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0 pointsDylan168071mo ago0 comments

It would need to be mostly centralized, but keeping track of history would not be hard.

A typical credit is getting paid in, transacted once, and cashed out. And a transaction with a user ID, destination ID, and timestamp only needs 16 bytes to store. So if you want to track every hundredth of a penny individually, then processing a million dollars generates 0.16 terabytes of data. You want to keep that around for five years? Okay, that's around $100 in cost. If you're taking a 1% fee then the storage cost is 1% of your fee.

If your credits are worth 1/20th of a penny, and you store history for 18 months, then that drops the amount of data 17x.

(And any criticisms of these numbers based on database overhead get countered by the fact that you would not store a 10 credit transaction as 10 separate database entries.)

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order-matters1mo ago

fair enough on tracking history in the centralized model. I had suspicions there would be hidden costs that might make it too expensive. i dont think the data storage would be as much of a problem as the cost to write it to storage.

I wasn't fully envisioning credits only being transacted once before cashout either. I was thinking more along the lines of being able to create something that goes viral, a lot of people use it and you rack up a bunch of credits, and then you can sit on those credits and spend them as you use the internet without ever having to connect to a bank yourself. So people who are contributing more than they are consuming would rack up credits. they could use those credits to enrich their contributions, maybe pay for cloud services, etc.

the credits could form its own mini web economy if it got popular enough. As cool as this would all be if done honestly, I know that if i saw a company telling me to buy web credits to use anywhere on the internet and the websites get to decide how much to charge and they charge it automatically when i visit the website, and if the company i buy the credits from goes out of business then i may not be able to cash out or get my money back, then I likely wouldnt be buying those credits... so idk

Dylan16807OP1mo ago

Even with user to user credits it would take a lot for the number of transactions to go above 2. That would mean more than half the money is going to viral payouts.

And was this assuming you'd only take a cut on the cash going in and out? Because even a 0.1% cut of the transactions would mean you have $1000 to handle the amount of data I described in the last comment.

order-matters1mo ago

>And was this assuming you'd only take a cut on the cash going in and out

I think fee needs to be per transaction, maybe not cash flowed per transaction but accrued per transaction.

Say we both self-host a website for our favorite daily game, and I use yours about as much as you use mine. We would transfer roughly the same amount of credits back and forth to each other ad-infinitum. but the credit service provider is accumulating only expenses with each transaction.

Say someone make a lot of bot accounts to simulate user traffic, and it sends each of them credits to use to visit their own site. the host collects the credits from the bots and transfers them back to the bots to keep them running.

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order-matters1mo ago

Dylan16807OP1mo ago

Even with user to user credits it would take a lot for the number of transactions to go above 2. That would mean more than half the money is going to viral payouts.

order-matters1mo ago

>And was this assuming you'd only take a cut on the cash going in and out

I think fee needs to be per transaction, maybe not cash flowed per transaction but accrued per transaction.

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