolbecause this is basically basically micropayments and I am a slightly tooyoung to know the full historyof the Internet. I was born in 1992,so I was coming up, I guesswith it in the 2000, but it seemedthat micropayments were this kind of golden thing.
Everyone wanted to do it like, wouldn'tthis be amazing to do? And this would createbetter incentives for for everyoneyou would need it. It just seems likesomething that would solvea lot of problems, but it was neveractually implemented. And I was listeningto Adam Curry not too long agoand he was saying, Yeah, you know, this probably thismight be the first time micropaymentshas actually been done and is actually working. So very,very cool for that. The other thingI mentioned was everyonegets a piece of the pie that the podcastapp developers hosts if they want to get inon this blueberry, for example,you can use their, their functionalityin 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 servicesfor statistics, you can put in charities. I mean, hell, you can even put in the listener back into itif you want. So what this does is it really one enablesa lot of optionality and I think it alignsa lot of incentives and it can cut outa lot of the kind of I won't say bullshit,but I think just a lot of we all know people who have a jobwhere they have a ridiculous amountof time for that, for that work, and they kind of only work2 hours, 3 hours a day. I think if you can eliminate a lot of that chaffin the system, it makes for a betterworld.
Now, let's get on to,I guess, the streaming aspect of this. So streaming sets and this isthe main use case we see nowin podcasting 2.0, and we can see this across a varietyof of different apps. And so this how this worksis generally it's calculatedin one minute intervals, thoughnot necessarily sent being in one minuteintervals. So batching occurs. So if you go into the appsitself, you wouldtypically see down at the bottomof the screen it'll say ator have a a little counter or a little circle near the play button or off to the side of thator something like that.
And you can chooseas the listener how much that you want to stream in to your favouritepodcaster. For me, myself,I like the $0.21 per minute because that'show many bitcoin there are going to be. It's just a kind ofsymbolic number. And even afterlistening to this, I might change thatbecause I've got some stats on here on how muchthat is actually worth. Once again,the micropayment aspect is kind of highlightingthe micro ness of it. It's this is intendedto be smallish amounts, but you know, small can differfrom for different people. If a billionaire was listeninginto the podcast and they were streamingin, you know, 2100 sets per minute, that would still berelatively small for them in comparison to tomy perception of wealth.
So we have this, thisaspect here, unlike subscriptionsor paywalls, you're only payingfor what you actually use. This is why micropayments are so cool and can helpa lot of other systems which are in place. And you might say, okay. CORIN But there's there's other waysyou can do this. You could do thisthrough the patron model. And this is getting moreto the the value for value aspect and getting closerto the heart of that, which is I providevalue for you upfront, and then you provide itback to me in whatever numberand way that you want. Okay, Well,this is beautiful for two different reasons.
One, you get to choosethe value that you sendback to me, i.e. you get to choose how many satoshis per minuteyou want to send to me, and it stops as soonas you stop listening, which is in contrastto something like Patreon where you have to just payand it just goes automatically and you've kind of paid for a month,I guess. So this is really gettingto that aspect wherewhat if I only want to get two weeks worth of valueout of this? What if I only want to listen to the show just to kind of test it out and see, doI actually like this show? And so I'm goingto jump on to here onto the GitHubfor the podcast namespace.
And Dave Jonescreated this thing, a little captionhere called Play to Pay, whichI think is really cool because it explains itquite nicely. So I'm just goingto read this out. This, this dong can be thought of as play to pay rather than the traditional payto play pay wall approach. When a media listener such aswithin a podcasting app presses the play buttonon an episode whose feed containsa value block, a compatible appwill be expected to begin streamingmicropayments to the designatedrecipients on a time interval that makes sensefor the app.
So it actually doesn'teven need to bein these minute intervals and I'll get on tothat soon. The amount of each paymentcan be any amount the listenerchooses, including zero. If the list of the listener chooses not to pay to listento this media, then the app can ignorethe value block of that feed and thenit goes down a little bit. Low payment intervals,the time interval for calculating paymentsis always one minute. However,the actual interval between when paymentsare sent can be longer. The intervalshould be chosen with a few factors in mind,such as connectivity.
Is the appcurrently online transaction fees batched payments togetherto reduce fee percentage cryptocurrency networkload can be given crypto network or APIsupport this payment. Right? So there'sa couple of things related to that therewhich were were pretty much what I washighlighting. This does fit the valuefor value model more closelythan something that takesa paywall approach and it's accessiblefor people who are just coming inand who are just a little bit uncertain. Do I actually like thiscontent or not? And maybe when you're coming infor this first time, you could havethe default a zero because you'relistening to a show and you only want to send itwhen you when you think it'sit's worthy of sending.
Now, whatI actually really like about this as wellis that it's rather passiveand doesn't actually require active decisionmaking to be made whilealso allowing the listener to determine the amount. So this is classicV for V, and I think it'sthis passive part which is really interesting and intriguing because when we lookat the value for value modelthat is being done on something like No Agenda,for example, it does requirea kind of bigger effort on an individual's part. Now what they typically doon that show with this is AdamCurry and John C Dvorak is they've done this largelythrough PayPal, and PayPal is good enoughfor one instance and this is being able to set uprecurring payments.
And so you can havejust this thing which will go every monthand go, bam, you know, do I want to send thisto the show? Well,it doesn't even ask you if you just set it up. It will justautomatically do it as long as you have enough moneyin your PayPal wallet or maybe even your bankaccount. And PayPal can can workstraight from there. I'm not actually sureI don't use PayPal that often. And this is once again getting closerto the value for value. But the more passiveaspect of it, which is I don't you know, if I was tryingto 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 showbetter than this other show? Should I send themthis much? It's too much. It is too much overload. Whereas with this system, once again, you can justchoose a number. And I've chosen my number and I might change a different numberin the future. But once I've chosen that,every show that I listen to fromthen on, it's just a constantstream and going in. I'm not having to make these active decisions and the moreactive decision. So something like BoosterGrams, 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 relativelysimple on the surface, the micropayment aspect, I want to choose an amountof money to go to my favourite artist or content creatoras I'm listening, and as soon as I stoplistening, I want it to stop.
I think that's prettysimple. I get to choosehow much I want and I can justkind of maintain this for as long as I want. Now the complex thingis more on the application side, and this is morejust of interest perhaps for for people,which is there's so many different various waysthat this could all that they have tomake decisions. So this is the application, the podcast app that is tuned, that is receivingthese micropayments and then passing them on or enabling this,I should say. So for example, if someone is listeningto a show and they want to and they end up sending545 so they listen for, you know, X amount of time at let's makethis even easier, they have the streamingset set at 54 per minute and they listenfor 100 minutes.
So that's an hour and 40minutes worth of content. They will have sent 540. But okay, the the amountthat is actually going to individual peoplein the in the value block. So this is in the actualRSS feed. How's that going to getdivvied up? It's pretty easy if there's just onein there or 540will go to that person and to thatthat that wallet. But what if there'stwo of them? Okay, well,I guess you could maybe have it as 270going to each. Okay. What if there's four ofthem in the equal splits? Okay. Well, I guess 135. But you can kind ofsee how this could get into a pointwhere it's like if you have 100 differentpeople all getting 1%, well, you can'tdivide 40 into 100.
So like withouthaving micro portions. So at some point they're going to haveto make some decisions of going,okay, well, this person is too low. So we're just goingto send a rough amount of setsto these other people. Another case would belistening at 1.25 speed. What does the person who is streaming itin, do they expect this to be for the actual minutesof the show or the actual minutes of how longthey're listening, which will be shorter because they're listeningat a faster speed? Or if you do the oppositeversion at 0.75 speed, whatwhat about in that case? You can also have mistakes in the podcast aside where you might not havethings adding up to 100% and might add up to99% or 101 and we see thisrelatively often, How do we do?
We then dividethat have to do more recalculations,Then there's fees as well, which are probably somethingI want to just touch upon becauseI heard someone on anothershow, a listener being worried about the the fees that arecurrently occurring and the app developersare smart and they make a lot of decisionsand they have to make these choices. And they these are individual onesthat they decide to. In this case, most of themare pretty smart and so they will say,okay, the actual sending throughon the minute basis is kind of hardand it's going to rack up some fees.
And so what they will typically do is they'llbatch these payments. Now, I was chatting withsome of them on the Mastodon instance,and that was the kind of various thingssaying from, you know, every 3 minutesthey will send in a batched payment. I think some of themwere slightly a bit larger than that, but almost certainly theydo it as it's occurring. And so they're not justwaiting until you've finishedlistening to an episode and then sending itall in one big chunk, which I thinkcould be done as well. I don't seeany problems with that. But allof this is just, you know, they're going to haveto 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 happeningin this case now that was a sectionhere which I just want to touch upon,which was all of this at the momentis based on lightning, but you could even hear itin that section. I was sayingwith Dave Jones that he had cryptocurrency network load and so I'm just goingto jump down here to the namespace again. And this is where it says Support currenciesand protocols. The value blockis designed to be flexible enough to handle mostor any cryptocurrency and even fiat currencieswith a given API that exposes a compatibleprocess.
Currently,development is centred mostly on lightning, so this is the layertwo of bitcoin using the key and method keys and allows for pushbased payments without the recipientneeding to generate an invoiceto receive them. Another another methodto send spontaneous paymentsvia lightning is amp atomic multiple payments which supersedes key and in many waysin last form robust and largerpayments. However,it is still in beta and thus not widelyimplemented. 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, itcould be done with fiat. So this is, you know, actual US dollarsor Australian dollars or Canadian dollarsor Argentinean pesos or Colombian pesos. But not much of it isactually done through that becauseit's incredibly complex. This could have you know, we'vewe've had the ability to do this forfor a large while, but it actually no one'sactually implemented it. It's morethrough the digital money like Bitcoin where it it it makes a lot more senseand it's actually doable. It can cross geographicboundaries and there's no and not as many laws and restrictionsand regulations related to the sending ofmoney like there is was.
If you wanted to send micropayments to your favouriteIranian podcaster and your US based,I think that is going to be pretty impossiblefrom what I know. From what I gather, how what we actually haveseen is that there is room for more. So you can actually do this on the hiveblockchain. I wanted to give a small shout out to themand this is because, you know, one of the developersthere, Brian of London, he made an active, difficult choicepretty much on his own to help implementthis into podcasting. And we saw thiswith podcasting, which is also usingthe Hive blockchain.
So it does allow forother 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 avoidedor tried to avoid highlightingthat it's a Bitcoin thing and because I thinkit can extend beyond that, but it is very much centred uponthat at the moment. And I would just say that I find Andreasand Antonopoulos to bea really great resource. If you want to know moreabout what that is, he's probably the personI've learnt the most about regarding Bitcoinas a whole and then the LightningNetwork as well because is very tech basedbut explains it in pretty simple and clearmanners.
He's got a book called Masteringthe Lightning Network, which I have yetto read myself, but it's a very technicalbased book, but I've heardgood things about it and I've listenedto a lot of his podcast, so I would justrecommend that. So just getting onto the summary aspect, I suppose, of this directpeer to peer micropayments enable flexibility whilst being a passive activityfor the listener consumer. I think this could beapplied outside of podcasting as well. I'm pretty sure there are examples of peoplewho have set this up in some sort of feedor reader that you useon the internet where for every, let's sayfor a blog, as you're reading,the blog goes down, you know,for each page scroll that you do, or perhapsfor each paragraph where you go fromone to the next, that is when you,your browser or whatever it is, willautomatically send in a micropayment toto the recipient of that.
It's very muchthe same thing. The podcasting versionobviously is audio and is done on a minute basis, i.e. youknow, I've listened to this many minutes of a podcast, but you can do thisfor text as in, you know, I'm going to send in a micropaymentfor this much of a text that I've read, you know,this many paragraphs. So I think this can applyoutside of just audio and video as well. No reasonthis can't be done with minutes of a videothat you've consumed. So I think this isstarting to go outto a broader example and you actuallycan do this with video. For example, if you go on to any of the three speak feeds which show up in podcastapps which support the video version.
So once again, going backto what is a podcast, typically it's an MP3,but you can have the video podcast version ofthat, which is an MP four and you can do this if youactually want to do this, you can type in Miyamoto's podcast without any spacesin between that and you will see a feedthat I set up a long time agoon three Speak, which has some clipsthat I've created, and these clips are muchlower quality. I think I put them in 720p and tried to make them relatively short as well,but you can send micropaymentsto that as well. So this does workfor video.
So it's not justa podcasting thing. Micropaymentsare actually working for, I thinkfor 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 concernedabout this, I would just say maybe don't use super big amountsbecause it is it can be hard to knowexactly how much has gone through to youryour favourite podcaster. But I just want to say soif you have a set at ten sitesper minute, which is equal to 600an hour, if you're listeningto an hour of content and then 600 setsat today's prices, that's about $0.12in Australian dollars, which would probably be about $0.10 $0.09 in USdollars.
That's not a whole lot forfor an hour's worth of enjoymentthat you got. I assumeif you're listening to something for an hour,you would get you know, you're onlypaying $0.10 for that. But let's say you do that forthe equivalent across a let's say you're listening to 10 hoursof podcasts a week. You know, that'sthat's about a dollar. You know, is that is that somethingthat you can afford a dollar a week for forlistening to to content. Sure sure. That's awesome. And then the micropaymentsagain it matters very little onan individual if someone sends me $0.10.
So it's not going tochange my life. But if 10,000 peoplesent me $0.10, okay, well, that's that's $1,000that actually makes and makes a difference. So you can kind of see where this canactually add up in the large scale of things. And so you can actuallyhave be supported as and as an artist, as a digital contentcreator, whatever you wantto label yourself as, by a lot of peoplesending you a little bit amount of money, This is kind of the dreamof crowdsourcing, right? Being ableto do something like this. Now, typicallythis changes because even in crowdsourcingmodels, it's usually a you havethis kind of power laws.
The the aspect of thatwill be a couple of people who will donate the largest amountsand kind of, you know, the 20% of people willsend in 80% of the value or the sourcing for that. That's probablyalways going to happen. That seems to be a naturallaw of the universe. It happens in galaxiesand stars and matter and and light and all of thissort of thing. So where I wouldn't try and fightagainst that too heavily, but I justthink this is really cool and you can so if you've been listening to this,this show will probably go for45 minutes. You know, if you send in what I typically do ofof 21 sets a minute, you know, that's onlygoing 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 usingthis will probably come into the future,which will probably trend slightly awayfrom pure value for valuein its purest form. But I think a probably an enhancement of whatwe typically see nowadays. So for thosewho are just wondering, how does your Spotifytypical Spotify money actually get divvied up? So they're it's about220 million. I think SpotifyPremium members each paying,let's just say $9 of $9 a month of that$9 a month. Where does that moneyactually go? Well, a lot of it goes into the royalty feesfor for music.
A lot of that will go to the top artistsand so they will get. So even if you're notlistening to the Taylor Swift's the Justin Bieber'sof the World, and you are focussedsolely on a niche like me, who listens to this onecalled free flow flava. And it's kind of aJapanese is unhip. No, not hip hop, Japanese techno, drum'n'basssort of music which I usefor my workouts. I love listening to that. They'rea much, much smaller band and even if I listento them only exclusively, my money wouldn'tgo to them. It would goto someone else. So I think there'sprobably going to be some hybrid modelsin the future where it willhave this aspect of, okay, if I spend $9 a month and I listen to theseten different artists, it will do itbased more on who the artistI'm actually listening to.
But I think this value forvalue the micropayment, think of it actually going to themin that time, in that real timeaspect has a it has a qualityto it, a uniqueness. Every morningI've got a telegram chat and a telegram bot set up which lets me knowreal time when people are sending mein micropayments. And it is super,super cool because at any, any given momentI can just check it and it's like,Oh yeah, it's coming in. So I can actually even say there is someonelistening to me right now who is streamingin some micropayments. I see value for valuethree total payments, $0.45, threetotal payments, $0.45.
And this is in the last5 minutes of ten, 13, 1022, ten, 27So whoever that is that's listening in,Thank you very much. I verymuch appreciate that. So very, very cool. I love it.I love this sort of thing. So, yeah, I think justyes, I'm going it all up. Micropaymentsare going to pay a large a larger portion ofof being able to support people on the Internet. I think incentive creates some really interestingincentives. It enables people to be a lot more flexible with howthey use their money and how it getsdivvied up. And I think it will create some realbig efficiencies of allowing usto not need to go through restricted parties or orgoing through platforms which are there kind to only only there forthe aspect of of trust.
So yeah, I think it's it's really cooland definitely something that you should be looking out forand not discounting a large portionof podcasting 2.0 and of getting podcastersonto the system is emphasisingthis boost aspect. Like wow, a boost comes inand it can be super big. But I think in one of the coolest thingsis that unnamed? Well, it'snot even unnamed. You can't seepeople's names, but it is kind of that supportwhich maybe might not get recognisedas as clearly and cleanly. I am startingto do for the just meremortals as a whole for for tax purposesand things like this.
I'm startingto keep a monthly, I suppose you'dcall it a budget or just just keeping track of, ofhow much is, is coming in and being able tothen be able to report this tothe Australian Tax Office. And what I can see here is for July of 2023, I have let'ssee how many sets come in. So that was about across the various showsthat I've got going on. I had about 336,000 and of that amountthere was a 51,000 of that was viapeople just streaming in. So that's what 161 seventhof the total amount. And that is justa really cool thing to to have come in.
So it's I would actually even lovefor that to be larger in the future. Um, and yetso it's just very cool, very cool on that aspectand I think it's going to, to changea lot of things. I am now going to get intothe Boosta Gram Lounge and I'm going to actually thank some peoplewho have been supporting the show. So takeit away. Mr. Adam Curry
[00:32:29] Unknown:
Welcometo the value for value. Boostagram Lounge,
[00:32:37] Unknown:
and boosta Gramsfor those who don't know, is a payment, a messagethat has been sent through one of these apps directlyto the the wallets the, the addressthat I put in my RSS feed. So this is different to athe micro streaming because you it now itenables people to actually give some feedback as wellsome a comment a a message that comesdirectly to me so this can be very, very beneficialin many ways because I get some contentfor the show and I get to actually directly thank the peoplewho have been helping to support. So let's kick it offwith the first.
Yeah. So this is from ColeMcCormick, the host of the AmericaPlus, and he says, I understand the riskwith advertising models, but I'm leaning towardsusing and experimenting with themrather than demonise. Twitterseems like an opportunity that's different from YouTubeor Instagram influencer or YouTuberor Instagram influencer. Maybe I'mmoving to the bad light. Someone help me and then he sendsin his favourite number 5492 sats sentusing fountain. So this is just inreference to not even sure I talked about it,particularly on this showwhere I was saying with Twitter nowand enabling the people actually sending money to creatorsfor helping to drive engagementthings on the platform.
I was just saying,you know, I could see thisturning into a clickbait sort of thing where you you try and get peopleposting underneath your comments just to be ableto, you know, drive some outrage,some something. The because it's basedmore on I'm not necessarilysure it's based on value, but it's based on attention, which I don'tthink at the same things. And I think that can gosome different ways. But I thinkhis overall strategy is probably the best wayto 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 tryand come back into the the critical,critical of it. So as I was talking aboutwith those hybrid models, I think that strays away from valuefor value, the core principles of it. But they can beinteresting nonetheless. And yeah,I would definitely say thatjust in terms of a life principle, experimentingis is very, very useful. And that was sentusing Fountain, one of the appswhich enable micropayments and boosting come in actually all of these werefrom fountain this week another one here from Jean Bean so this is the host of the VolunteerTechnologists.
I may be wrong, but I think one peer group instance can mirrorcontent from another. If so, and if the blueberry serveryou are in now is true, then you should be able to stay there and mirrorto any troupe. No ideaif that's appealing, but wanted to mention itregardless. And then he sent through atwo kilobyte boost 2048 sent using fountain. Yeah,I honestly have no idea. This is I'm I'm at the I'm just gettingcomfortable with the kind of live aspect,the technological aspect. I'm at the moment and I'm going to beworking my way towards trying differentways 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 trysomething like peer group. So this mirroring aspect and getting the streamonto different places, I'm I'm not going to rushthat. I was talking about thatI think a couple of weeks agoin the live chat as well. I'm yeah I'm at the momentmy I've got a whole bunch of other thingsdifferent to do. For example,I have 48 phone panels sitting on my desk in front of me, which need to go upon the walls to get ridof some of this reverb. So I've got a gotall sorts of stuff to do.
But thank you very much,Jane. Been all out. I'm definitely goingto look into that. It's just that at what point and when wehad Macintosh coming in. So this is the host of generation Bitcoin and he says Music V for V might bebigger than any of us except Adam. I thinkit will be Mcintosh. And then he sent 2121sets sent using Fountain. So once again,the bitcoin number there. And yeah, look, honestly, I thinkit'll be pretty big. I talked about thison one of the shows and I might have neglectedto mention it just in here, butI was talking about how I think thesehybrid models will emerge.
It was on episode403 of the Mere Mortals podcast that came out. So if you want to know more about the hybrid modelsand I was really getting into Spotifyand I'm basically I have an openbet out there that I think the Spotifywill be bankrupt within eight years. So if you want to, if you're intriguedinto what that is all about, I would recommendchecking that out. But yeah, I think music value for valueis going to be huge and I'll probably betalking about that in about 2 to 3 weekstime. I'm just going tofocus more on the ascending of value,the monetary value at the moment,and then get on to how this is being implementedin some really cool ways, suchas what Adam Curry is doing with theboostagram Ball The finalone I have here is from Gene Bean againcoming in and he says,Don't feel icky about fountainadvertising.
It's really greatand non shady model A one kilobyteboost 1024 cent using fountain as wellYeah I yeah I've changed my tuneon that it was my default is just to be scepticalof advertising. I was actually talking with my brotherabout this last night and he was and I was tryingto explain to him the V for V and why I'mso big into it. And there's many different aspectsthat I I'd try to it. One is I just personally don't like adsand I feel like I've been trickedby ads in the past two is I thinkstrategically relying on I think the censorship aspect of it playsa big part of it.
The strategic aspect of only having one or twoadvertisers coming in. And if they get can't and that's the weak point,I guess I would much ratherhave be supported by 500,000 true fanslike Kevin Kelly article. I would much ratherbe supported by a thousand different peopleacross the world in various aspects. All who can make their ownindividual decision making rather than threeadvertisers who are very vulnerableto a couple of emails sent by peoplewho dislike me and dislike the showand decide to not sponsor any more. I think juststrategically, it's a it's a risky position to be putting yourselfin, much like if you build a businessbased on Instagram or Facebook or YouTube, you don'tcontrol that medium.
And so you can getkicked off at any point. You can get throttledwith the algorithms. You know, it's it'sa tricky game. It's tricky gameand a risky game, I think. And that's a risk that I personallyam not willing to take, although it might seem that going all in onvalue for value might might seem slightlyrisky to some people. I'm goingto jump onto my tips. So thank you very much. And thank you, everyonewho is streaming as well. It's very,very much appreciated. And that person was streamingand live right now. I really do appreciate it. I want to give some tipsat the moment.
So one of the things that I noticed and I've taken this from when I was listeningto flooding with Bitcoin, who I talkedabout the other way, but this isacross a few shows as well of only mentioning one service and this servicebeing fountain like I was justmentioning. I think it's just good to be mindfulof creating a community on only one app. The Stitcherapp, for example, is closing downits service, the Damas app,which was used for Nostr kind of got kickedoff of the App Store. It's not hard to imaginethe various ways that any of these thingscould go wrong.
And havingjust that single point of focus of failurecan be a problem. I think what I've seen withthis show is really great was it's not just phonesand people are using other ways of supporting in. And I'll talk about all of these variousapps in a second, but I would just say it is worthat the very least highlightinghow other people can help support the show. So I would agree Fountainis a really great app. It's it'smy go to at the moment and it's got gota great community there but I would just say just just be mindful,you know, if if you're putting allyour chips on one place, once again, it's justa it's just a risky aspect to do so with the appand service highlight.
I just wanted to givea reiteration of all the various different appsthat you can use to do micropayments. So obviously I mentionedFountain. Another greatone is podverse, who I mentionedthe other week as well, some other cool onesthat can do this casta Matic I have yet to really useCastamatic myself because I do not have thatphone. I don't. That's only on iOS,so I don't have that phone myself. The Podfans, which at the momentis just on the web, but hopefully will be comingto a a mobile app in the nearest futureis also able to do this Podfriendcan also do it.
Curiocaster, a great one for the desktop podfriendis also on the desktop. They used to have a I can't remember whatit was. The mobile thing wouldjust say it's desktop. The moment podstation also doesthe stats asset streaming. We also haveanother one called Breez, which is mostlya lightning wallet, but it does have podcastabilities in there. I'm going to throw this out therebecause 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 justlooking at something in. There's one thingcalled the value for value calculator, and I don't even knowwhat this is.
Yeah, but if you're really interested in that,you can go on to there. But the main ones I wouldrecommend are fountain castamatic, podverse,Curiocaster, podfriend. Thoseare probably and breez, those are probably the big appswhere you can do this streaming of setsand they're ones which I have personally used Costa Rica a long time ago when I had accessto my brother's phone and and could use that outand pod fans coming up. So yeah those are the appswhere you can do streaming institutionsif you want. Let's jump onto my Valuefor value section and for this week I'mgoing to give 15% to Dave.
Dave Jones,the Podsage himself, for putting in a sillyamount of effort to make this all happen. Those things thatI was just reading off before all of the specs, I believe,that were written by him, so much of what he hasdone is been helping to create all this backendinfrastructure to allow all of this magic Internet money to actuallybe sent back and forth. He also wrote Helipad,which is a service for you that lets you see exportcollate the streaming of stats andand boosts. I personally use fountainand Satoshi stream and get I'll bea combination of them.
All of them. I can see the amount the boostagramsbut then also the streaming of statscoming in. But if you want amore self-hosted version, you can also go throughhis helipad. It's not even a service. You don't have to payfor it or anything. It's just free software that is out thereand that you can use. So very, very cooland much appreciation to Dave Jones. So what is my finalrequest? Well, one of the thingsthat you could do is you could up yourstreaming amount here. So you know, what value doput on this show. If you had 100 statsper minute, 45 minutes, that's aboutone Australian dollars for an episode.
So forthe last 45 minutes, was that worth it for you? Did you get one dollarsworth of one Australian dollar'sworth of value? So that's I think what, 70, $0.67 ussomething like that out of, out of this podcast. If so you know, set itat 100 cents per minute if it's a little bit less,if it's a little bit more or a lot lessor a lot more. In either case,I really am appreciative of peoplesending in these. The smaller the small amounts, and it gives me a kickof joy every time that I go onto that Telegram appand I just say, okay, you know,someone is streaming sites in through at this very it'sso, so cool and I can still see the still doing itat this very moment.
So I really,really do appreciate that. Just in terms ofvalue for value as well, there's manydifferent apps I just listed offa whole portion of them. If you don't want to do itin a monetary form, letting someone knowabout these cool different things,if you are a podcast fan and you know a podcastapp personally, or if you are a podcasterand you want to know how to do more of this, reach out to me via any of the linksin the show notes and I'm more than happyto help guide you into how to do this. It is relatively simpleand there are ways of doing this now,which you do within five 5 minutes.
It's it's not a hard processif you have some talent, if you know more aboutthe streaming of sets, if you know moreor if you know any examplesof micropayments working in the pastfor other services just across the Internet, not even podcastingrelated, I would I would love to knowabout that. Some historical history,things like this. And you feelI've done a mis service by not talking about them. I would love to knowthose things. You know, please boost that in is the best wayof doing that, but also just reaching outto me. So very,very cool micropayments.
I think they are going to be a big aspectof the future and yeah, I do just want tothank everyone for, for tuning in for this onetoday and I will be backonce again next week. At the same time 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning Australian EasternStandard Time and yep until thenext time. Chao for now Kyrin out.
