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“Listeners now have the ability to pledge streaming payments to the podcaster at rates like 100 sats/minute, and to tip for their favorite sections.” - Lightning Labs
Being a podcaster I guess, I should have known the name Adam Curry before. But when I was young we did not have cable TV at my parent’s house and I could not watch MTV. So I missed Adam Curry VJing and I also missed the start of the podcasting era by the “podfather”. Until he was a guest on the Orange Pill podcast by Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert some weeks ago. He was talking about Bitcoin and how it will change online business models. Adam mentioned a project that will save the open and independent podcaster space.
And bam! Last week Adam presented Podcasting2.0.
What is it? It is streaming money! Fans of Andreas M. Antonopoulos’ work know the term. He was talking about streaming money in 2016 already. Streaming money is a form of payment that is flowing. While listening to a podcast you as the listener can send tiny amounts of bitcoin to the podcast host. You pay on the go. As long as you listen, the payment flows. You can decide how much money you want to send. Without intermediaries, without doing anything. You do not have to hit a button, you do not have to fill in a password. Set it up in your podcast player once and done.
Adam Curry teamed up with Paul Itoi and the team of sphinx.chat. It is an app built on top of the Lightning Network, you can use it to send money and chat at the same time. Sphinx chat is a decentralized app, it is possible to use any other app with a similar architecture too. A decentralized app does not need a central server or a central company (like Twitter or Facebook). You and the podcast host, two independent individuals, can send money without intermediaries. At the same time, the individuals stay in control and ownership of their content.
This is one of the greatest technologies that mankind has invented. It will have more impact on the world than the Internet had. No monthly subscriptions, no paywalls. Seamless giving to people who provide good services.
As a self-hosting podcaster, I want to be one of the first to try this. I asked the developers of the WordPress Plugin I use, that is called Podlove, to implement the namespace tags into the RSS feed that are needed for it to work in the first step.
I hope the Podlove developers see it the same way as I do, that this is a gamechanger for the independence of podcasts and for the payment of content producers and will integrate the tags soon. If not I will find another way to host my podcast independently.
