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you omitted Lightning payments as money streaming. People pay podcasters on the minute via Apps like Breeze, Sphinx Chat or Foundain Podcast. Its called value4value (see https://podcastindex.org/podcast/value4value). Currently it uses BTCpayServer, in the future there will be static QR codes with all sorts of complex payment schemes in various currencies (see https://bootstrap.bolt12.org/examples).

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I designed a payment system like this back in 2015. Instead of breaking the payment stream down into recurring discrete chunks that pay out every second (or closer), you can represent the payment in your database as a start time and a rate of flow. Then, at any given moment, you can calculate how much cash has flowed by subtracting the start time from the present time and multiplying by the flow rate.

The benefit is technological rather than financial. It allows you to represent perfectly continuous payment streams while saving storage space in your database.

I did this for the purpose of implementing a continuous basic income (UBI) payout. The basic income itself was like a perpetuity. But I also generalized the system to support payment streams with end times.

And, obviously, you have to figure out what to do when a promised continuous payment stream hits a time point at which it defaults.

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《The idea of continuous streams of payments really seems to have captured a lot of imaginations.》

Does the ad for paid subscriptions to this blog indicate how deeply the author himself is bought into the system?

Why did Socrates teach for free, though?

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