First Impressions - JB

Working Groups Attested Network
1

Gaps / things I’m thinking about

This is already solid for one-off purchases and subscriptions. Where it gets trickier is some of the messier, more real-world cases. These aren’t criticisms as much as questions about where this could go next.

Transferability / gifting
Right now it assumes the payer and recipient are the same DID. But what if I want to gift a subscription, or resell something like a limited badge? There’s no clear way to transfer or re-attest ownership.

Metered / consumable usage
The model works well for binary access such as “has premium” versus not, but less so for usage-based cases.

Think:

  • paying for 100 hours of moderation

  • paying for streaming bandwidth

  • API or infrastructure usage

You can’t realistically write a new attestation for every unit consumed. That would quickly overload the PDS. There’s no clean way to decrement or “burn” access over time.
If we eventually have native streaming payments or state-channel style flows, do we even need static attestations for this kind of thing? Or does value just move continuously as usage happens?

Infrastructure and value capture

The spec solves the payer, recipient, and broker relationship, but it doesn’t account for the rest of the stack. These are the parts actually serving the content and taking on the costs.

A paywalled post is not just one transaction. It involves:

  • a PDS hosting data

  • an AppView serving it

  • a Labeler adding context

  • a client rendering it

All of those have real costs, but right now the broker captures the transaction and the fee. Everyone else serves the content without earning from it. So you end up in a situation where value is captured at the point of conversion, but costs are incurred downstream.

That feels like it could push things toward centralization pretty quickly. Whoever controls the transaction layer captures the upside, and the rest of the ecosystem gets squeezed.

Open questions this raises

  • How do we attach some kind of value split directly to a receipt so money flows to where the work actually happens?

  • If an AppView or PDS verifies access before serving content, can they claim a small cut programmatically?

  • Does the lexicon need something like an infrastructureShares field to define how value gets distributed?

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2

Maybe it was added in response to this, but as of today the Scenarios page includes Entitlement Transfer and Consumable Entitlements sections which apply to some things mentioned in gaps.

3

is this ai generated

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