satoshis, derivative of bitcoin I think? I have a poor understanding of it. Essentially it's a way to pay podcast producers directly. Streaming means it sends whatever you set per minute so you auto-support podcasts. Boosts are short messages with dollar values tied to it. The show has to support this though, not all podcasts do.
Yeah, based on Bitcoin lightning (which is quite different from normal bitcoin) meaning no transaction costs and very low energy use. Basically it happens off-chain until someone syncs-up (then it becomes a btc transaction). It makes payments in fractions of cents possible, ie I stream 10 sats/min which is about 60 Eur cent per minute (so 1 cent per second).
You can also send messages to creators and attach amounts (those are called boosts), so you'd send a short message and attach 10k sats (or whatever you want), which is about 10 euros/dollars.
Some podcasts I listen to use this to read messages on the show (the highest ones). It's fun and casual but remains highly technical for now, https://getalby.com/ takes away some friction (but you're still self hosing a lightning wallet using docker compose). Easiest I think is Fountain [0, 1], which has it all built in. But I never tried that, I use Castamatic [2] with Alby.
I have to say, it seems to divide the Linux podcast world a bit with some shows embracing this, and some just calling it crypto-bs. A well, people seem to enjoy it and creators get real value, enough to have to rely less on ads even. I think this is one of the babies we'd throw out if we banned crypto currencies (which I agree are 99.999% bs).
