With the Lunchmoney extension, you can visit a website that has implemented the use-lunch-money hook and get paid almost instantly in exchange for a set of data that a website can use in real time for things like:
- email address (alice@example.com)
- first name (Alice)
- last name (Smith)
- gender (Female)
- age (21)
- zip code (94122)
When you first install the extension, you'll be prompted to put in the data listed in Data payload includes. You'll also need to connect an LND node to the Lunchmoney extension with the admin macaroon so that it can create BOLT-11 invoices on your behalf. When you visit a website that has implemented the use-lunch-money hook that website will recognize you are a Lunchmoney user and immediately request your data payload. The extension will generate an invoice, and hand it off to the website, if the website pays the invoice, the extension will hand over the data payload to the website. One they've received the payload they're free to do whatever they'd like with it, such as the different use cases described here.
- A shoe company could use the gender data in order to redirect a user to the men's shoes landing page instead of hoping the users will see the men's shoes navigation on their website.
- A newsletter website could use the email address data to prefill the email subscription form field.
- A weather reporing website could use the user's zip code data to redirect a user to the weather page for that zip code.
- A website could welcome someone who just landed on their website for the first time with text like, "Welcome Alice! We think you'll love these products."
Since the beginning of the internet, companies have used data that you generage while browsing their website to track your behavior, fingerprint you in order to track you across other websites, and willingly hand over data about you to companies like Facebook, Google, Experian. There's an entire multi-billion dollar industry built around monetizing this data, but the people who generate all of this data are not part of the economy.
In order to include people in this "data economy" a couple things need to change. 1. People need technology that sits between them and the websites they're visitng. Cookie banners are currently trying and failling to do this, but it's a bad UX, and most people just hit "accept" in order to dismiss the banner without knowing what they're actually doing. 2. Companies need an incentive to want to pay users for their data, such as data they they've never previously had access to. Also users have never been able to easily monetize this data. That what bitcoin, lightning, and Lunchmoney enable.
At first, Airbnb was creepy to people, why would you let a stranger sleep in your house? With the right technology in place people quickly became comfortable with it, allowing home-owners to monetize space in their house they never even considered before. It may seem scary at first to offer such personal data to websites you visit, but this is data websites already collect on you through "back-channel" means. Lunchmoney gives you the ability to make money off of data you've never been able to before.
Companies spend a lot of time, effort, and money on user tracking. They use a plethora of tools to capture a "Customer 360" profile about you. Why not get rid of all of those tools, go directly to the user and tell give them bitcoin for that data? This starts a direct relationship between a user and a company the first time the customer ever lands on their website.