I think the lightning network is great at handling payments for software. We have built a small tool and selling it for 1$/month through regular credit card processing is just a pain. There’s the processing service that takes a cut, then money reaches the bank after some days, another cut, then after all that they pretty much freeze at any point.
Granted, it’s a rather improved process than about 20 years ago, where selling my first software involved receiving an actual cheque in the mail, then waiting 30+ days for the bank to finally clear it, after taking a big commission of course.
Compare this to running my own lightning node on a raspberry pi in the office, and receive the money instantly… it’s just from another galaxy. What I did was implement a custom solution for generating invoices and processing them through the website (something like btcpayserver seemed overhead, I wanted to fiddle myself with it). The fiat price now has 1$ extra to cover for all the headackes involved. I think this will be the way forward… regular price for bitcoin transactions, and penalty fees for fiat legacy rails.
If you’re curios how it works, have a look at the website at https://theclicker.app. Order is generated on the website, picked up by the raspberry pi, an invoice is generated through lnd’s RPC, posted back to the site which displays the lnurl code + qr code for convenience. Running something like Alby in the browser makes the whole process seamless and can be done in basically seconds. Email is needed just for order confirmation, practically there’s no personal information required for the transaction.
I hope to see more payment options popping up like this, feels like a win-win for both sides of the transaction.
Bitcoin will change completely the whole fiat mindset of "pay for software license". Bitcoin will bring the "pay for value" concept.
So start providing value if you want my sats. Not "licenses".
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Records of authenticity and signatures from devs for software could be an interesting use case but not licenses (certifying release binary downloads over IPFS/Bittorrent with only chain data access). It could also form part of a kind of equity market for capitalising a software dev shop where these certificates can be traded.
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Software licenses and intellectual property dont make sense and can only be enforced through a violent government
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So true
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I agree that a "license" is indeed a rather legacy term and links back to copyright and intellectual property which is very much bullshit and abused these days.
Going forward I see if more like paying for usage in the form of micropayments, more aligned to the value4value movement.
Would be interesting to try and integrate streaming payments into an application, to basically pay for how much you use it and nothing more. One possible issue I see is that you always need to be connected to the internet for that to work, I can see some scenarios where that would not be ideal. Maybe a solution around that would be getting some pre-paid amount in advance and then consuming that as you go.
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definitely - and offline micropayments can be done w/ the help of secure enclave tech on mobile. just record and encrypt trxns locally and then settle up when the device pops back online. Lots of ways to skin that particular cat, including local batching.
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