[HN Gopher] What happened with the Web Monetization API?
___________________________________________________________________
What happened with the Web Monetization API?
Author : kuba-orlik
Score : 162 points
Date : 2024-02-06 14:23 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chriscoyier.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (chriscoyier.net)
| TotempaaltJ wrote:
| I think another interesting development related to this space is
| GNU Taler[0], which has gotten EU and NLnet grants, and could
| probably hook into these APIs.
|
| [0]: https://taler.net/en/index.html
| mhitza wrote:
| I'm eager to see what the extra funding does for the project.
| UX, setup, and everything else that relates to integration
| wasn't something I wanted to work with last time I took a
| serious look at the project.
| jmercouris wrote:
| Unfortunately the UX does not appear to be a priority.
| two_handfuls wrote:
| > Decoupling the Web Payments API and crypto is certainly the
| right move right now.
|
| As much as in the past I wanted cryptocurrency to succeed, I
| agree.
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| I remember Brave introducing BAT tokens that you could earn for
| seeing ads and then donate to other websites and content
| creators. How did that experiment end up? Was it just a crypto
| hype thing?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The concept is a deliberate scam. Brave removes the legitimate
| ads from the website owners, and puts their own ads on top.
| Then presents that as somehow helping website owners.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| > puts their own ads on top.
|
| I haven't used Brave for years and don't own their token, but
| that's just not how Brave ads work at all.
|
| The ads are shown as notifications and aren't replacing ads
| embedded in websites.
|
| Why mislead people?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The browser has a built in ad blocker, effectively removing
| the ads that pay for a website. To then put your own ads
| _anywhere_ after that and pretend that you're helping
| website owners is a scam. Imagine if YouTube started
| blocking sponsored content and put their own ads there.
| svieira wrote:
| Brave removes unsolicited advertisements and trackers.
| That is a feature of the browser and is effectively the
| same as shipping older versions of Chrome with a bundled
| version of ublockOrigin.
|
| Separately (probably not in "planning how to make Brave a
| profitable company", but definitely so in feature scope)
| IFF the user opts-in to seeing Brave's ads then they get
| paid (in a crypto-token that represents a unit of
| "Attention"). They then _can_ choose to offer those
| tokens to web sites (either as one-time "tips" or by
| giving the site a certain percentage of the tokens the
| user earns over the course of a month, possibly based on
| the total percentage of time the user spent with the site
| over the course of the same month.)
|
| This latter feature is attempting to create a parallel
| economy to the ad-supported industry, not a scam (unless
| they don't believe they can create such an economy and
| are just trying to fleece-the-suckers, but I don't think
| that's the case).
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If a browser blocks the website owner's ads and put their
| own ads instead, then they are leeching on the work of
| other people and also profitting from it.
|
| There is a saying "You can't fool an honest man", and it
| holds true for this situation as well. If the browser
| would just block legitimate ads and put their own ads and
| take all the money themselves, then hackers would riot.
| But since they say they are sharing the profits with
| users, many people will turn a blind eye to such
| unethical behaviour. Because people are base.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| The problem is that each of these steps seems fine in
| isolation but the net result is that websites get (and
| feel) ripped off. If I sat directly outside the printing
| press of a newspaper, intercepted each printed copy,
| ripped out all the ads and put in my own instead and took
| a cut of the resulting revenue, everyone would understand
| that's a problem.
|
| I've seen Brave apologists say for _years_ going "no,
| really, it's not ripping you off!" to people who feel
| ripped off, to basically zero effect at changing hearts
| and minds. At some point you have to accept the reality
| that people aren't going to be won over by "logical"
| explanations of why someone who seems like they're
| obviously ripping them off actually isn't.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| You're now making a different argument: it's unethical
| for an ad blocker to have their own ads?
|
| Why is that? I don't like ads on websites because they
| track me, slow down loading times, use my data, etc... So
| I'd like to block them because they're forced on me in
| the modern web. This ad blocker gives me control of
| whether I want to see any ads, how often I want to see
| them, and takes measures to prevent tracking. That seems
| like freedom and user-friendly behavior.
|
| The fact that the ad blocker doesn't keep all ad revenue
| is another bonus and I can choose whether I alone earn
| money from seeing ads that run on my machine, or if I
| share some of that with creators I appreciate seems like
| another level of freedom.
|
| I'm not seeing a downside. I can opt out of the ads
| altogether if I choose. I can even choose to not block
| ads that aren't trying to exploit me.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You are not seeing any downside because you are only
| thinking about yourself. Somebody made the website that
| you are visiting and enjoying. They spent time, effort,
| and maybe some money to make it. And they get paid by ads
| to keep access free. Now, I know hackers will come
| screaming about how their human rights are violated by
| seeing an ad on a webpage. Okay, block the ads then. But
| for a business to block the ads of other companies and
| then put their own ads. If you don't see how that is
| wrong, then I don't know.
| EGreg wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, why are so many people on HN who
| are against crypto-based payment systems and
| decentralized networks (always using shibboleths like
| "scam" and "ponzi") at the same time so totally for the
| equally "ponzi" model of advertisers supporting free
| sites via giant centralized brokers? Most advertisers
| quickly find out that the ad money is wasted and only the
| slickest and most misleading campaigns win, same as the
| meme tokens. Clicks and visits can be astroturfed same as
| fake volume of crypto.
|
| But what makes the ad supported model far worse than
| crypto is the dystopian centralized control, system of
| incentives and Surveillance Capitalism that always grows
| up around it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
| kerkeslager wrote:
| A lot of HN works in industries which benefit from
| advertising. It's motivated reasoning.
|
| In general, HN users can be trusted to take the side of
| corporations over humans in the vast majority of
| situations.
|
| EDIT: Downvoting without giving reasoning just lends
| further credence to my point that their views are based
| in selfishness rather than reasoning. ;)
| carlosjobim wrote:
| No need to sugar coat it. If that's what you really
| think, then write it clearly: "Hey guys! Hey my fellow
| hackers! That poster is a... is a... CORPORATE SHILL!"
| kerkeslager wrote:
| That's not what I really think.
|
| Most of my audience aren't hackers, at least not in the
| sense I think you mean.
|
| And the poster is likely not a corporate shill. "Shill"
| has connotations of undisclosed association and
| intentional deception, neither of which are things I'm
| accusing anyone of. I don't think there's any reasonable
| expectation of disclosing associations on a pseudonymous
| forum. And I don't think most posters here are being
| intentionally being deceptive--they probably believe what
| they're saying, as most people will go through great
| mental calisthenics to believe what they're doing isn't
| harmful.
|
| The late-stage capitalist ideologies held by much of this
| forum _are_ extremely harmful, but I don 't need to
| accuse people of malicious intent to say that. People can
| intend the best and do great harm.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You're letting your imagination run. I'm not the
| slightest against crypto. I'm not against people using
| adblockers and I'm strongly against advertisement online
| and in other media. But the website owner also needs a
| chance to be reimbursed for his labour and put food on
| the table. If he choses to do so with ads, that is his
| right.
|
| Because people do not donate, even to stuff they love and
| use a lot. For a company to block those legitimate ads
| and then put their own, while pretending they are helping
| website owners - that's a scam. And nobody would swallow
| it unless it came with the promise of sharing some scam
| money with the users.
|
| I'm for a free speech internet where users pay a cheap
| and fair price to creators for content, that's a much
| better model than ads - and it is probably the future for
| any quality content.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > You're now making a different argument: it's unethical
| for an ad blocker to have their own ads?
|
| This is a straw man. It's not unethical, it's
| nonsensical. If you serve ads you aren't an ad blocker,
| you're an advertiser.
|
| > This ad blocker gives me control of whether I want to
| see any ads, how often I want to see them, and takes
| measures to prevent tracking.
|
| Pretty much _every_ ad blocker gives you control of
| whether you want to see any ads, and how often.
| Whitelists exist that allow some ads, they just don 't
| get much use because outside of the out-of-touch HN
| bubble, very few people actually want to see _any_ ads.
|
| The difference is that other ad blockers are obviously
| more trustworthy because they aren't also in bed with
| advertisers.
|
| > I can even choose to not block ads that aren't trying
| to exploit me.
|
| More nonsense. "Trying to exploit you" is literally the
| purpose of advertising.
| yreg wrote:
| Yes, to me this combination is pretty unethical.
| Similarly, I don't mind piracy, but I find it distasteful
| to pay for pirated content.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I'd much rather my browser mine crypto for that website when I
| visit a website than get ads. (But only while I have that tab
| open, it is the focused tab, and the browser is not minimized.)
| caseyf wrote:
| I operate a website and I earned $70 in BAT during the most
| recent month (Aug 14 - Sept 14 2023)
|
| September is the most recent month because I turned the Brave
| stuff off after that.
| pants2 wrote:
| Why would you turn it off if you're earning $70/mo?
| pants2 wrote:
| The problem with BAT tokens is they're BAT tokens. If they had
| just used USDC I feel like it would be much more popular.
| seanwilson wrote:
| > It needs to be built into the browsers and web standards such
| that it's incredibly smooth and fast. I wanna send $1 to a
| website, it happens instantly and anonymously, and the developer
| can do things around this. Like unlock features! For instance,
| stop showing ads, offer more complete downloads, unlock tutorial
| courses, etc. Make it easier and faster than using a credit card.
|
| Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that
| gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee? Or an
| approach that doesn't require one company to have a monopoly over
| it?
|
| I'm really curious how the internet would change if there was a
| fast and easy way for site visitors to give something like $0.10
| to unlock content or just to say thanks.
| frutiger wrote:
| > Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions
| that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee
|
| This is anathema here in the US but the rest of the world
| typically does not use credit cards as the default payment
| method.
| gear54rus wrote:
| But they (we) do use debit cards as one tho.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions
| that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee
|
| One option is to have regulations about card fees, which is the
| case in the EU (0.2% for debit, 0.3% for credit).
|
| Another is to use an alternative payment method, like India's
| UPI or Eurozone's SEPA which are free and instantaneous.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| The UX around card and SEPA payments sucks, though. I hear
| UPI is nicer.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| But the UPI requirements of forcing mobile apps makes the
| monetisation usecase UX pretty terrible (think App Intents
| to and fro on mobile browsers) and scanning QRs on desktop.
|
| I'd rather like Taler.
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| It's actually 2%+fixed amount fee (see e.g. Stripe.com and
| choose an EU country), 0.2 is just the interbank fee IIRC.
| jacobn wrote:
| SEPA via Stripe takes on average 5 days, max 14 according to
| their docs - instantaneous would be a game changer?!
|
| https://stripe.com/docs/payments/sepa-debit
| calmoo wrote:
| Instant free SEPA transfers are becoming more common in the
| EU, but as an easy payment method it's still annoying from
| a UX perspective.
| Jommi wrote:
| Where did you read that SEPA is free? Thats not true.
| zilti wrote:
| GNU Taler
| internetter wrote:
| Frankly, this is probably just going to manifest as a digital
| currency. Add 10$ to your wallet. At the end of the month
| that's distributed or something
| stevekemp wrote:
| Flattr tried to do something similar, but yes I agree. It's
| unfortunate that bitcoin became a hoarding/speculation thing,
| rather than a useful thing.
|
| Decentralized micro-transactions would have been cool had
| they been used with a decent friendly UI and been integrated
| into a browser or two as an extension.
| internetter wrote:
| > Decentralized micro-transactions would have been cool had
| they been used with a decent friendly UI and been
| integrated into a browser or two as an extension.
|
| My position on cryptocurrency as well. I think that the
| ability to send money in this decentralized manner is
| fascinating. It's too bad it went far, far beyond that.
| Cryptocurrency should have never tried to replace normal
| currency, or any of that NFT bs.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Blockchain isn't really the solution there, though.
|
| I don't want a public ledger with all my payments, which
| tells not only what I consume, but also how much I am
| able/willing to spend.
|
| And as soon as you are in massmarket you need ways for
| humans to intervene, for handling complaints, mistakes,
| whatever or dealing with the unavoidable case that
| individuals lose their secret keys. Or even cases like
| medical restriction or inheritance requiring others to
| take over the funds.
|
| All those things Blockchain purposely and inherently
| prevents.
| pants2 wrote:
| You can just send a transaction from your exchange.
|
| Like, let's say I want to send you $0.10 right now. I
| would just go into Robinhood and send 0.1 USDC to you on
| Polygon or Solana, that would arrive in your wallet
| instantly from a Robinhood-owned address, you would have
| no idea who I am or my previous transaction history.
| Robinhood also owns the private keys and account recovery
| process here - it's just using blockchain as the payment
| rail.
|
| Go ahead and post your address and I'll send you $0.10.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Okay, so the solution is to use a bank, not Blockchain
| money.
| pants2 wrote:
| But you can't send $0.01 instantly and anonymously with
| bank rails. The solution is to use a crypto exchange on
| crypto rails - just not a regular crypto wallet (you
| could, but perhaps not very user friendly)
| indigochill wrote:
| My understanding (possibly mistaken - I've only been
| casually watching from the sidelines) is bitcoin (and at
| least most other blockchain currencies) suffers a similar
| problem to credit/debit cards, in that there is effort
| involved in validating/recording the transaction and that
| work needs to be compensated, and therefore there are
| transaction fees that are effectively independent of the
| value transferred, therefore microtransactions are
| disproportionately penalized by this necessity.
|
| Especially with KYC/AML laws being necessary to run a
| legitimate financial exchange, there really is no getting
| around a certain cost-per-transaction and even in a best-
| case scenario that hits microtransactions "equally" as hard
| as "macrotransactions" which proportionally penalizes
| microtransactions.
|
| To minimize the proportion of that going to transaction
| fees, you're better off making fewer transactions which
| then manifests as something like a monthly subscription
| instead of "I'll just transact ten cents to you per
| action".
| thinkmassive wrote:
| The Lightning Network is a layer on top of Bitcoin, which
| allows users to aggregate a huge number of transactions
| into a payment channel that's tracked off-ledger. The
| only transactions that need to be settled on the base
| layer (broadcast to the public Bitcoin blockchain) are
| channel open and close events.
|
| There are already APIs protected by an L402 paywall that
| charges tiny fractions of a cent for access to protected
| resources.
|
| http://l402.tech
| SleepilyLimping wrote:
| >It's unfortunate that bitcoin became a
| hoarding/speculation thing, rather than a useful thing.
|
| Brave tried to do this with their Basic Attention Token,
| but they seem to be focused on adding generalized crypto
| features like wallets rather than developing how it could
| work better.
| tromp wrote:
| > It's unfortunate that bitcoin became a
| hoarding/speculation thing
|
| It's a natural consequence of its deflationary design,
| which encourages hoarding. Use as a currency would have
| benefitted from an alternate pure linear emission, with no
| reward halvings, where it would take 100 years to get
| supply inflation down to 1%. That would also leave later
| generations their fair share of supply.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| That's how Brave already works.
| imiric wrote:
| Agreed. Brave actually implemented this exact thing[1], and
| then got dumped together with other crypto scam projects,
| which continues to happen in this very thread.
|
| Crypto haters are quick to shout that cryptocurrencies have
| no practical use, and introduce many problems, but this is a
| perfect use case for them. The negative discussion has
| detracted from some truly disrupting technologies being
| adopted, which is a damn shame.
|
| Brave Inc. has made some missteps, sure, but I don't think
| they're overall an evil or scam company. A solution like BAT
| can eventually move us away from the current ad-infested web
| where advertising leeches serve as sleazy middlemen between
| users and companies, and scams and fake content flood the web
| in order to trick SEO and get easy ad revenue. The modern web
| is a minefield corrupted by advertising, and things will only
| get worse as AI generated content gets widespread adoption.
|
| If browsers integrated with a decentralized wallet, that can
| either be filled by watching privacy-preserving ads _OR_ by
| manually adding credit to them, had Humble Bundle-like
| sliders for users to control how much of their credit is
| allocated for each site, and the web had standardized APIs
| for websites to set their minimum price, then it would solve
| the monetization issue once and for all. The basic customer-
| business relationship would be preserved, where customers
| actually pay for the services they use, instead of the
| corrupt business models of today where web users are not even
| the customers, but a piece of rock gold can be mined from,
| and its value milked in perpetuity.
|
| I think the single largest reason this hasn't happened yet is
| because it would negatively impact the profits of adtech
| giants who are running the web, and have a strong sway in
| directing its future. If any solution has a chance in getting
| mass adoption it needs to happen outside of the web, and be
| built from the ground up by avoiding the mistakes we now know
| have lead us to where we currently are.
|
| [1]: https://basicattentiontoken.org/
| gnatman wrote:
| >> Crypto haters are quick to shout that cryptocurrencies
| have no practical use, and introduce many problems, but
| this is a perfect use case for them. The negative
| discussion has detracted from some truly disrupting
| technologies being adopted, which is a damn shame.
|
| Crypto haters & "negative discussion" have not detracted
| from this use case anywhere near as much as the very real
| fraud and rampant speculation that completely defined this
| technology for the general public over the last 10 years.
| soco wrote:
| I had for a while Coil installed in the browser and nobody
| cared about it, so I uninstalled it half a year later. I
| honestly couldn't care less if there's a blockchain behind it
| or whatever, but as long no sites (useful to me) implement
| it... Under the line I paid Coil some money for nothing, so
| maybe for them it was a business success.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I had Coil too. They shut down.
|
| https://www.coil.com/#:~:text=On%20March%2015%2C%202023%2C%2.
| ...
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Of course there is, there are tons of cryptocurrencies that can
| do this but everyone here hates crypto and throws the baby out
| with the bathwater and won't stop parroting "SCAM!" every time
| they hear the word. It's too expensive to use on-chain
| transactions on things like Bitcoin or Ethereum but there are
| other coins.
|
| https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth...
|
| You could also use Lightning Network on Bitcoin or any of the
| Layer 2s on Ethereum like Arbitrum or Optimism. Fees are in the
| cents range.
|
| https://l2fees.info/
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Pointing to my comment elsewhere on this thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39279246
| pelorat wrote:
| Good luck getting something like that past Eu regulators.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Why? It seems like the sort of privacy-supporting thing
| they'd like.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| > Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions
| that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee?
| Or an approach that doesn't require one company to have a
| monopoly over it?
|
| The short answer is, no. For the long answer, I really
| recommend people read a blog like Bits About Money or some Matt
| Levine columns to start learning about the actual plumbing of
| finance and payment processors, to see why such a thing is
| actually difficult or impossible to build. Something that
| _seems_ like a simple transaction to us, like sending $0.10 to
| a webiste, actually involves many parties, all of whom are a)
| hedging against counterparty risk, b) required by law to do KYC
| /AML and c) required by law to have safeguards against leaving
| customers in the lurch. Providing a, b and c is expensive in
| both money and time.
|
| There are a lot of layers of abstraction in this system to make
| sure that you, the end user, don't usually have to think about
| all the complexity, and so to you it just looks like "I sent
| money from A to B", but the complexity is nonetheless there and
| it's a real impediment to getting the kinds of fast, cheap
| microtxns you want.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| This is literally the use case for cryptocurrencies -- digital
| cash, not investments.
|
| In the more... questionably legal parts of the web, Monero is
| pretty common since you can't use regular banking anyway. The
| fees are pretty low, at around USD0.001 IIRC.
|
| There's also Nano (feeless) but it doesn't seem to be very
| popular, unfortunately.
| jjcm wrote:
| Please correct me if I'm wrong here (I've been out of the
| crypto game for a couple years), but I don't think crypto
| holds up here. The nature of transaction fees with crypto is
| they scale exponentially with demand. Monero fees are low
| because volume is low. Bitcoin fees are high ($9.97 was the
| average transaction fee yesterday!) because volume is high.
|
| Any fully decentralized crypto at the scale of use that the
| Web Monetization API would need would have enormous tx
| prices. There are ways to scale this, ie the lightning
| network, but those are essentially centralized solutions to
| scale.
| ptsd_dalmatian wrote:
| this is the point of lightning network for btc, way lower
| costsand nearly instantaneous transactions. I haven't tried
| it so far.
| epolanski wrote:
| Because it's still theory 7 years after announcement it
| has been proven again and again to not be a real
| alternative.
| gamepsys wrote:
| The current bitcoin blocksize is limited to 1mb. This
| means, on average, only 1mb worth of transactions can be
| written to the ledger. With that 1mb we save thousands of
| transactions. When you pay a transaction fee you are
| essentially bidding on your data being written to the
| ledger every 10 minutes. You are correct that the more
| people bidding, the higher we can expect the price to be.
|
| There is however no technical reason we should limit the
| blocksize to 1mb. We could have 10mb or even 100mb
| blocksizes easily. Realistically a 100mb block would be
| large enough to handle all transaction data our species
| currently generates.
|
| The transaction fee is a considerable portion of miner's
| revenue. Miners ultimately are responsibility for making
| changes to the bitcoin protocol. I think it's unlikely
| bitcoin miners will vote for a higher blocksize because it
| will cause short term decreases in revenue. However, they
| are missing a potential boon from the Jevons paradox -- the
| cheaper a resource becomes to use the more of the resource
| we use.
|
| So in summary, it's not really a technical limit to have a
| high transaction volume but we aren't likely to see it from
| the current big coins.
| tommica wrote:
| Does not seem to be a sustainable solution: if the amount
| of microtranfers increase, the blocksize is going to be
| an issue again
| gamepsys wrote:
| The number of real time electronic transactions is
| virtually guaranteed to increase. This is not only a big
| problem now, it's becoming a bigger problem over time. I
| consider the unwillingness of the bitcoin network to
| increase blocksize to be a critical flaw.
|
| Edit: The problem is not 100mb is too small for the
| future. The problem is that just like we cannot go from
| 1mb to 100mb today, we would have no ability to go from
| 100mb to 1000mb when needed.
| epolanski wrote:
| Yet bitcointalk and /r/bitcoin were able to sway what
| later become to be known as Bitcoin Cash into the wrong
| fork.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| That was the reason for the fork of Bitcoin Cash, and
| indeed BCH blocks are bigger and fees are much smaller.
| But BTC is still inexplicably way more popular.
| epolanski wrote:
| Value of technology is not why people aggregate towards
| Bitcoin.
|
| Otherwise it would've been long superseded by other
| chains.
|
| Bitcoiners still arguing about the solidity of the
| network guaranteed by so much mining, yet virtually all
| the mining is in the hands of few specialized operations
| all knowing each other (so it's not really decentralized)
| and despite Ethereum proving new protocol to be a valid
| and safe alternative.
|
| None of Bitcoin cultists at the end of the day understood
| that it wasn't about algorithms nor computers, but
| consensus among people.
|
| And that consensus voted to have Bitcoin, the oldest and
| least technologically developed chain to be the "store of
| value" of cryptocurrencies.
| stickfigure wrote:
| > Realistically a 100mb block would be large enough to
| handle all transaction data our species currently
| generates.
|
| Nonsense.
|
| With the current block size and average transaction size,
| the bitcoin network processes ~7 transactions per second.
| A 100X increase in block size gets you to 700
| transactions per second. A quick google says global
| credit card transactions currently average more than
| 21,000 per second.
|
| You're still almost two orders of magnitude off, and
| that's just existing credit card transactions.
| gamepsys wrote:
| Maybe my global transaction number is off. I'm not sure
| if the blockchain algo would have other bottlenecks when
| at 10gb blocks which is the size it would need to grow in
| order to accommodate 70k/sec. Certainly storage and
| network transfer is sufficient enough. It seems pretty
| feasible to process 16.67 MBps of data even on
| inefficient algorithms.
| cchance wrote:
| Why are you comparing this to bitcoin, bitcoin was never
| meant to be a fast network lol it was to be a network for
| cash to sit in "digital gold"...
|
| Other networks were designed for speed and others are
| working on it (etherum with layer 2 networks, and more
| speed focused networks, for instance as was mentioned
| Nano was doing 1200-1500tps years ago, with plans for
| increases not sure if thtey eer went further.
|
| The problem is crypto has a few solid real projects and a
| billion loud useless scam/spam projects that make the
| idea of "crypto" look like its all trash, finding the
| networks that actually have something to really give to
| the world is hard.
| acchow wrote:
| > bitcoin was never meant to be a fast network lol it was
| to be a network for cash to sit in "digital gold"...
|
| Your claim is opposed to the contents of the original
| Bitcoin whitepaper
|
| https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
| j0hnyl wrote:
| It depends on the chain. Some chains can support high
| throughput at low fees.
| rglullis wrote:
| _Theoretically_.
| tromp wrote:
| Sure; they can. By sacrificing the very properties
| Bitcoin was designed for: decentralization and censorship
| resistance.
| rglullis wrote:
| The worst part of lightning is not even the centralization
| but the capital inefficiency. By definition, any money
| locked in a payment channel can not be used for anything
| else.
| ambigious7777 wrote:
| unfortunately, looks like Monero just crashed from Binance
| delisting it for security reasons. hopefully it manages to
| recover.
| EE84M3i wrote:
| Is there a way to use crypto for this without adding a bunch
| of new capital gain/loss items to my taxes?
|
| For foreign currency, there's a personal use exemption,
| right? Does this apply to crypto?
| Sargos wrote:
| This would most likely be based on stablecoins (US users
| would use USDC/USDT etc) so no tax issues there.
| pr337h4m wrote:
| If you try to be feeless you become super vulnerable to spam:
| https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/03/11/nanos-network-
| flood...
|
| IIRC this spam attack cost the attacker only $5000 but
| rendered the network pretty much useless for hours
| miohtama wrote:
| Hashcash, Bitcoin's predecessor, was created to solve email
| spam:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
|
| Having users to pay actions make spam unprofitable, as spam
| relies on tragedy of commons and abusing public goods. This
| is why there is so much less SMS spam compared to email
| spam.
| config_yml wrote:
| This already works with Crypto, something like Hedera is dirt
| cheap (1/100 of a cent) and fast and scales really well.
| Wallets are easy to connect, but the disconnect to regular $$$
| is still a bit too big for the regular surfin' user.
| uncletammy wrote:
| You've just described the value proposition for bitcoin, a peer
| to peer electronic cash system. Sadly, bitcoin has been
| captured by banks and is now only useful for gambling and
| parasitic investment scams.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| :/ Distributed ledger technology ever being a viable solution
| for small, high-frequency transactions seems like a pipe
| dream.
|
| I'm aware that tremendous effort has been and is being
| invested in that.
|
| But I have yet to be convinced efforts in that direction
| won't all boil down to "trading decentralization for
| efficiency."
|
| In which case, why not use a centralized, much more efficient
| solution?
| Wazako wrote:
| How do you centralize without having a government requiring
| KYC?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'd ask how you decentralize without having a government
| requiring KYC?
|
| Anonymity of nodes?
|
| If avoiding KYC / government-control is the primary
| motivation, then more centralized ledger systems look a
| lot like current payment networks... just with anonymous
| operators. (Oof)
| epolanski wrote:
| Why is that even a real need?
|
| All crypto cultists I know don't give a damn to give all
| of their info to any provider, out there, be tracked
| everywhere "they already know everything" and yet there
| is a problem for a 1$ donation on some random website
| when they using their real dollars online for literally
| everything.
|
| Also, there's literally 0 ways other than bartering to
| get bitcoins really anonymously, and the number of people
| able to transact while staying anonymous is below 0. You
| need to take your credit card and pay for it on an
| exchange, so it's not anonymous.
|
| And the anonymous chains are borderline ignored, because
| being anonymous is really not what drags people into
| Bitcoin, but the hope of finding a fool paying more than
| they did.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| I mean, Solana does 3k tps on a good day (with less
| electricity than a google search and a fraction of a penny
| fee). So it's not un-believable there will be a
| decentralized ledger that hits visa levels of throughput in
| the next few years.
|
| I agree though that a centralized solution would be more
| performant, but it would have to have network effects for
| it to gain widespread use, which means it would be a
| monopoly and enshitify and start taking an unreasonable
| fee. So government should step in and offer something for
| online micro transactions, but at government speed we might
| be decades out.
|
| So then we are back to decentralized ledgers.... Not
| technically better but organizationally, politically,
| socially better...
| wazzer wrote:
| say what you want, but iota, out of all of them, actually
| seems to bring a promising technical solution. @hus_ky on
| twitter, one of their main devs working on it is a good
| follow.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Looks like https://getcode.com/ just launched to solve this
| problem. There have been many attempts at web3 micropayments,
| but this one seems slicker than most. Hat tip from USV, one of
| their investors.
| Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 wrote:
| > Privacy taken too far, however, can lead to bad outcomes.
| To mitigate the potential of Code being used for nefarious
| activity, Code users are limited to $250 USD per payment, up
| to $1000 USD per day.
|
| This is a joke. Everything seems to be designed around their
| proprietary app, so why bother with a blockchain and custom
| currency at all?
| pants2 wrote:
| The best way to do this today is through any crypto exchange
| that supports USDC.
|
| I just tested this - I went in to Robinhood and sent 0.01 USDC
| to a SOL address. It cost me $0.001 as a transfer fee and took
| about 30 seconds total. I agree the process could be a bit
| smoother, but it works fairly well.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| I'm grateful this hasn't been worked out yet. The magnitude of
| the shittification of the internet which will occur once this
| is a solved problem is almost too much to think about. If you
| are working on this, for the sake of humanity, please stop.
| dlbucci wrote:
| I think a large portion of enshittification comes from sites
| being advertising revenue driven. This leads to them needing
| more users with higher engagement, so they grow beyond their
| scope first and then shittify everything when they need to
| start making money (see reddit). A large reason sites have to
| be ad driven is that requiring users to sign up and pay for a
| site is a huge blocker for most people. So I feel like having
| a standard easy way for users to send money to a site they
| use for the utility they receive would go some ways to reduce
| enshittification, not increase it. But maybe I'm just an
| optimist.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| I'm not saying there aren't good use-cases for this. There
| absolutely are. What I'm saying is that this tool WILL be
| used well beyond those cases in ways that make the internet
| much worse than the ad and surveillance nonsense we
| currently have to deal with.
|
| As a thought experiment, consider a truly terrible group of
| smart and capable people. The kind of people who will
| exploit this new tool to extract and squeeze every cent
| from others to themselves without any care for what is
| destroyed, broken, or ruined. Imagine they do exactly this
| and become wildly rich. Their uncaring ruthlessness richly
| rewarded leading to normalization of such tactics which are
| then taken on by others as just the 'way things are done'.
| I ask you to consider just how this tool could be used for
| evil and then know that it will be.
|
| This tool will allow any/all action on a website to be
| easily monetized. This will mean that eventually EVERY
| action will be monetized. Oh, and the ads and surveillance?
| They'll be there too.
| notatoad wrote:
| Most of the "enshittification" that you're talking about is
| the result of having to find roundabout ways for people to
| get paid for their work, because simply charging the consumer
| isn't feasible.
|
| websites charging money for the content and services they
| provide is not enshittification. it's just business.
| expecting everything to be delivered for free is what leads
| us to things like invasive tracking and targeted advertising.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| I don't disagree about what the problem is. I just think
| this particular solution will cause more new problems then
| the old ones it will theoretically solve.
| j0hnyl wrote:
| I actually think it will solve the enshitification problem,
| which is mostly ad driven.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Or random paywalls. I am fine to pay $0.10 per random
| article I get linked to and find interesting. I am not fine
| to pay subscription fees of $5+ for a single article.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| It doesn't even need to be that fast, as long as it's secure
| and credible. Stock trades in the US happen "instantly" (or
| near enough), but actual settlement takes place two or three
| days later.
|
| The cryptocurrency people are hung up on the idea of "fast,
| irreversible payments" (that settle at the same time as the
| trade) because they desperately want a trustless, digital
| equivalent of cash for political reasons.
|
| But for merchants and mainstream users, a fair, trustworthy
| payment system run by known intermediaries would be much
| better. It can be slow, as long as merchants know they'll get
| their money in some reasonable timeframe. The problem is that
| the Visa/Mastercard duopoly makes it hard to innovate.
|
| It's possible FedNow will fix this
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow
| itslennysfault wrote:
| I think you need the browsers to act as a broker/escrow.
|
| Brave tried to do this, but I'm not sure what ever happened to
| it. The way their system worked (as I understood it) is you
| deposited an amount in the browser each month and it was split
| between the sites you visited that month weighted by how much
| time you spent on each site, but it only worked for sites that
| signed up for the Brave reward program (or whatever they called
| it).
| pdubouilh wrote:
| On the non-crypto web-monetization side, I'm toying with a non-
| profit idea in the same vein but using third party tooling
| (browser extension, etc...)
|
| website: https://lagom.org whitepaper:
| https://lagom.org/docs/lagom-whitepaper.pdf
| coddle-hark wrote:
| Beautifully designed website! I still don't know how it's
| supposed to work though, the whitepaper has zero implementation
| details in it.
| pdubouilh wrote:
| Thanks :) It's a basic centralised idea - I'm working on a
| second version of the whitepaper to be more pragmatic with
| defining the solution, the current one is just conceptual.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| The problems with monetization and micropayments are not
| technical and no easy-to-use API is going to help with adoption.
|
| Dealing with money is a real pain due to fraud, security, and
| legal compliance and those problems don't go away when the
| amounts are small.
| TillE wrote:
| Even those are solvable problems, the real issue is social.
| There's a reason Flattr failed and Patreon has been a huge
| success. People would rather personally support a handful of
| creators at $5/month than put the equivalent money in a tip jar
| at a bunch of faceless websites.
| internetter wrote:
| Before coil failed, making this something that happened in
| the background seemed promising.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Even those are solvable problems,_
|
| Are they?
|
| Historically, there have been a lot of people eager to erect
| barriers to make payments difficult for those who want to
| gamble, sell porn, buy porn, donate to controversial
| political causes, avoid taxes, sell drugs, buy drugs, etc etc
|
| So a system that lets me send $40/month of untraceable cash
| to strangers on the internet might face a lot of opposition.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| You can send $40 month of untraceable cash to strangers via
| the post office, how is that any different?
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| You can send $40 a month easily but receiving $40 a month
| from 20000 people is difficult and will raise questions.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| You are the one that added the "untraceable" requirement.
| revscat wrote:
| I mean I'm sure that's what the processors want people to
| believe. But even if those problems are difficult, they aren't
| insurmountable: I'm sure that libraries would be developed over
| time that would allow for these things to happen, securely and
| without error, much as the SSL libraries have developed over
| the decades.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| You have missed my point. Actually carrying out "Shift 10 US
| cents from Account2732 to Account8462" is trivial. A simple
| server could deal with 5 million such requests an hour.
|
| Now imagine you had to deal with $500000 moving around your
| system per hour.
|
| * How many of those are fraudulent?
|
| * How do you handle chargebacks? No one will use your system
| if you don't support them.
|
| * How do people move money in and (worse) out of their
| accounts? That means interacting with banking and a small
| army of accountants.
|
| * 99% of your customers will make $5 a month but 1% will take
| possibly millions, effectively becoming business partners. Do
| you police what they are doing? Are they laundering money?
| What do you do if they come to you asking for reduced rates?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The solution to this is a centralized model, where users top up
| their account with money. Then they get a button in their browser
| where they can click to pay for features in the current open tab
| or donate if the page is free.
|
| The top up could even be a recurring payment if the user wants.
| myfonj wrote:
| I was ruminating around this topic the other day and came to
| conclusion it is probably terribly missed opportunity for certain
| advertising company. Now it sounds super scary privacy-wise,
| smells monopol-y and overall may not happen anymore (I think),
| but consider:
|
| In situation when "all" users are being in fact "logged into"
| their service anyway, then features such as - pay to hide ads on
| this particular web (basically "overpay the advertiser"), - pay
| to keep ads and support the author of this particular web, - pay
| for extra features but remain anonymous for web's author, -
| provide data about yourself that the company gathered about
| yourself to the web's author, then it sounds like quite low-
| hanging fruit.
|
| Web authors would gain "auth" for free, integration would allow
| some "serverless" features for otherwise basic webs and so on. My
| initial idea was (probably akin to Brave(?)): - pay advertiser
| one centralized "ransom" to disable X ad impressions, so they can
| be distributed to websites authors as I go, just the same way as
| if I was exposed to a real ad.
|
| For favourite websites I could either top that by also allowing
| ads again, or paying them more, obviously with certain share
| ending up as a fee for that mediator.
|
| I guess there was/is some blatant obstacle that prevented this
| (perhaps advertisers would all bail out when the could be legally
| "overpaid" by users?) or it in fact had been implemented somehow
| in the past (distant enough I missed it completely), but it was a
| fun thought exercise anyway.
| jsnell wrote:
| > it in fact had been implemented somehow in the past
|
| Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
| julianeon wrote:
| I don't think that website really wants to call attention to
| the fact that it's serving you ads. They want it to be a
| seamless part of the Internet experience. Ideally, you wouldn't
| even notice the ads are ads. They don't want to support
| services that remind you that they're there, and are annoying.
| And if you want to monetize your site, they already have a
| preferred solution for you: sign up to show ads and get a check
| from them.
| imiric wrote:
| If I understand your proposal correctly, why would advertisers
| be needed at all if users had the ability to directly pay for
| the content they consume? You'd just be giving adtech even more
| power over the user experience, something that adtech always
| prioritizes, right? :) Users are not even customers to them,
| but a shiny gold rock they can extract value from.
|
| https://piped.video/watch?v=uSudkID3zJM
| ysofunny wrote:
| turned out it's the same API as VISA/MasterCard/every other
| credit card already provides
|
| see also (somewhat of a jump, but the same monetary system)
| FedNow
| nerdo wrote:
| What if money gets sent to websites that host hate speech?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Then they are saying something people want to hear, since it's
| all completely subjective anyway.
| teitoklien wrote:
| Why do you think anyone reserves the right to block funding to
| what gov determines as "hate speech". If someone wants to pay
| for hate speech they can anyways do it right now with
| donations.
|
| Ideas like this quickly devolves into gov marking any message
| that criticizes them as "Hate speech". Democracies like Japan,
| to an extent Singapore do that already, officially by law.
|
| Nations like Canada, India, Israel, Hungary, do it indirectly
| in unofficial but rampant ways.
|
| Speech is not a crime, listening to hate speech and starting to
| be unjustly hateful towards people is a crime.
|
| Punish the people who discriminate and act on the advice of
| hate speech. Do not punish speech, or else soon, you'll get
| confused when gov starts changing what "hate" means.
| pelorat wrote:
| Unfettered speech can lead to a cult following which, as we
| here in Europe know very well, can be extremely fucking
| dangerous. Which is precisely why some speech will land you
| in prison.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Germany had plenty of hate speech laws back when Hitler was
| elected. Still the question that remains here would be:
| which government gets to decide what's hate speech? Like
| even if we could have a payment webAPI that could "block"
| hate speech (not sure how that would be possible), do we go
| by the standards of the US? Europe? Russia? How would it
| work concretely?
|
| Trying to discuss the implications of hate speech for
| something that would be international is asinine imo, the
| term basically means everything and nothing (when used in a
| global context)
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| Yes, exactly. We wouldn't have had hitler if we'd had hate
| speech laws back in the days!11!1
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| > Speech is not a crime, listening to hate speech and
| starting to be unjustly hateful towards people is a crime.
|
| I'm confused. You start off talking about merrits of blocking
| payment related to hate speech (or lack thereof). And then
| you point to the danger of government deciding what "hate"
| means.
|
| That is all good and well, but to get back to the original
| issue - I'm wondering if you feel paying money to people
| spreading hate speech amounts to a crime or not?
| kerkeslager wrote:
| What happens now when money gets sent to websites that host
| hate speech?
|
| Twitter/X hosts plenty of hate speech and is the #6 site in the
| world according to Wikipedia currently.
| nerdo wrote:
| In the US the receiver gets unbanked without warning or
| explanation and permanently loses the ability to accept money
| through any service via systems like MATCH.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Right... so far this has happened to 3 sites in the top 10
| of this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-
| visited_websites
|
| 2 of the sites in the top 10 of that list have been
| criticized for hosting hate speech.
|
| The 3 sites which have had trouble receiving payments don't
| overlap with the 2 which have been criticized for hosting
| hate speech.
|
| And notably, many sites which are more hateful than those
| and have experienced deplatforming efforts, are still
| thriving, such as KiwiFarms and 4Chan. As it turns out,
| there are enough hateful people out there that they can
| manage technical/financial solutions to deplatforming
| efforts.
|
| Hate speech is becoming a go-to justification for policing
| the internet, but the reality is that those policies are
| more effective in harming user privacy and freedom than
| they are in curbing hate speech.
| nerdo wrote:
| Porn can be an understandable concern because of the
| amount of chargebacks it can create for processors,
| though the excessive chargebacks should be the rule not
| the porn. Hate speech they never tried to explain afaik.
| FWIW repealing fair banking[1] was immediate priority for
| Biden up there with fortifying elections[2].
|
| 1: https://reason.com/2021/02/11/biden-administration-
| suspends-...
|
| 2: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-
| bill/1
| kerkeslager wrote:
| You're not saying anything I don't already know, you're
| just changing the topic.
|
| My point is that when you said, "In the US the receiver
| gets unbanked without warning or explanation and
| permanently loses the ability to accept money through any
| service via systems like MATCH", that's flat wrong in the
| most prominent cases, and in less-prominent cases where
| deplatforming _has_ been applied it hasn 't been
| effective.
|
| It's absurd to try to block a direct payment model to
| _all_ content creators because you think it will be an
| effective payment model for hate speech, when hate
| speakers already have working payment models.
| peteforde wrote:
| I actually had Coil set up on a few of my sites, and I would
| occasionally get small micropayments showing up in my ledger. I
| was sad to see it fail, but I also profoundly agree with CC that
| for the web monetization API to actually work, it needs to
| distance itself from the crypto/grift ecosystem.
| EGreg wrote:
| I think the issue is that micropayments shouldn't be user-to-
| website, but rather website-to-website, with users being given
| some allowances via trustlines to spend.
|
| https://qbix.com/ecosystem
|
| Notice that almost none of the above is "Web3", but it can use
| Web3 (or other means) to do periodic settlements between
| websites.
| temp0826 wrote:
| Tangential but I've never seen a http 402 error (payment
| required), and I sort of wish it would be implemented somewhere.
| boucher wrote:
| Stripe sends 402 errors on failed payments (though their docs
| currently don't really label the error code correctly)
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| The basic premise is flawed. This needs to go higher up and
| regulated by countries and that api implemented by website
| authors.
| cyberax wrote:
| It was nothing but yet another crypto crap. So it died.
|
| The only successful model so far was Scroll, and it got bought up
| by Twitter and killed off. With Scroll you paid for a small
| monthly subscription and it got distributed between the sites
| that you visited.
| redder23 wrote:
| > I'm some big stan for Big Banks, but crypto was (is) just so
| absolutely riddled with scams and crime that I just can't
| anymore. Decoupling the Web Payments API and crypto is certainly
| the right move right now.
|
| Completely disagree with this. Fiat money is riddled with scams
| and crime more then cryto ever was and can be at this point.
| Because the world operates on fiat and. Arguing that giving
| central banks the Monopoly over this is a good thing is just
| stupid. But OF COURSE Google will not dare to bring anything
| cryto into the web browser. It could be the opportunity for
| something really revolutionary with a private coin connected into
| this.
|
| People with this mindset are just horrible gatekeepers. Cryto has
| so much scams BECAUSE its moving fast and its easy to trick
| people who are after fast money. Its a sign that crypto actually
| works and is valuable!
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Your argument _almost_ sounded cohesive, and I'm a proponent of
| crypto.
|
| Handshake has an improvement proposal called HIP-0002[1] that
| utilizes the .well-known directory on your domain's server to
| enable direct payments. You payment address looks like this:
| https://<domain>/.well-known/wallets/SYMBOL.
|
| You could even utilize IBAN to send to fiat like so:
| https://example/.well-known/wallets/USD.
|
| Of course, you'd need do a bit of legwork to implement non-
| crypto support.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/handshake-
| org/HIPs/blob/master/HIP-0002.m...
| Sargos wrote:
| The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) provides this functionality
| in a standard protocol. You can associate Microsoft.com with
| an ETH, BTC, SOL, etc address. GoDaddy yesterday actually
| integrated this in a no-gas free manner
| [https://aboutus.godaddy.net/newsroom/company-news/news-
| detai...]. Other DNS providers will likely follow suite over
| the next few years.
|
| Bonus, most web3 tooling already supports ENS so no jumping
| through hoops most of the time.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| If there was a one-click button in my browser to send $1 to an
| article author or publisher, I'd be spending a fortune. As it is
| I'm blocking ads and avoiding lock-in subscriptions like the
| plague.
| efitz wrote:
| A paid web could eliminate the ad ecosystem and all its toxicity
| (surveillance technology, etc.)
|
| I don't see any solution that was based on customer goodwill
| ("that was cool, here's $1") as something that there is much
| demand for.
|
| What we need is a browser-mitigated micropayment ecosystem. Maybe
| browser vendors could come up with a standard where you can
| "charge up" your account like a prepaid phone card, and then when
| you browse to a URL you get the option of an ad-ful experience
| like today or a micropayment option, e.g. "nytimes.com requires a
| subscription or a $0.50 payment to view this page OK/Cancel".
| Micropayments would avoid the fee overload of the credit card
| companies and your browser could display your balance in the
| toolbar. The server could be provided with a cryptographically
| signed receipt and there could be a periodic reconciliation.
|
| Note that there is no need for the complexity of a blockchain
| anywhere in this; IMO a blockchain just complexifies the solution
| and turns off people who don't trust cryptocurrencies.
| bakugo wrote:
| > A paid web could eliminate the ad ecosystem and all its
| toxicity (surveillance technology, etc.)
|
| I don't know how anyone can still live under this delusion when
| we're currently seeing multiple paid streaming services putting
| ads on their paid plans that were advertised as ad-free.
|
| Corporations will never be happy with the profit they're
| making. If they can make you pay AND show you ads, they will.
| efitz wrote:
| OK fair enough.
|
| As an aside, I don't think that's greed, I think it's
| perverse incentives - e.g. if a VP wants that big stock bonus
| next year, they have to figure out how to cause x% revenue
| growth, rinse and repeat. Sooner or later you hit market
| saturation and have exhausted all the easy, user-friendly
| solutions.
| ertian wrote:
| That's why it has to be lightweight. The thing that would
| drive prices down and keep ads at bay is competition. Since
| setting up a new streaming service is difficult-bordering-on-
| impossible, the players are protected from competition and
| can squeeze their customers. In other markets, if you had a
| lightweight payment system that isn't just a component of a
| walled garden (ala Medium or YouTube), you could see actual
| competition. Then, if some player started showing ads or
| raising prices, people could just up and move elsewhere.
|
| Imagine the early internet if we didn't have HTTP & HTML. It
| would have been a bunch of specialized AOL- or CompuServ-type
| walled-garden services, each of which could have wrung their
| customers dry. That's the world we ended up with in
| streaming. But the WWW doesn't have a mechanism for simple
| payments, so payment infrastructure can be used to lure and
| trap content creators. That's why we need a simple,
| lightweight, portable and open payment mechanism, to
| complement open web protocols.
| emmo wrote:
| Sorry, slightly tangential, but haven't we seen streaming
| services get progressively _worse_ as more competition has
| entered the space? Netflix was great when they were pretty
| much the only place in town; now it 's a fragmented
| disaster of services that have to squeeze harder and harder
| to keep things viable.
| imiric wrote:
| > Maybe browser vendors could come up with a standard where you
| can "charge up" your account like a prepaid phone card
|
| This will, sadly, never happen. When an adtech giant controls
| not only the world's most popular web browser, but also has
| major power in directing the future of the web itself, there's
| no scenario where they would voluntarily align against their
| own business interests.
|
| Brave actually has a browser that does what you say, but it
| will never gain major adoption, either from web users or sites.
| Course correction of a ship that has sailed long ago, and is
| run by people who benefit from its current direction, will
| never happen.
| luhn wrote:
| Presumably the browser would take a fee for facilitating the
| transaction, which could replace any lost ad revenue.
|
| And imo most websites would double dip: Have paid content
| _and_ advertising. You already see that for online newspaper
| /magazine subscriptions. If Google is on both sides of that,
| that's extra revenue for them.
|
| I agree that it'll never happen, but moreso because a lack
| imagination and willpower from Google.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It isn't that surprising that Google isn't bringing us to the
| post-ad web, but I'm surprised Apple isn't. The idea of an
| app or something asking the OS for a payment, and then the
| user trusting the OS to handle the details behind the scenes
| is already conventional on iOS, right?
|
| They already have a nice way of doing subscriptions to
| podcasts too. So it isn't like Apple is totally allergic to
| giving content providers with a way to offer their users
| premium services. It just hasn't happened for websites for
| some reason.
| efitz wrote:
| The problem is while credit card processors want 2-4% with
| a minimum, Apple and Google would want 30% - their App
| Store rates. So expecting Apple to do it is a nonstarter.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm not sure that is the problem really. 70% of something
| is still better than 100% of nothing after all.
|
| Something that looks a lot more compelling which came up
| in some comments here is that KYC regulations can be a
| headache for payment processors. Maybe nobody wants to
| deal with them for the not-so-lucrative 10c per website
| view market.
| fragmede wrote:
| Unfortunately, the Visa Mastercard duopoly charges fees which
| make this impractical, which means that via a cryptocurrency is
| how this would be implemented given today's technology.
| ozr wrote:
| This is why you'd 'charge up' some prepaid store.
| striking wrote:
| Or you could start off with macropayments and make
| micropayments possible later. Letting perfect be the enemy of
| the good is how we got here.
| didntcheck wrote:
| Not to mention then taking on the role of judge, jury, and
| executioner on who is allowed to receive money. That's really
| not healthy for a free society
| foobiekr wrote:
| The problem with micropayments has ALWAYS been malicious
| actors. It will ALWAYS be malicious actors. This is not a
| technical problem but a problem with the whole concept that is
| structurally inseparable.
| ace2358 wrote:
| The problem with _Ads on the web_ has ALWAYS been malicious
| actors. It will ALWAYS be malicious actors. This is not a
| technical problem but a problem with the whole concept that
| is structurally inseparable.
|
| Hmmm
| didntcheck wrote:
| > A paid web could eliminate the ad ecosystem and all its
| toxicity (surveillance technology, etc.)
|
| It could, but we've now seen the absolute vitriol levelled at
| sites who dare to ask for a bit of money in return for content,
| and the lengths people will go to to avoid paying then make up
| some excuse to justify it. It's funny how a common excuse for
| ad blocking used to be "I'd pay for content if there was an
| option", yet you don't hear that so often now that many sites
| do in fact offer that option
| Spivak wrote:
| Because it's so annoying. You read for two seconds and then
|
| LOOK AT THIS PUPPY. HE CRIES WHEN YOU DON'T GIVE US MONEY.
| YOU DON'T WANT TO MAKE HIM SAD DO YOU?!
|
| [X] BE A GOOD PERSON AND GIVE US MONEY
|
| [_] I ENJOY BEING A DRAIN ON SOCIETY, ANNOY ME AGAIN TOMORROW
|
| And you can't just give them a dollar to get them to shut up.
| It's always $2.99/mo BEST VALUE (billed centennially
| $3588.00).
| tdeck wrote:
| ITT: Ideas that have been tried before that nobody used.
| ok123456 wrote:
| I remember people discussing embedding microtransactions as part
| of HTTP in the mid-90s.
|
| Cryptocurrencies get us a little closer, maybe. But we're
| ultimately still having the same discussions.
| solardev wrote:
| Contrarian opinion: As a regular consumer, I don't WANT a
| decentralized, anonymous currency. For users like me, crypto
| totally misses the point. I don't want digital cash that can't be
| traced. I'm not buying drugs or illegal shit.
|
| I want a _centralized_ , _safe_ way of sending small amounts of
| money to some content producers, microtransactions, etc., but
| with basic banking guarantees. Like being able to charge back a
| transaction if the merchant fails to deliver, or not being liable
| for fraudulent uses (as opposed to losing my entire wallet, oh
| well, too bad).
|
| Decentralized crypto actively hurts instead of helps my
| confidence in being able to conduct a safe, easy transaction
| online. One wrong move and I lose all my funds to some scammer.
| How is that even remotely enticing?
|
| Instead, I wish there was something as easy to use as a credit
| card, but without the exorbitant fees (for the merchant) and
| interests rates (for me). I just wish we had a financial
| organization like Visa/Mastercard but run as a nonprofit (or at
| least a credit union) so they can provide similar services with
| similar guarantees but just make less money on the returns.
|
| Services like Privacy.com kinda do that, but merchants still get
| dinged with the Visa fees, so it's not entirely practical for
| microtransactions. So so far the best thing I've found is still
| just using Google or Apple to temporarily hold transactions and
| batch process them at the end of a month. (Lyft also does
| something similar, I think, batching rides and tips until the end
| of the day or week or something).
| lostmsu wrote:
| IMHO, you don't quite understand what you are talking about.
| Your centralized requirement is entirely bogus. If participants
| wish so, they could use any of the cryptos to run a subnet with
| an external oracle/moderator. Or even just build moderation
| right into smart contracts.
| Devasta wrote:
| Everyone loves the cookie prompts, I'm sure they'll be only
| delighted when its nonstop begging for pennies on every single
| website.
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