Most of LV's paywall unlocks are smut, overwhelmingly so. I assume we've done way more volume than Starbackr.
It does work. Perhaps too well.
It's more private for the buyer, permission-less for the seller, and micro-paywalls and paid engagement convert better than subscriptions.
PMF like that shows you the operational problems that would come with scaling further. Most of those are solvable with decentralization.
Tooling for decentralizing anything of the sort is suck to non-existent, and sucked even worse then.
This is what informs my view on stupidity like mobile nodes, bolt12, and fake l2's. These don't work for selling digital goods for micro payments on a website interactively. Lightning address was the closest thing that could work but still too limited for things like the unlocks.
Even if we got things like LNURL-Verify going, no casual is going to set up an address server with dns static ip and all that shit. At the same time, all the custodial wallets with Lightning Addresses got scared shitless in the 2023 chilling and started blocking downloads / new accounts.
So, Pub/Wallet went from the dream stage to priority 1 during that 2023 chilling, despite LV being in-stride at the time.
CLINK and Pub exist to solve that payments gap specifically, Lightning is just the core, CLINK is its shell. There's other factors around that like identity to not become platform. Look at all our projects, they're all components to LV2.0.
Most of LV's paywall unlocks are smut, overwhelmingly so. I assume we've done way more volume than Starbackr.
It does work. Perhaps too well.
It's more private for the buyer, permission-less for the seller, and micro-paywalls and paid engagement convert better than subscriptions.
PMF like that shows you the operational problems that would come with scaling further. Most of those are solvable with decentralization.
Tooling for decentralizing anything of the sort is suck to non-existent, and sucked even worse then.
This is what informs my view on stupidity like mobile nodes, bolt12, and fake l2's. These don't work for selling digital goods for micro payments on a website interactively. Lightning address was the closest thing that could work but still too limited for things like the unlocks.
Even if we got things like LNURL-Verify going, no casual is going to set up an address server with dns static ip and all that shit. At the same time, all the custodial wallets with Lightning Addresses got scared shitless in the 2023 chilling and started blocking downloads / new accounts.
So, Pub/Wallet went from the dream stage to priority 1 during that 2023 chilling, despite LV being in-stride at the time.
CLINK and Pub exist to solve that payments gap specifically, Lightning is just the core, CLINK is its shell. There's other factors around that like identity to not become platform. Look at all our projects, they're all components to LV2.0.