6 ms·

Bitcoin for Rockstars

78 points by rahim 12y ago

chm 12y ago
Bitcoin does not solve this issue, a blockchain does. That's what the guys at Ethereum for example are trying to achieve: vanilla blockchain, build anything on top.
- programmarchy 12y ago
  Counterparty could solve this, on Bitcoin's blockchain [1]: > Counterparty works by storing extra data in regular Bitcoin transactions, which makes every Counterparty transaction a Bitcoin transaction, albeit a very small one. When Counterparty transactions are broadcast to the Bitcoin network they are verified by Bitcoin miners and saved in the Bitcoin blockchain to make a secure, verifiable record. [1] http://counterparty.io/ http://counterparty.io/
  - chm 12y ago
    Yes, and I should have mentioned it. The fun thing about XCP is that I can use it now, unlike Ethereum.
Animats 12y ago
Well, the music industry wanted copyright with "no formalities", and that's in the TRIPS agreement. No more need to put a copyright notice on something, or send a copy to the Library of Congress. Now the industry is whining that keeping track of who owns what is too hard. They dug their own hole. Let them deal with it. This is so typical of the music industry, which has been shooting itself in the foot since the invention of the tape recorder. The article seems to be proposing some kind of a micropayment system, where every time someone buys a track of music, all the sub-payments to the various contributing parties get cranked out. That's not only too complicated, but the transaction volume would be huge. Bitcoin is not web-scale. The Bitcoin block chain is currently limited to about 7 TPS. This idea comes back now and then. Ted Nelson's Xanadu had a micropayment system something like this. A bunch of fanatical libertarians tried to make it work. The free World Wide Web won out. The amount of effort that the computer industry puts into keeping the music industry happy is excessive. Apple or Google could buy out the entire music industry for cash.
- malandrew 12y ago
  I really wish we'd start calling it the music distribution industry instead of the music industry. Except for the musicians and the recording studios, it's never been about music. For everyone else, i.e. the overwhelming majority of those working in the industry, it's about sourcing a product an distributing it. The "industry" is just a supply chain for auditory experiences, and when consumers became distributors as well, it cut out the supply chain folks. That is who is ultimately fighting back in all of this.
- hellbanTHIS 12y ago
  I don't think he's proposing a micropayment system, more like a universal system to keep track of who worked on what song. I think he's saying Katy Perry sends a song to Spotify along with a bitcoin-type address and at the end of the month they send the payment to that address, which divides it up between all the writers, producers and rights holders.
- tzs 12y ago
  > Well, the music industry wanted copyright with "no formalities", and that's in the TRIPS agreement. No more need to put a copyright notice on something, or send a copy to the Library of Congress. The US abolished the notice and deposit requirements via the Berne Implementation Act of 1988, almost a decade before TRIPS.
  - Animats 12y ago
    True, but then it went worldwide, and nobody kept records any more.
- epscylonb 12y ago
  Agreed, I think what a lot of people misunderstand is that bitcoin is a terribly inefficient way of achieving consensus. No one is going to build mining farms just to protect digital rights. Bitcoin has a chance at becoming a currency because in the past it has been hard to reach a global consensus on value. It may be possible to use a bitcoin based timestamping solution like https://github.com/goblin/chronobit https://github.com/goblin/chronobit to record the rights, but I can't see where the incentive is for everybody to support a distributed database of such rights.
guard-of-terra 12y ago
The problem here is, music gets produced at increased rates. You might have a huge database of all the music from yesterday, which would be less useful than you think if you'll not figure a way to make every musician put metadata for their newest creations there.
biomimic 12y ago
songcoin is another interesting option where consumers get to transact and "invest" in artists or songs... "Songcoin Wants to Be Music’s Alternative Currency" http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobile/5915780/songcoin-wants-to-be-musics-alternative-currency http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobil... http://songcoin.org http://songcoin.org
GigabyteCoin 12y ago
If your sole goal is to store information in the blockchain, why not use Namecoin? It's almost as secure as Bitcoin, and specializes in storing small bits of data in it's blockchain.
briandear 12y ago
This idea is revolutionary. It would piss all the right people off if it works and also ensure that all the right people get transparently compensated for what they do.
return0 12y ago
He's describing a network where payments are being distributed hierarchically and recursively to all the creators behind a work. What does that have to do with bitcoin? you could replace the payment method with another and it would all be the same.
inoop 12y ago
The elephant in the Bitcoin room is that it simply cannot scale up to high TPS rates. If any kind of meaningful adoption actually happened, the network would keel over pretty quickly trying to globally broadcast all that data, and the blockchain would quickly balloon to unmanageable sizes. I see a lot of these articles hailing Bitcoin as the answer to some monetary injustice or other, or as the fundamental underpinning of some revolutionary new product, but people totally ignore Bitcoin's technological limitations. Instead, the blockchain is talked about as if it's some magical box that is pretty much whatever the author needs it to be. The amount of cognitive dissonance in the Bitcoin community regarding this topic is baffling. The whole point of side chains was that even core devs realized that Bitcoin can not scale. Yet side chains were hailed by the community as some sort of fantastic innovation that is 'good for bitcoin'. Maybe these people are just talking their book, I don't know, but next time you read an article about Bitcoin or blockchain tech just realize that VISA can handle 47.000 tps. Bitcoin currently is doing slightly more than 1. Inb4 'merkle trees', 'invertible bloom filters', 'something something moore's law', 'corporate shill', 'freedom hater', 'the market will sort it out', 'side chains', etc. </offtopic rant>
- mrb 12y ago
  Firstly, Bitcoin does not need to scale that much to be considered widely successful. Heck, Western Union[1] averages only 10 tps, which is only 10x what Bitcoin is doing today, so such a target is clearly within reach with a 2MB block size. Secondly, Bitcoin can actually scale by many orders of magnitudes, see the math and arguments there: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability You need solid counterarguments to this page to convince us it can't possibly scale. Thirdly, Bitcoin has done 6 years in a row what critics have always said it cannot do ("nobody would want bitcoins", "the exchange rate will never reach $1/$10/$100", "it will crash and be forgotten after the Jun 2011/Mar 2013/Nov 2013 bubble", "the US govt will make it illegal", "big companies will never accept it", etc). So you need to sit back and start thinking why is it that Bitcoin keeps growing and reaching milestone after milestone, instead of throwing one more empty statement "bitcoin can't do X" with zero reasoning behind. [1] WU does ~250 million consumer transaction/year. Edit: @inoop I misremembered and meant WU, not Paypal
robrigo 12y ago
I believe that BitShares Music project is the most tangible effort in making this kind of platform happen. http://bitsharesmusicfoundation.org/ http://bitsharesmusicfoundation.org/ http://peertracks.com http://peertracks.com
- oco101 12y ago
  True I believe this could be the best thing that happen in music in the last decade.
- Inthenameofmine 12y ago
  If anybody is interested, we're building the platform at Bitsapphire.com. If you have any questions I can answer them here on HN.
  - robrigo 12y ago
    Hey itnom, cob mentioned that tracking contributors to tracks (the credit part of this article) isn't apart of the MVP you guys are building. Would you consider leveraging reputation / on chain graph DB (key graph) to handle tracking this information in a future iteration? I think this would make the blockchain much more useful for other 3rd parties to plug into and leverage said DB.

78 points by rahim 12y ago

chm 12y ago

Bitcoin does not solve this issue, a blockchain does. That's what the guys at Ethereum for example are trying to achieve: vanilla blockchain, build anything on top.

programmarchy 12y ago
Counterparty could solve this, on Bitcoin's blockchain [1]: > Counterparty works by storing extra data in regular Bitcoin transactions, which makes every Counterparty transaction a Bitcoin transaction, albeit a very small one. When Counterparty transactions are broadcast to the Bitcoin network they are verified by Bitcoin miners and saved in the Bitcoin blockchain to make a secure, verifiable record. [1] http://counterparty.io/ http://counterparty.io/
- chm 12y ago
  Yes, and I should have mentioned it. The fun thing about XCP is that I can use it now, unlike Ethereum.

Animats 12y ago

Well, the music industry wanted copyright with "no formalities", and that's in the TRIPS agreement. No more need to put a copyright notice on something, or send a copy to the Library of Congress. Now the industry is whining that keeping track of who owns what is too hard. They dug their own hole. Let them deal with it. This is so typical of the music industry, which has been shooting itself in the foot since the invention of the tape recorder. The article seems to be proposing some kind of a micropayment system, where every time someone buys a track of music, all the sub-payments to the various contributing parties get cranked out. That's not only too complicated, but the transaction volume would be huge. Bitcoin is not web-scale. The Bitcoin block chain is currently limited to about 7 TPS. This idea comes back now and then. Ted Nelson's Xanadu had a micropayment system something like this. A bunch of fanatical libertarians tried to make it work. The free World Wide Web won out. The amount of effort that the computer industry puts into keeping the music industry happy is excessive. Apple or Google could buy out the entire music industry for cash.

malandrew 12y ago
I really wish we'd start calling it the music distribution industry instead of the music industry. Except for the musicians and the recording studios, it's never been about music. For everyone else, i.e. the overwhelming majority of those working in the industry, it's about sourcing a product an distributing it. The "industry" is just a supply chain for auditory experiences, and when consumers became distributors as well, it cut out the supply chain folks. That is who is ultimately fighting back in all of this.
hellbanTHIS 12y ago
I don't think he's proposing a micropayment system, more like a universal system to keep track of who worked on what song. I think he's saying Katy Perry sends a song to Spotify along with a bitcoin-type address and at the end of the month they send the payment to that address, which divides it up between all the writers, producers and rights holders.
tzs 12y ago
> Well, the music industry wanted copyright with "no formalities", and that's in the TRIPS agreement. No more need to put a copyright notice on something, or send a copy to the Library of Congress. The US abolished the notice and deposit requirements via the Berne Implementation Act of 1988, almost a decade before TRIPS.
- Animats 12y ago
  True, but then it went worldwide, and nobody kept records any more.
epscylonb 12y ago
Agreed, I think what a lot of people misunderstand is that bitcoin is a terribly inefficient way of achieving consensus. No one is going to build mining farms just to protect digital rights. Bitcoin has a chance at becoming a currency because in the past it has been hard to reach a global consensus on value. It may be possible to use a bitcoin based timestamping solution like https://github.com/goblin/chronobit https://github.com/goblin/chronobit to record the rights, but I can't see where the incentive is for everybody to support a distributed database of such rights.

guard-of-terra 12y ago

The problem here is, music gets produced at increased rates. You might have a huge database of all the music from yesterday, which would be less useful than you think if you'll not figure a way to make every musician put metadata for their newest creations there.

biomimic 12y ago

songcoin is another interesting option where consumers get to transact and "invest" in artists or songs... "Songcoin Wants to Be Music’s Alternative Currency" http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobile/5915780/songcoin-wants-to-be-musics-alternative-currency http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobil... http://songcoin.org http://songcoin.org

GigabyteCoin 12y ago

If your sole goal is to store information in the blockchain, why not use Namecoin? It's almost as secure as Bitcoin, and specializes in storing small bits of data in it's blockchain.

briandear 12y ago

This idea is revolutionary. It would piss all the right people off if it works and also ensure that all the right people get transparently compensated for what they do.

return0 12y ago

He's describing a network where payments are being distributed hierarchically and recursively to all the creators behind a work. What does that have to do with bitcoin? you could replace the payment method with another and it would all be the same.

inoop 12y ago

The elephant in the Bitcoin room is that it simply cannot scale up to high TPS rates. If any kind of meaningful adoption actually happened, the network would keel over pretty quickly trying to globally broadcast all that data, and the blockchain would quickly balloon to unmanageable sizes. I see a lot of these articles hailing Bitcoin as the answer to some monetary injustice or other, or as the fundamental underpinning of some revolutionary new product, but people totally ignore Bitcoin's technological limitations. Instead, the blockchain is talked about as if it's some magical box that is pretty much whatever the author needs it to be. The amount of cognitive dissonance in the Bitcoin community regarding this topic is baffling. The whole point of side chains was that even core devs realized that Bitcoin can not scale. Yet side chains were hailed by the community as some sort of fantastic innovation that is 'good for bitcoin'. Maybe these people are just talking their book, I don't know, but next time you read an article about Bitcoin or blockchain tech just realize that VISA can handle 47.000 tps. Bitcoin currently is doing slightly more than 1. Inb4 'merkle trees', 'invertible bloom filters', 'something something moore's law', 'corporate shill', 'freedom hater', 'the market will sort it out', 'side chains', etc. </offtopic rant>

mrb 12y ago
Firstly, Bitcoin does not need to scale that much to be considered widely successful. Heck, Western Union[1] averages only 10 tps, which is only 10x what Bitcoin is doing today, so such a target is clearly within reach with a 2MB block size. Secondly, Bitcoin can actually scale by many orders of magnitudes, see the math and arguments there: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability You need solid counterarguments to this page to convince us it can't possibly scale. Thirdly, Bitcoin has done 6 years in a row what critics have always said it cannot do ("nobody would want bitcoins", "the exchange rate will never reach $1/$10/$100", "it will crash and be forgotten after the Jun 2011/Mar 2013/Nov 2013 bubble", "the US govt will make it illegal", "big companies will never accept it", etc). So you need to sit back and start thinking why is it that Bitcoin keeps growing and reaching milestone after milestone, instead of throwing one more empty statement "bitcoin can't do X" with zero reasoning behind. [1] WU does ~250 million consumer transaction/year. Edit: @inoop I misremembered and meant WU, not Paypal

robrigo 12y ago

I believe that BitShares Music project is the most tangible effort in making this kind of platform happen. http://bitsharesmusicfoundation.org/ http://bitsharesmusicfoundation.org/ http://peertracks.com http://peertracks.com

oco101 12y ago
True I believe this could be the best thing that happen in music in the last decade.
Inthenameofmine 12y ago
If anybody is interested, we're building the platform at Bitsapphire.com. If you have any questions I can answer them here on HN.
- robrigo 12y ago
  Hey itnom, cob mentioned that tracking contributors to tracks (the credit part of this article) isn't apart of the MVP you guys are building. Would you consider leveraging reputation / on chain graph DB (key graph) to handle tracking this information in a future iteration? I think this would make the blockchain much more useful for other 3rd parties to plug into and leverage said DB.