[HN Gopher] How do I pay the publisher of a web page?
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How do I pay the publisher of a web page?
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 76 points
Date : 2024-12-02 18:49 UTC (7 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sethmlarson.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (sethmlarson.dev)
| zoezoezoezoe wrote:
| I think the way you support publishers is one of a few things
|
| * they list a patreon or librepay or whatever and you support
| them directly * They have ads and they ask you nicely to disable
| your adblocker (as long as they are unobtrusive I'm fine with
| this)
|
| I think that's really it, if publishers dont give you a clear way
| to support them, in my eyes, they are providing the service for
| free.
| rullelito wrote:
| But crypto..
| zoezoezoezoe wrote:
| if you want to me to send you crypto, put a BTC or,
| preferably, Monero address in the footer or whatever.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Some people don't want to be paid. They do things as a hobby and
| for fun. As soon as one is being paid there is a ned to publish
| more and good quality stuff, which turns a fun project into work.
| elashri wrote:
| That is sad reality. As an example, I wish Sabine Hossenfelder
| didn't have to leave academia. Her content (blog posts not
| videos) were one of the ways I kept up with development in
| theoretical physics. But now that she is a full time video
| content creator, she is under pressure to publish click bait
| and very questionable content. I understand that she is
| catering to the audience but this is one example why alignment
| of the incentives works. Before, she was earning her living as
| a working physicist so she did not have to cater to anyone
| actually and she produced very good content -with exceptions-
| for years.
| ghaff wrote:
| Avocations _can_ turn into a nice revenue stream if the stars
| align. But online content almost certainly requires that you
| really work at it and think about what you need to do to
| boost revenue in ways that might not happen organically.
| jasode wrote:
| _> , I wish Sabine Hossenfelder didn't have to leave
| academia. [...] I understand that she is catering to the
| audience but this is one example why alignment of the
| incentives works. Before, she was earning her living as a
| working physicist so she did not have to cater to anyone
| actually_
|
| But this obscures the fact that she was still _" catering to
| the audience"_ when working in academia as a paid physicist.
| She was just _placating a different audience_ and worked on
| topics she really didn 't think was groundbreaking just to
| keep the grant money rolling in. The misalignment of
| incentives just happened outside of Youtube.
|
| Deep link to her explanation:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8&t=4m37s
|
| A lot of viewers wish that "content creator" wasn't a thing
| and people just did Youtube for free as a hobby.
| Understandable. But what viewers don't realize is that it's
| also actually saying this: _" Please continue being unhappy
| in your crappy day job so you don't need to live off money
| from Youtube ads or sponsorships."_
| alpinisme wrote:
| Her personal motivations make total sense and this isn't a
| judgment of her, but your comment makes it sound a little
| like misaligned incentives just switched places, but the
| misaligned research incentives remain (and she doesn't do
| research professionally anymore) and now she introduced a
| new misalignment: the content creation business.
|
| It's totally fair that emotionally she was done with one
| and able better to continue work with the other, but
| removing the hobby element actually did remove one set of
| well aligned incentives and did not replace them with
| another.
| zusammen wrote:
| _Please continue being unhappy in your crappy day job so
| you don 't need to live off money from Youtube ads or
| sponsorships._
|
| The problem is that we shouldn't be a society where most
| day jobs are crappy and where we accept that because people
| who are "not entrepreneurial" deserve to suffer.
|
| We could have been all sorts of things. We chose _Office
| Space_ and then we chose influencer grift.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Not all day jobs need to be crap of course. I enjoy mine
| and I like to produce some content on the side.
|
| It's hard to get people to find it though due to the
| platforms all promoting professionals from which they earn
| more. But on the other hand I don't really care either.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > But what viewers don't realize is that it's also actually
| saying this: "Please continue being unhappy in your crappy
| day job so you don't need to live off money from Youtube
| ads or sponsorships."
|
| But the reverse is also true: Not for everybody being
| content creator is the dream job. Some like creating
| something once in a while, but otherwise enjoy their life
| and job.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Personally, I don't mind that "content creator" is a thing,
| but what irks me is that, at least in the Youtube I see,
| "content creator" is the ONLY thing.
|
| If I search for ANYTHING, I get a tutorial, or tips, or
| some clickbait like "I had no idea about this!" Every video
| is by someone whose job is Youtube. The giveaway is that
| all of them have custom thumbnails. Someone who just made a
| random video about something and posted on the free video
| platform wouldn't even have bothered getting a custom
| thumbnail for it. You can't find those videos, at all. At
| this point it wouldn't surprise me if a custom thumbnails
| was a requirement for the algorithm to consider your video
| even if it isn't spelled out anywhere.
| csixty4 wrote:
| Not just a custom thumbnail. It has to have the YouTube
| Face[1] too.
|
| 1. https://www.avclub.com/why-does-everyone-on-youtube-
| make-the...
| reticulan wrote:
| Even if we installed fully automated communism and nobody
| had to work crappy day jobs to feed themselves anymore, the
| inherent human drive for fame and approval of one's peers
| would probably still make people placate their audiences to
| an extent. It's probably just inescapable
| ghaff wrote:
| Agreed. If you don't think you'll bring in material revenue (by
| your standards), it's often not worth collecting any at all.
| troymc wrote:
| The web already has lots of options for people who don't want
| to be paid. That's not the problem!
|
| The problem is that there's no web-standard way for people who
| _do_ want to be paid to indicate how.
| dangus wrote:
| This also means that the people who want to be paid will tell
| you exactly how on their page. E.g., all the "buy me a coffee"
| links you can find on open source projects.
|
| The author of this article wants a special HTML meta property
| but we've already that solved: plain text and hyperlinks.
| hkdobrev wrote:
| humans.txt [1] could be an approach for this.
|
| [1]: https://humanstxt.org/
| rmccue wrote:
| > I have money and I have a URL, how do I send money to the
| publisher of that URL?
|
| This question could easily be "I have money and I have a person's
| name and address, how do I send money to them?"
|
| The only way to do this consistently would be to mail them
| physical cash, since there's no way to consistently send money
| electronically across the world (and you'd have a currency
| conversion problem too - if someone mailed me US$0.23, it's not
| worth exchanging it).
|
| Building micropayments infrastructure requires building broader
| financial infrastructure, not just adding a meta tag. This can
| use existing infrastructure to some extent, but it's a pretty big
| challenge.
|
| (For example, in Australia, you can send someone money if you
| have their email address (via PayID), so you could bootstrap that
| part - minus the international part.)
| ysavir wrote:
| I think the (not clearly stated) intention is for an automated
| way to detect the pubisher's explicitly preferred method of
| compensation. Which is a sensible request, since it can allow a
| browser button/extension that sends you there with the click of
| a button, rather than having to search the page (or a video)
| for a mention of it.
|
| Though in my experience, publishers and creators make it pretty
| easy to find that information, so the use of this tech would be
| very niche.
| kuschku wrote:
| > since there's no way to consistently send money
| electronically across the world
|
| In theory there'd be SWIFT, but that's too slow and expensive.
|
| The EU has the SEPA, but few other countries actually care
| about joining or replicating that success.
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| The EU is also working on a digital Euro [1] that is supposed
| to roll out to the whole EU and support digital payments
| without any fees. Let's see, if they succeed with that, but
| if they do it would be great.
|
| [1] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en
| .ht...
| m01 wrote:
| > "I have money and I have a person's name and address, how do
| I send money to them?"
|
| Send a cheque?
| Martinussen wrote:
| I don't know about other places, but here there's no bank
| that will turn that slip of paper into real money. I've never
| even seen a cheque or chequebook in person, it's almost
| exclusively mentioned by Americans (In my experience)
| baud147258 wrote:
| the last two payments I sent by cheque here in France got
| processed, one by the national electricity provider for
| about 50EUR and the second by an association/company (I'm
| not sure) for 200EUR. The last cheque I received, in 2021
| (my grandmother reimbursing me the gas refill I did on her
| car one week before she died), got processed for free by my
| bank.
|
| But I don't think the chequebook I have can be used to sent
| money to someone outside of France. And I only have a
| chequebook because that's how I have to pay my electricity
| bill.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >But I don't think the chequebook I have can be used to
| sent money to someone outside of France.
|
| I suspect if you sent me one, my credit union would
| figure out how to get me the money eventually.
| knorker wrote:
| I got a cheque for $5 once. It would have cost about $40 to
| cash it.
| lakomen wrote:
| Yeah but we're in the digital age and trying to make things
| better than they were
| chr15m wrote:
| Great idea.
| tekchip wrote:
| Isn't this the problem Brave browser set out to solve? It's just
| that they did it with cryptocurrency so everyone shunned it.
| https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
| carlosjobim wrote:
| No, they block legitimate ads on creator websites and then put
| their own ads in front and offer creators a cut. It's an
| outright racket and scam.
| jorvi wrote:
| It's so funny how the Brave haters will constantly outright
| lie just to get their point.
|
| > _Do Brave Ads replace ads on websites? What do Brave Ads
| look like?_
|
| > No, Brave Ads do not replace the ads that the Brave Browser
| blocks on web pages (like banner ads). You can find a list of
| Brave's ad formats here.
|
| > _What do Brave Ads look like?_
|
| > You can choose which ones you'd like to see: images on the
| new tab page, cards in your Brave News feed, push
| notifications, and others.
|
| Creators also don't get "a" cut. Brave gives 70% of earnings
| on ads to users, and those can then decide how much they
| reward to the creators of whatever content they consume.
|
| BAT being crypto is also nice because it automatically means
| you can just buy BAT directly and support sites without
| having to see a single ad or cumbersomely figure out how to
| somehow donate to each site/creator directly.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| From https://archive.is/W0k4j (an archive of a page on
| brave.com)
|
| > Step Two: Brave Replaces Ads We recognize that ads pay
| for most of our web content. Ads are not going away. So we
| replace the bad ads with Brave Ads, which we use to pay
| publishers and users.
|
| Maybe they don't replace ads now but they seem to have done
| it in the past. Or at least talked about doing it.
| jorvi wrote:
| (Other commenter already pointed it out).
|
| Really man, drop the crusade. Look at Brave their tech
| blog (Project Sugarcoat for example, something directly
| meant to make page ad hiding more cosmetically pleasing).
| Or the fact that their defaults are more private than
| Firefox its defaults.
|
| For the weird missteps they did in the past (appending
| their affiliate link on crypto sites and one other
| scandal that eludes me), they're a really good org /
| product now.
| rpdillon wrote:
| That page is eight years old; this is a very early
| iteration of the idea, if I recall correctly.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I don't hate Brave, but blocking legitimate ads and then
| putting in their own ads is a racket.
|
| > Creators also don't get "a" cut. Brave gives 70% of
| earnings on ads to users, and those can then decide how
| much they reward to the creators of whatever content they
| consume.
|
| Ie, creators are offered a cut - in a roundabout way.
| jorvi wrote:
| It is not a racket when the website owners are mass-
| injecting trackers and security risks into my browser.
| Some egregious pages have 700+ (!!) ad partners.
|
| Hell, it is the opposite of a racket because other
| adblockers / adblocking people pay zilch. _That_ is the
| racket. Any BAT user is a +70% gain.
|
| I'll pay you. I won't compromise my devices for you.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| OK, even if we say that the ads from the website creator
| are not legitimate, it doesn't make the ads from brave
| legitimate.
|
| Try to think about this from the perspective of another
| person instead of yourself.
|
| Or think about this comparison: I own a bar where I sell
| drinks to the general public. Then some businessman comes
| in, throws out my bar staff and starts selling his own
| drinks to the guests, and offers 10% of revenue to me. Is
| that fair and honest? Who was the legitimate drink seller
| and who wasn't? Now you can say that alcohol is bad for
| your health and shouldn't be sold at all, and that you as
| a customer don't care. But it is very clear who is legit
| and who isn't.
| jorvi wrote:
| > Or think about this comparison: I own a bar where I
| sell drinks to the general public. Then some businessman
| comes in, throws out my bar staff and starts selling his
| own drinks to the guests, and offers 10% of revenue to
| me.
|
| Which is a completely wrong comparison.
|
| - You own a bar (website) and serve drinks (ads) to the
| general public.
|
| - A large subset of your visitors decides they like the
| atmosphere of the bar, but whenever you try to sell them
| a drink, they refuse to order one. Alcohol is bad, they
| claim, and since you aren't offering non-alcoholic
| drinks, they've decided its moral to not order anything
| and enjoy your bar for free.
|
| - An enterprising individual (Brave) recognizes the
| plight of both the bar owner and the customers. They
| surreptitiously serve non-alcoholic drinks (clean ads) to
| the bothersome customers.
|
| - They sell the drinks at 70% discount, and strongly
| suggest to the customers to generously tip with the net
| gain of money, to ensure the continued existence of the
| bar they enjoy so much.
|
| Brave isn't turning non-adblocking visitors into
| adblocking visitors. Its converting adblocking visitors
| into revenue-generating visitors.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Like I suspected, you unfortunately don't have the
| capacity to see things from another persons perspective.
| That's normal, that's how most people are. The only way
| you could understand would be if you yourself had to make
| a living from ad-supported creativity. Until then, you
| will not be capable of understanding. Or you've
| effectively used sophistry enough in life to make it a
| habit. But everybody sees through it.
|
| This is the reason why corruption is so rampant in the
| world. People skip the line to get healthcare by bribing
| an official. They think it's right, because they only
| look for their own interests. The bribe-taking official
| is an "enterprising individual".
|
| The creators of Brave skillfully use this egotism of
| users to make them accept and even defend their illicit
| practices. "Oh, I get free money, then I like it". If
| they were honest about their business they would
| distribute their ad money to creators without going
| through the user, but which user would then enable their
| illicit ads?
|
| Blocking ads as a user is completely different. Nobody
| makes money by blocking ads for themselves.
| rglullis wrote:
| There is nothing "legitimate" about ads that track me and
| that I would block anyway.
| lancesells wrote:
| I look at Brave as another business looking to take their
| cut as a middleman between users and creators. It's an ad
| network that takes the 30% cut like Apple does to apps
| making over $1M.
|
| I would much rather that creators who want to make money
| decide what they want to sell, and how they want to sell
| it. The web doesn't need a crypto tip jar layer.
| rglullis wrote:
| Brave does not take 30% of creators that receive BAT in
| the rewards program.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Cryptocurrency might have been ok, but this is their own custom
| currency. In other words, they're paying people in scrip. They
| shouldn't be surprised that people don't like that.
| rglullis wrote:
| They started with BTC. Their token only came after they got
| the feedback that people were not interested in parting ways
| with their own crypto.
| mminer237 wrote:
| It/Uphold can automatically convert it to USD. You don't have
| to concern yourself with the intermediary form at all.
| kevinsync wrote:
| I (rather diligently) accepted 10 ads an hour on Brave for
| about a year, received BAT regularly, and immediately
| converted it to BTC upon receipt. Eventually my BAT
| payments stopped coming (I somehow got algorithmically
| blocked and didn't bother opening a ticket with Brave for
| almost another year), but I withdrew the BTC from Uphold
| and it's worth about $450 now. That's like being paid
| almost 40 bucks a month to just go about your business
| while browsing the web!
|
| IMO this is mind-blowing, tangible proof that micropayments
| in return for my time and attention works. Imagine a world
| where our attention is actually valued and rewarded, where
| all people receive income through many various streams as
| they navigate the physical and digital worlds. We can argue
| back and forth about pros/cons/ethics of arriving at my
| anecdotal valuation (bitcoin, crypto, etc), but that's not
| my point -- the point is that this type of system actually
| does function, and in theory could raise tides enough
| across the world to lift all boats in really positive ways.
|
| Tangential, but Michael Saylor has also opined about how
| this type of micro-payment / micro-staking could go in the
| opposite direction, using smart contracts and Lightning to
| escrow fractional tokens to participate in social media or
| even prevent DDOS attacks if woven into the underlying
| networking appropriately. Obviously I'm skeptical about
| certain latencies that would be added but, conceptually,
| forcing people to have SOME skin in the game and doing it
| in an invisible, frictionless way is quite intriguing.
|
| Anyways, just one man's journey from Milan to Minsk by way
| of Brave and BAT lol
| quaintdev wrote:
| Browsers should have pay/tip button to support website owners.
| And browser vendors should handle the payment. This would limit
| ads and tracking as well which aligns with Mozilla goals. Can I
| pitch this idea to Mozilla somewhere?
| nkrisc wrote:
| Who pays for that service?
| quaintdev wrote:
| The browser vendors can earn small commission from each
| transaction. This ensures steady stream of income for them as
| well. They have created a piece of public infrastructure that
| is absolutely critical they should earn from direct payments
| of their users instead of relying on single entity who may or
| may not have their best interest at heart.
| nkrisc wrote:
| So if this became popular enough, then in a sense browser
| makers would be gatekeeping who's allowed to receive
| payments. Website owners could of course still show ads or
| independently earn money other ways, but wouldn't browser
| makers then be incentivized to tailor the browser
| experience to favor sites that earn them a commission?
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| But they don't have the infrastructure to reveive the payments
| internationally,(apple and google do) but there wouldn't be a
| conflict of interest for example google with their ads
| businesses and imagine apple charges 30% for every transaction
| like the do on the apple store
| EricRiese wrote:
| You're describing Brave
| rchaud wrote:
| Browser companies can't handle payments unless they decide to
| pivot to becoming a payments company like PayPal.
|
| The API and standards talk in the article is putting the cart
| before the horse. There is currently no way to send money peer-
| to-peer without an intermediary that can handle the bank
| transfer, and intermediaries tend to charge a lot for this
| service.
|
| Because of this, the best options are to add a PayPal or Ko-fi
| button on the site, with the understanding that the publisher
| won't be receiving the full amount you send.
| noman-land wrote:
| I know this forum hates crypto but this is very doable with ENS.
| You can both point to content via an ENS domain and also link to
| a wallet address.
|
| https://ens.domains/
|
| Come to think of it you can do this with normal DNS by just
| setting a wallet address in a TXT record but that's not
| integrated into anything. It's just text.
| sneak wrote:
| We don't hate crypto, there are just a loud bunch that like to
| complain about other people using it. Lots of us are building
| and using daily.
| rchaud wrote:
| There's a difference between 'doable' and 'viable'.
|
| People want to be paid in cash. Not some internet money that
| has to go through an exchange to be converted into actual cash.
| If ENS was so great, people would already be using it.
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| I don't see much of a point. If someone makes a website and wants
| people to be able to send money to them for that, a link on that
| website should work just fine. I'm failing to see the benefit of
| a HTML meta tag related to that.
|
| > I wish I could click a button to easily send a "tip" to someone
| who created something I enjoy or to browse other options for
| supporting them.
|
| I believe most people invested in getting donations already have
| a similar button on their page.
| Drakim wrote:
| Plus, to me it seems like this could be ripe for abuse. If you
| are reading a great post on something, how do you know if the
| HTML meta tag actually would go to the author of that post, or
| the hosting platform instead (who sneakily puts in that meta
| tag on all their hosted content).
|
| With an explicit button, you have to read and acknowledge who
| you are giving to.
| butz wrote:
| Worst part about such small payments is that intermediary, that
| will process the payment, might get 50% or even more of said
| payment, leaving not much to receiver. If someone really wants
| support, they will either have a link to "merch" store, or links
| to Patreon, Kofi or some other platform. Worth noting, that
| content creators usually seek recurring payments, not a single
| tip.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Worst part about such small payments is that intermediary,
| that will process the payment, might get 50% or even more of
| said payment, leaving not much to receiver.
|
| Yeah you essentially need a system has an internal balance that
| would then let you send and receive micropayments and only
| convert them to cash when the balance is large enough that the
| processing fee makes sense.
| paxys wrote:
| The open web is a platform for freeloaders. Since day 1 the
| expectation is that whatever is accessible will be free. And
| whatever isn't will be made free by whatever means necessary. Web
| content creators/publishers don't bother with micropayments
| infrastructure because no one is going to pay. Ads are a proven
| business model and they are going to stay.
|
| There are other platforms where micropayments have in fact been
| solved - see Twitch, OnlyFans, YouTube, Substack, Patreon, IAP on
| iOS/Android, WeChat, Gaming. That's where the innovation in the
| space will be because that's where the money is.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| > That's where the innovation in the space will be because
| that's where the money is.
|
| Agreed completely, assuming that "innovation" is a euphemism
| for "grifting". These platforms are completely dominated by
| rent-seeking and borderline fraudulent garbage. I'd take a web
| ring over the front page of the App Store in any context.
| QuiDortDine wrote:
| "Solved" in the sense that Twitch gets 50% of the payment. This
| is an outrageous cut.
| alan wrote:
| 7 years ago I tried to start a project to allow customers to
| pay through the ad networks. IE rather than seeing ads, you'd
| see something saying how much you were providing to the web
| page owner. I've so far been unable to actually build it
| though.
| jimmydoe wrote:
| Advertisers want more scale; consumers want no ads. You are
| in the middle to please no one.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| This is the one thing that I actually thought cryptocurrency
| would help - getting small adhoc payments out from under the
| bootheel of Mastercard and Visa, and especially for international
| transfers that cross between, say, the MC/Visa duopoly regions
| into other ones like the Asian ecosystems.
|
| But instead it's slow, inconsistent, inconvenient, balkanised,
| dripping with scams, criminals and bad actors and still involves
| substantial transfer fees and volatility on top of that. At this
| point it's a market for lemons: any new cryptocurrency venture is
| almost entirely indistinguishable from something that already
| ended up being at best a non-starter, but often just a scam.
|
| As a vehicle for speculation, arbitrage and scams, it's a
| masterpiece. As a _currency_ (you know, like in the name), it 's,
| put lightly, not great, especially if you live in the developed
| world.
| interactivecode wrote:
| Fully agree. We should just settle on a single internet
| currency thats fast, interoperable and not a market for
| speculation.
|
| Hmm perhaps we don't need more types of currency? Perhaps it's
| better to push deep integration of modern banking changes like
| psd2, psd3 and others. Across the whole internet. So everyone
| can just do regular payments with their own bank in a safe and
| protected way, and hopefully with less intermediaries.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Yes, indeed. The thing is MasterCard, Visa and all their
| foreign counterparts actually _do_ provide a lot of value in
| keeping the ecosystem relatively safe for normal people. When
| I see a contactless touch point in a shop, I know it 's
| almost certainly legit. If they didn't, people would just use
| cash.
|
| So there's probably always going to be some kind of transfer
| or network access fee. It's just that it very much not a
| competitive market place.
|
| Opening up the system to competition, but still within a
| regulatory framework that prevents it degenerating into a
| Wild West hotbed of scamming does seem like a good way to
| achieve some of that. Certainly, the vaunted "free market"
| should be ensuring that the price of a transaction is pretty
| close to the cost of providing it, and it clearly is not
| currently.
|
| The problem, or feature, depending on who you ask, is that
| basically only governments can provide that kind of
| regulation. Which will always then inject a level of
| geopolitics into things like which countries you're allowed
| to buy your blog posts from. And for governments who listen
| to business over citizens also leads to capture and
| subversion of the system.
| micropayer wrote:
| The problem is https://xkcd.com/927/, but one specific way it
| could work is via solana with the phantom wallet, which I've
| documented at http://micropayments.fyi.
|
| It's currently a horribly complex setup, but the rails
| _exist_ , it just needs a shitton of dev work to make the UX
| better, and then adoption.
| klntsky wrote:
| Read about chain abstraction and account abstraction for EVM.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _and not a market for speculation._
|
| That's the bit I don't know how to solve. I have a feeling it
| may not be solvable in principle, only mitigated if we could
| get trading on the thing turned into a crime. You'd still
| have black market trading, but hopefully much more limited in
| its impact on ordinary use.
| radicalriddler wrote:
| Even modern currency isn't free of being a market for
| speculation.
|
| It's not as extreme as cryptocurrency, but forex trading is
| a thing, and honestly the sways of USD to other currencies
| are meaninful enough to take into consideration when moving
| money internationally.
| noch wrote:
| > We should just settle on a single internet currency that's
| fast, interoperable and not a market for speculation.
|
| With respect to crypto, a "single currency" shouldn't be a
| prerequisite because, with a $3T mcap, crypto has plenty of
| liquidity across centralized and decentralized exchanges to
| allow anyone to convert between any currencies they have on-
| chain. (Uniswap for instance has $1B - $6B volume transacted
| daily.)
|
| Declaring a single currency would also be antithetical to
| free market competition for currencies.
|
| > interoperable
|
| If "interoperable" means you can use the currency anywhere,
| then I think liquidity for currency conversion is sufficient.
|
| That said, we already have dollar (USD) stablecoins[^0] on
| all major L1, L2, rollup blockchains. Because they are pegged
| to the U.S. dollar, they also meet your requirement that the
| currency not be speculative (Strictly speaking, the U.S.
| dollar is inflationary and therefore is subject to
| speculation, but perhaps I'm being pedantic.).
|
| > fast
|
| Rollups[^3] provide fast transactions. These use various
| cryptographic protocols to verifiably and quickly batch and
| compress user operations on-chain.
|
| > deep integration of modern banking changes
|
| "Deep integration of modern banking" sounds good but modern
| banking creates a choke point[^1] where users can be targeted
| and denied services. Ultimately we would want to be able to
| stay on-chain for all payments and not need off-ramps which
| leave users open to debanking[^2] or surveillance. Crypto is
| permissionless and, with little effort from the user,
| censorship resistant.
|
| ---
|
| [^0]: https://castleisland.vc/writing/stablecoins-the-
| emerging-mar... "Stablecoins - tokenized representations of
| fiat currencies circulating on blockchains 1 - are
| unambiguously the "killer app" of crypto so far. There are
| over $160 billion worth of stablecoins in circulation today,
| up from single digit billions as recently as 2020. Over 20
| million addresses make a stablecoin transaction on public
| blockchains every month. And in the first half of 2024,
| stablecoins settled (according to our adjusted estimates)
| over $2.6 trillion dollars worth of value. Stablecoins offer
| considerable advantages relative to existing payment systems,
| including native programmability, strong auditability
| properties, fast settlement, the ability to self-custody, and
| native interoperability"
|
| [^1]: https://www.piratewires.com/p/2023-banking-crisis
| "Beginning in 2013, Choke Point was a scheme which sought to
| marginalize specific industries operating legally -- not
| through lawmaking, but by applying pressure via the banking
| sector."
|
| [^2]: https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1862950205252874552
| "[T]he FDIC and other financial regulators had secretly
| imposed a 15 percent cap on deposits at banks for crypto-
| related firms."
|
| [^3]: https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Fully agree. We should just settle on a single internet
| currency thats fast, interoperable and not a market for
| speculation.
|
| I wish we would all agree to just go back to mostly using
| paypal (or venmo, zelle, etc) for online shit and leave
| crypto out of it. The only advantage to crypto is anonymity,
| and possibly the ability to send smaller fractional payments,
| but honestly the existing non-crypto solutions could come up
| with solutions to those things.
| cxr wrote:
| Keybase's integration with XLM was pretty great. It's too bad
| the community revolted for reasons that amounted to a form of
| begging the question about the things you list here.
| havnagiggle wrote:
| There are options, however just saying anything is going to get
| you labeled as a shill heh. You're right that any new crypto is
| indistinguishable, but that is part of the risk in trying to
| outlast the rest. Some crypto that have survived should be
| worth more for hitting some of these milestones, but
| unfortunately that still isn't reflected in the top 10/20/100
| because people are so desperate they throw cash at anything
| that moves.
|
| The convenience of the scamming is partly why it _is_ a
| solution to this problem: people can transfer value as fast as
| they desire, and it works. There is also just a problem off on
| and off-boarding where you get hit by Visa/Mastercard level of
| fees. So is it really solving the problem at that point?
|
| One area I would like to see is some kind of governed/regulated
| profit sharing. Basically giving your votes to
| content/production and this puts it on the books for some
| fraction of payment. You get X shares to distribute to content
| regularly. It would also be helpful if our government would
| provide support for independent producers where there's a clear
| trackable benefit (e.g. open source libraries that a ton of
| people rely on and a business can say "yes I need this, help
| them keep doing it").
| echelon wrote:
| I have a friend claiming bitcoin is a "store of value, tool for
| the de-banked (politically right), hedge against the rapidly
| inflating dollar, more valuable than gold" (paraphrasing). He
| further claims that "bitcoin can't be faked like 'uninspected'
| gold reserves" that are supposedly just "painted iron ingots".
|
| I want to scream. This is a speculative investment with more
| bad actors involved than the SEC has investigated throughout
| its entire history.
|
| I hate these bitcoin boom cycles. It's like all the lessons
| learned immediately get forgotten.
|
| Him: "But this time is different. Last time the Democrats were
| holding it back. Trump is going to make a strategic crypto
| reserve. Trump and his allies are all pro-crypto. The
| Democratic party was trying to regulate it away."
|
| I guess this will be the next lesson.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Notice he isn't claiming its a currency, even if we take all
| the claims at face value. Apparently he is not alone though
| as the value has climbed 33% since the election. I had not
| even heard of this fantasy of a TrUmP crypto boom.
| jarsin wrote:
| Trump just promoted David Sacks to the position of
| Crypto/AI Czar. You can't make this up.
|
| I will give Trump credit for putting AI and Crypto in the
| same department though.
| m348e912 wrote:
| He might be right in some ways about Bitcoin but he fails to
| take into account that the price of Bitcoin may be inflated
| by Tether, a stable coin traded in large numbers for Bitcoin.
| New tether is minted by the billions, and has questionable
| auditing and oversight, and is used to buy Bitcoin on the
| open market.
|
| There a couple of ways that the price of Bitcoin could drop
| precipitously and the unraveling of Tether is one of them.
| hugs wrote:
| I think this is a good application for the Lightning Network,
| specifically if people use a Lightning Address where the
| address uses the same domain as the URL of the webpage. There
| are a lot of people in Lightning world who also hate scams (and
| any other crypto coin for that matter) and just want to make
| this work as money (and already have).
|
| A real-world example where Lightning Network is already working
| is Nostr. It's not hard to get a Nostr client with built-in
| Lightning functionality (like Primal) and start "zapping" tiny
| payments to others.
|
| I'm not affiliated with Primal, just a fan, and a developer who
| wants to see a system like this work.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Don't forget the l402 stuff!
| atoav wrote:
| I am not sure if people are aware, but with SEPA you can
| transfer money to other peoples account without any fee
| (depending on where you live of course).
|
| Only downside is that you have to reveal your account data
| online.
|
| I know a guy who runs an online shop with a single product and
| it is a static website saying "Transfer 12 EUR to the following
| bank account with the following subject and your name/address"
| -- apparently this works quite well since the mid 90s. The
| website still uses frames for its layout and has animated gif
| flags.
| unilynx wrote:
| SEPA is not free - it's just often free for consumers (and
| likely until your bank considers your usage patterns to be
| 'too business like')
|
| and it can't be free.. even though the systems might have no
| further marginal cost per transaction, banks still need to do
| anti-money laundering checks, and someone's gotta pay for
| that
| klntsky wrote:
| Have you seen the fees on ethereum L2s? Your opinion may be
| slightly outdated, I wouldn't consider a single digit number of
| cents a large fee
| michaelt wrote:
| I buy a magazine where $3 gets you 114 short articles, each
| about 1/3rd of a page. So I'm paying 2.6C/ per article, if I
| read every single one.
|
| Some people dream of 'micropayments' at a similar price
| point. Being able to buy a single article for about 2.6C/.
| ghaff wrote:
| And that's probably around the price point that people mean
| by micropayments. It's not $1 per article. And that's
| probably an exhausting amount of mental transaction costs
| as Clay Shirky observed ages ago and probably not a
| sustainable revenue stream for producers.
|
| For consumers, a subscription model seems to fit the bill
| for most people but some media are apparently better suited
| than others.
| cadamsau wrote:
| True, but that's made possible by the aggregator (the
| publisher who's printed the magazine)
|
| This dream of eliminating that middle-person is still a
| dream.
| Retric wrote:
| My dream is for ~5c micropayments, where the money goes
| either goes to the publisher or a charity depending on if I
| liked it after the fact. Basically fighting low quality
| clickbait without the publisher being able to tell which I
| specifically did.
| daveguy wrote:
| Single digit cents is not a large fee, but blockchain fees
| are dynamic. And the more traffic, the more expensive. I
| would not appreciate if that 2.6 cents suddenly became $2.60.
| Also the maximum number of transactions for Bitcoin (not sure
| etherium) is about 10/s. Processors like Visa and MasterCard
| process thousands of transactions per second. And if every
| article read is another transaction that would need at least
| 1-2 orders of magnitude more transactions. The way I see it,
| blockchain is a broken model for micro payments. If I am
| missing something, please let me know.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| Yes. Solana has been sub-cent for it's entire lifespan. So
| have other blockchains. They're not going to ever be above
| a cent by design.
| ghaff wrote:
| There were probably some useful concepts and possibilities in
| the blockchain space but they became so intermixed with the
| crypto-scum that the whole area became toxic.
| ghaff wrote:
| And one effect of that is that the energy/investment level of
| legit promoters of blockchain has gone down while other
| promoters have stayed the same or increased.
| shark_laser wrote:
| Check out Lightning Network, Nostr, and Zaps.
| sneak wrote:
| This is a relatively straightforward problem to solve. There is a
| "payment required" HTTP status code and lightning network
| micropayments are very easy to set up and use.
|
| The problem is that payments that cannot be centrally surveilled
| and centrally vetoed (without burden of proof of probable cause,
| usually) are actually illegal to implement.
|
| To do anything like this requires strong ID and KYC for payer and
| recipient and that isn't what bare URLs and the web are about.
|
| All of the cool applications of online payments that would spread
| quickly and efficiently are illegal.
|
| It's truly sad.
| csumtin wrote:
| I think another problem with micropayments is competing with
| free is hard. Say you have the best lightning paywall with an
| amazing UX where it's super easy and automatic to pay a creator
| a few sats. Most people assume the problem is user's don't want
| to pay but it's actually publishers who won't put up
| micropayments on their content. Here's why: for a big
| publisher, adding a lightning paywall is a big risk which may
| lose them their audience. For small publisher's, they don't
| care if 10 people send 10 sats, all they care about is becoming
| a big publisher
| knorker wrote:
| > it's actually publishers who won't put up micropayments on
| their content
|
| Won't, or can't?
|
| Do you have a good article about how to set up a paywall or
| tip jar for small transactions, with a clear description of
| what percentage goes to middlemen and (mainly in the case of
| proof of work) how much externality cost it incurs?
|
| I would like to be able to pay $cents or even $dollar for
| instant access to an article, but only if X% actually goes to
| the recipient (I don't know what X is, yet), and I would lead
| by example on my own content. (though most likely tip jar,
| not paywall)
| waxpancake wrote:
| The Web Monetization API was another recent effort to try to make
| this, the latest of many attempts. See previous HN discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39274455
|
| My guess is that 1. there's virtually no demand from potential
| supporters for a more convenient way to pay creators than
| existing payment/subscription apps, and 2. relatively few
| creators have direct control over their own internet presence
| anymore, so any solution that requires modifying a web page is
| dead in the water.
|
| Any new attempt to pay creators that doesn't factor these two
| realities in will likely fail, because it just makes things
| harder than existing solutions.
| uxhacker wrote:
| Is this the same issue with content creators being reimbursed for
| generative ai?
| montenegrohugo wrote:
| Honestly this is one of the main usecases of crypto, in my
| opinion. And it's only in 2024 where the transaction costs are
| cheap enough that it's worth it.
|
| Still, fragmentation of crypto makes the whole experience shitty
| - but we've been working on this to fix that:
| https://docs.peanut.to/checkout-api
| try_the_bass wrote:
| Crypto's obsession with public blockchains and the requisite
| fees to make this work prevent this from being a viable
| solution.
|
| Those transaction costs you're talking about are still a couple
| orders of magnitude (or more!) too high for this to be a viable
| solution for these kinds of micro payments.
|
| This doesn't even get into the necessary transaction throughput
| that's still it's own unsolved problem
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Honestly this is one of the main usecases of crypto, in my
| opinion.
|
| The problem is that crypto doesn't provide anything that non-
| crypto shouldn't wouldn't also provide in a cheaper and easier
| to implement way.
| rhplus wrote:
| We're three decades in with the web and it's pretty clear that
| voluntary payment nudges don't work. Most people won't pay for
| free content _after_ they've consumed it. Humans need an extra
| incentive to pay for free content.
|
| This is why so many sponsorship platforms are effectively
| subscription models with additional exclusive content or early
| access. And for that to work, you need more than just a payment
| button, you need a content publishing platform that will handle
| all the subs and content gating.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I don't think payment friction has been reduced nearly enough
| to make that statement. If it was possible to click a button to
| instantly send ten cents to the creator of an article, and
| people still didn't do it, then we could conclude that it
| doesn't work. But we're _extremely_ far from that now.
| Suppafly wrote:
| This, people want micropayments but the market won't figure
| out a way to provide a service for that.
| etskinner wrote:
| I think you're missing a small yet significant portion of
| people who _will_ pay for content after consuming it. Off the
| top of my head I 've "tipped" after the fact for: An awesome
| free work time recording app, "free" walking tours when I'm
| traveling, free online chess, Wikipedia -- all after using
| them.
| rchaud wrote:
| Most people won't do that though. The walking tour is an
| example of a situation where there is likely a societal
| expectation to tip. No such thing on the internet where the
| publisher is a faceless unknown.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >We're three decades in with the web and it's pretty clear that
| voluntary payment nudges don't work. Most people won't pay for
| free content after they've consumed it.
|
| Humans have no problem tipping, the issue is that a single
| article or piece of content is rarely worth than a fractional
| amount of whatever your preferred currency is, and it costs
| more than that amount to transfer that currency. Sponsorships
| work because you pay normal amounts of currency to receive a
| larger future block of content.
|
| To make tipping work, you need a system that supports allowing
| you to deposit normal sums of money but then dole it out in
| micropayments, and also not charge more than those payments for
| processing the micropayments. A payment system like Paypal,
| that maintains an internal balance that is used instead of just
| transferring from one bank account to another (zelle, venmo),
| could handle this but I don't think the financial incentives
| are there for them to bother with it.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| Sorry, but I don't really see the problem, I mean someone that
| wants to get paid will make sure to let you know where to pay
| them.
| micropayer wrote:
| You'd need everyone to setup the rails for it to work smoothly,
| but it can. I've documented one way this could work at
| http://micropayments.fyi
| havnagiggle wrote:
| Seems fairly simple to have a smart contract do a DNS validation
| to unlock funds. For example, someone sends to a contract "$1 to
| example.com". Then the URL owner publishes either a TXT file or
| DNS record that has a list of crypto wallet addresses. Contract
| then forwards the payments. You could even make the keys just the
| ISO codes for each currency.
|
| It's as good of a proof for TLS certs, but it's susceptible to
| DNS hijacking, etc. Make the contract immutable to meet
| tornado.cash standard. There are already oracles for DNS lookups
| so this contract might already exist somewhere.
|
| Add in a couple of features:
|
| 1. Allow tracking per domain so publishers can know that there is
| a demand to set it up on their end.
|
| 2. Allow refunds in case the publisher never opens it up.
| numtel wrote:
| You're very close to https://prove.email/
| EricRiese wrote:
| Isn't the solution for Patreon et al to offer embeddable widgets
| that implement the Payments Request API?
| mediumsmart wrote:
| You scan the qrcode on the page which will launch your banking
| app that initiates the transfer and fills out the details leaving
| for you to enter the amount and the fingerprint confirmation to
| send it off.
| SethMLarson wrote:
| Author here! My primary motivation is to tip the hundreds of web
| creators that I enjoy every year without linearly increasing my
| spend (I can only afford so many $3/month Patreons).
|
| It's manual for now, but the computer tracks who to pay next, who
| to stop paying, and give you links to speed up the process.
|
| See: https://fosstodon.org/@sethmlarson/113575887792359030
|
| Happy to answer questions :)
| edward wrote:
| It's worth noting that Ted Nelson's visionary Xanadu project had
| actually addressed this issue decades ago. In the original design
| of Project Xanadu, rule 9 states "Every document can contain a
| royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure
| payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies
| ('transclusions') of all or part of the document." This suggests
| a foresighted approach to content monetisation which the modern
| web, in many ways an unfinished hypertext prototype, still lacks.
| Nelson's idea was to embed financial transactions directly into
| the fabric of document interchange, an integration not yet
| realised in today's digital content landscape.
|
| See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rul...
| lmm wrote:
| > It's worth noting that Ted Nelson's visionary Xanadu project
| had actually addressed this issue decades ago. In the original
| design of Project Xanadu, rule 9 states "Every document can
| contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of
| granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed,
| including virtual copies ('transclusions') of all or part of
| the document."
|
| It's easy to address every possible issue when your project is
| vaporware and you can just write "royalty mechanism" rather
| than having to actually implement one.
| stavros wrote:
| Yeah, wow. Saying that someone addressed the issue by writing
| "documents can contain a royalty mechanism" is like saying
| Jules Verne addressed the issue of manned spaceflight.
| fjfaase wrote:
| The European Union is working on a standard for QR-code payments
| [1]. In the Netherlands, most banking app already understand QR-
| code for payments. There are serviced that offer a possibility to
| ask for a payment without a specified amount that do not the
| reveal the bank account of the requester.
|
| If this could be turned into a world wide standard, one could add
| a link to a QR code in a web page to request for donations. One
| should realize that there are very different payments systems in
| the world and that there are payment companies, think credit card
| companies, that have good reasons to resist these kind of global
| standards.
|
| [1] https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/document-
| library/guid...
| Funes- wrote:
| If they'd fancy a donation, they'd have a visible button or
| section on their website so anyone interested could send it their
| way. Liberapay looks like a decent alternative to Patreon. Crypto
| (XMR, namely) is also a good option.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| This could be solved with a simple <link> standard.
|
| If we're talking "direct" payments, as much as it pains me to say
| it, it would be bitcoin, wouldn't it? Just put a wallet address
| in a <meta> and you're done. But with its operational overhead it
| may be a waste for micro-transactions compared to traditional
| payment methods.
|
| To be honest, the real problem isn't that there is no way to mark
| this up, is that even if there WAS a way to mark this up, most
| people wouldn't because it's not a browser API. People don't even
| use RSS because browsers don't tell users about RSS links. There
| needs to be a tangible consequence of using a tag for people to
| bother with it. If a $ doesn't appear on the address bar, what is
| the point?
| 6510 wrote:
| This week someone finally vandalized an old long forgotten sign
| at the train station. It's purpose was to ask the traveler not to
| walk on the rails. It said because of delays 30 000 people were
| late for their appointment every year. It attempted to appeal to
| a kind of decency and care for others that just doesn't exist
| anymore. It is also true that no one walks on the rails anymore.
|
| The answer to the riddle, how to pay the publisher: You make your
| own website and write your own article(s) If the reward worthy
| publisher wrote something that fits the context of your website
| (or one of them) and it is worth reading for your readers you
| make a link to it. <a href=""> etc An endorsement like that, from
| the right person, is worth a lot but it is not required. You just
| make a nice article for other people, they could do the same. We
| all win or lose together.
| pixodaros wrote:
| I'm out of the web dev game but wouldn't you just write code to
| search for links to the ten or so most popular wrappers for
| Paypal or Stripe and then an API to perform the transaction? That
| should cover 99% of the actual payments that happen (there are
| LiberaPay and crypto schemes and bank transfer and SEPA for
| nerds). I think that basically all the money that moves to
| support free webpages is through PayPal or Stripe, maybe a few
| percent by the EU SEPA and Canadian eTransfer systems.
|
| Realistically you Ctrl-F "donate / Paypal / Patreon / support"
| and click that link. Good web design should make it clear on a
| screen and in the code what is site content and what is third-
| party content such as comments with spam links.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| I wrote about a country or worldwide like system before that
| would do automatic funding to visited webpages:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40972106
|
| Would be nice for the EU to implement such a feature.
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