[p2p-hackers] Alpha testers needed

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Thanks for the history lessons, IanG and JimM! And thanks for the new
p2p research references, Dan Menasche and Vijay Gurbani. And thanks
for the valuable skepticism, DavidB and SergueiO. ;-)

Something that I would like to append to IanG's story about
cypherpunks thinking prices are the answer and p2p-punks thinking
decentralization is the answer:

That there is also a new generation of interesting payment systems
including The Love Machine and Flattr.

I think Flattr is very interesting:

http://flattr.com

Founded by founders of The Pirate Bay, they do several things that are
very promising:

1. The marginal cost to you of clicking on someone's "flattr me"
button is zero. This is due to the scheme of subscribing to Flattr.com
with a monthly fee and then at the end of the month your money gets
split among everyone whom your clicked on. This is the most promising
solution to the problem of "mental transaction costs" [1].

2. The pitch is that this is a way to express love to people. b% > $

3. Look: content! http://flattr.com/category/software It is very easy
to find things to love on the flattr.com web site.

This has a lot in common with the "tipping" feature that we advertised
as a future feature of Mojo Nation (e.g. it features prominently in
the write-up of Mojo Nation in The Economist). (Inside Evil Geniuses
For A Better Tomorrow we called that feature the "Pay Lars" button, in
honor of a certain musician who had publicly criticized Napster for
depriving him of well-earned income.)

>From a historical perspective Flattr is a fascinating example of the
evolution of ideas. The founders of The Pirate Bay are probably
intimately familiar with BitTorrent, but as far as I know, they are
unfamiliar with anonymous Chaumian digital cash. I wouldn't be
surprised if they got the idea for Flattr from their experience with
BitTorrent and basically observing that there was a "hole" in
BitTorrent where micropayments could go. :-) Does anyone know the
inside story on how they got the idea for Flattr?

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html
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