Hi Devs
I really like what oyster is doing concerning the use of CPU power to help cover site costs, as well as actually 'charging' those who visit websites. In terms of a democratic contribution to keeping site owners paid, it's brilliant. However, wasn't this the same thing that showtime and The Pirate Bay were doing? How legal is it to run scripts like this?
All I saw was reactionary outrage, but very little fact based discussion. Where does the Oyster team stand on this issue?
Thanks!
The outrage that people had with the Showtime and TPB incidents exhibits the same pattern as to when Facebook does a major design overhaul, everyone gets outraged and starts a group demanding the changes are reverted. After one year, they can't even imagine wanting to go back to the old design. People aren't very good with change to things they aren't used to.
Right now the economy of the internet is broken. Wikipedia among others have to beg for donations, and news article sites are setting up subscription paywalls which causes them to lose traffic. The most well known example of a token that attempts to solve the issues of the digital advertising industry is BAT (Basic Attention Token). They designed their own browser called Brave, which rewards user attention to advertisements. The introduction of BAT is indicative that there is a problem with the internet economy, this has been their slogan. I argue that Oyster accomplishes the goals of BAT in a better way:
The first issue with BAT is the unrealistic expectation that any significant amount of users would ditch Google Chrome and it’s likes to install their own browser. It is highly more likely that a user will simply install ad block plus instead of switching to Brave. The second issue is that adverts are still distracting and invasive. They take up precious pixel space, often break the content and design continuity of websites, and are rarely politically neutral. Adverts must always be manually interpreted and approved for ethics compliance, therefore the system can never be fully decentralized.
With Oyster, the first adoption issue does not exist because website owners need only add one line of code without having to go through any registration nor approval. The Oyster network is completely decentralized so no one can block them from generating revenue. The second issue is also non-applicable because adding Oyster to a website does not show anything significant on the screen, therefore respecting the aesthetics and neutrality of the website.
People cannot have their cake and eat it too, good content takes energy and hence money to generate, and it takes money to host it online. They are going to have to face the reality of this sooner or later. Oyster arbitrates these tensions in a completely decentralized way. There are no legal issues because there is no Oyster corporation, and no one runs it nor can stop it. I'm only the protocol designer and lead developer, there is no CEO or board of trustees. In the early days parents would tell their children not to buy bitcoin because the government is going to get you and legal boogeymen. Now those same parents are buying Bitcoin at $4k.
It is not productive to succumb to the absurd government rulings concerning the internet. Consider the cookies law passed by the European Union. Now every major website looks silly with a ridiculous and annoying sign that asks permission to store cookies. These people don't understand how the internet works, it doesn't matter what they say.
Oyster encourages website owners to make it known to their users that their computational resources are being used to promote the website financially. Visitors can also elect to disable Oyster from running, but the website owners reserve the right to disable access to the content in that scenario. Oyster grants the opportunity to consume content without having to pay cumbersome subscriptions fees and watch annoying advertisements.
This is the direction the web as a whole is moving into: IoT micro transactions. Instead of paying $9.99 a month for reading articles, your CPU (which you payed for) performs a bit of work per article.
These days the phones in our pockets and the laptops in our bags are like supercomputers, they have an enormous amount of computational capabilities. People pay for them out of their pocket, and it is this expenditure that Oyster capitalizes on. The phones of 2017 have twice the computational power of 2015. If people don't want the 2017 phone to momentarily spend 50% of it's resources to contribute to a website which is benefiting them then people are simply being selfish and ignorant. The economic reality of resource scarcity will catch up to them eventually.
