The problem with web payments isn't the lack of a standard API, it's everything that happens under the hood. As a developer it makes no difference to me whether the browser natively supports a payments interface or I add it in via one line of JavaScript. Now tell me how to deal with credit card fees, sales tax, direct debit, crypto transfer and a million other jurisdiction-dependent payment mechanisms and rules. Does the standard account for the fact that in India every online credit card payment requires a one-time code sent via SMS? Or that every bank has its own online payments interface? Or that UPI is now a thing? The folks publishing the Web Monetization spec sure aren't thinking about any of this.
The core issues with the Web Monetization API is that all the things you mentioned get dangerously close to SAP and Salesforce waters, and there's a reason these systems are the definition of bloated legacy accounting tech.
Our problem as a < 200 person non-profit is that our teams are being convinced that we _do_ need these systems, and in that scenario it is bloat. We keep telling ourselves that we need to "grow into" SalesForce and all its ancillaries that we're paying outrageous sums for. And that growth looks so much like a balloon. We have more and more SaaS stuff to support but the same number of people to do it. And we think we're getting ahead.
The spec/interface for developer does not have the handle the complexity of implementation browsers have to . Do you as the app developer deal with any of that integrating Stripe ? of course not, you yourself say it is just one line of JS for the app developer.
If the API goes through, it will be a key stream of income for browser developers, They can then monetize their most important asset - brand and trust people have on their product without diluting it and not be dependent on advertisements or search engine placements from competitors or crypto to support the development.
It is no different from IAP APIs mobile platform provides, they are not complex(for the app developer). Complexities of geography and taxation is not the app(website) developer's problem it is the platform's nothing in the interface has to handle that. Browsers will charge 30% the Apple and Google do for variety of reasons, but just Stripe level rates is enormous income source for them to support development.
That is the goal ? The spec's goal should be to keep it simple on the developer side and hiding/"punting" complexity to the platform/browser developer, is that not the sensible (and secure) way of doing this ?
Users would rather trust the browser to handle my money than each app developer ? We already do this with Apple and Google and other platform hosts. Both of them also build browsers, so it will not even be that difficult for either of them to build payment into the browser as they already have the complexity handled.
Microsoft probably has the stack as well if not at same scale, certainly at reasonable level given their consumer businesses collecting money directly from users.
Mozilla is the only one who will need to build it bottom up, however they have the most incentive to do it, given the revenue potential.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
With 10G blocks @ ~144 block per day, that's almost 1.5 TB per day.
The complete blockchain is currently about half a TB.
According to bitcoin technology experts, a network of Full Nodes is more secure than a network of Partial Nodes. Right now almost anyone can run a Full Node. If you make the blockchain grow by 1.5 TB per day, only big corporations will be able to run Full Nodes.
So no, existing storage and network transfer is not sufficient for large block sizes, at least not for the current way we validate BTC transactions. I assume if there was a good technology fix for the full/partial node issue, it would have been implemented already.
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.
That white paper was written when? 2008, give or take a couple years? "Speed," as we refer to it, is relative to the age. In 2008, the threshold for terms like "fast" was much lower than it is today.
Where are you getting "speed is relative to age" from? As far as I'm aware 100mph in 2008 is the same as 100mph today, and 10 minutes hasn't changed either.
The bitcoin white paper clearly describes the goal as a digital cash with and low fee transactions without the used of a trusted third party. We have none of those today in bitcoin.
False equivalence. Cars are much older technology than blockchain. In 1908, cars were much slower than they are today. In 1808, horse carriages were much slower. You get the point. The speed at which I expect changes to process differs over time. In some future time, we may all be in self-driving cars that are able to safely exceed 200MPH and we'll think back to our 45MPH street speed limits and laugh. Just like how in 2008, the typical home network had a 5Mbps uplink to the internet, and today it's (depending on the source) at least 135Mbps, with the availability of >1Gbps depending on your ISP and region.
I was using the term "speed" as a concept, and you were using it as a constant. I referred to "speed" as "fast" or "slow." Which is to say, the subjective judgement on what is fast. Which is a decent way to default to judging speed unless the white paper specifies a threshold of transactions per second to be considered "fast." You thought of speed as a constant unit of measurement for speed, which makes no sense unless they have a target for their transactions per second. The problem with that is, the number of transactions per second that a payment solution needs to process is pretty much only going to increase over time, and thus, the goal to be considered "fast" does actually change over time. You're just potentially thinking in too short of a time range to see much drift in that subjective judgement.
I think you're mistaking my intention too. My intention is to say that Bitcoin's perceived speed with handling transactions then, is perhaps slow by today's standards. The goal you gave:
> digital cash with and low fee transactions without the used of a trusted third party.
is at least 2/3rd of the way complete. You have digital cash, with high transaction fees, and no trusted third party. The solution that blockchain designers/engineers seem to have come up with is referred to as "layer 2 rollups" where a bunch of transactions are processed quickly by a trusted third party, bundled together, and then enforced in one big transaction on the actual network in intervals. This promises to be faster, and possibly cost less in transaction fees, but then under-delivers on the third goal of not using a trusted third party. But it is apparently the best way that blockchain engineers have thought up to compete with the transaction processing speed of entities like VISA, at least today. While it's not ideal to trust that third party, presumably you have a choice to opt in or out of the layer 2 network, and enforce your transaction on the slower, more traditional blockchain layer 1. And at least with the layer 2 network, it eventually gets trued up on the blockchain with each of the rollup intervals. It's maybe up for an argument on whether trusting the layer 2 third party is better than, or the same as, trusting VISA. I would potentially argue that it's better, with the caveat of admitting that I am not a blockchain expert. I just potentially know more than the average crypto enthusiast that trades BTC and Doge on institutions like Coinbase.
I will note that the goal you gave said absolutely nothing about speed though.
I'm not entirely sure about the point you're intending to make but I have an assumption. Perhaps your intention is to say that credit cards were faster than blockchains at processing transactions in 2008 (they still are today.) In which case, yes, I believe credit cards have been a thing since the 1950s, so they benefit a lot from the age of the technology. Credit cards are also just kind of a concept that goes almost as far back as banks and bankers do, where banks would loan out money for you to spend and pay back. Credit cards just abstracted a concept that always existed with some additional systems that were built around them over time like maintaining a trust record for individuals (credit scores) and online payment processing that benefits from the simplicity of going through a single trusted party that goes virtually unchecked for accuracy (I can't make an audit of financial transactions that VISA handled today and say "Bob had a 0 balance but they spent $6000 today somehow," for example.) Blockchain has none of that historical advantage, and has essentially only existed since 2008, and has not benefited much from mass adoption mostly because it's extremely easy for rational consumers to dismiss it as slow, or "only scammers use it," which would be even less true if legitimate users dismissed it less easily. That's not to say I think blockchain is ready for general consumers, in my opinion it's still an incubating technology.
You'll earn downvotes for the speed part, but this part is spot on;
>> 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
Congrats to the OP who sent money to Vietnam. It's a fantastic use case. But as a non-crypto user I can't do that with crypto because I don't know which site to trust and which is a scam.
And -reputationally- they are -all scams-, some just haven't been caught yet.
(I know, I know, there are honest players, but even the -big names I recognise- get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, that taints everyone)
Incompetents like MtGox and FTX lasted only a few years. OP claims the service they used has been operating for a decade already.
Same for the underlying tech : Bitcoin, Etherium and even Monero have also been around for a decent amount of time. (Of course you might refuse to use them for other reasons, like the wasteful power usage of Bitcoin or the money laundering enabled by Monero.)
(Note that this can generally be applied to anything money-related...)
As mentioned, Nano is inherently feeless. In theory it's supposed to remain fast and reliable at high network usage, and as of right now it's very fast, but it's only doing about 26k tx/day (about the same as Monero) so it's hard to say.
Which would mostly be fine for this usecase. Also, these properties wouldn't need to be abandoned entirely. Bitcoin in its current form isn't really a great model for this anyway.
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.
Lightning has had lots of problems, but most of those are fixable through software or gets better and better with adoption (at least in theory).
The reason adoption has been so low is that with current hardware you cannot run a full node in a phone, so you either get a server to run a full node or you trade-off some control/security of your coins
There are still other theoretical problems, mostly things like denial-of-services, but adoption has been what has stagnated it.
The hardware/control tradeoff is a real PITA, we need a phone with like 50x more battery or efficient to be able to run lightning in a completely self-custodial manner
And there are still some people advocating for blocksize increase, which will make the problems of lightning even worse
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.
Nope, as cryptocurrencies are not really currencies, so you are always trading capital.
Taler experimented with a different direction when they built a distributed payment system for moving usual currencies digitally, even with a asymmetric behavior to preserve buyers privacy while making sellers taxable. Sad that it did not catch on.
Technically, you are creating taxable events when going in and out of stables to normal USD. Its just that there usually only very minimal gain or loss in the transaction.
I don't think the IRS has taken that position and no tax professional in discussions around these issues has advocated for that. It might be something high frequency traders might keep track of but it's literally a rounding error for everyone else.
> This is literally the use case for cryptocurrencies -- digital cash, not investments.
It should be, but the cryptocurrency crowd have internalized Austrian deflationary bullshit as a premise for their money system, it's just doomed to be unused as a payment mechanism and keep being used as securities.
It's literally Economics illiteracy killing the use-case.
Interestingly enough, the fact that they are used as securities is also responsible for why bitcoin is still the biggest fish in the pond while being technically pretty meh and long obsolete (very long block time, no “smart contracts”, failed as a decentralized system because ASICs, etc.).
Yeah, from my POV it just seems like the pro-deflation crowd simply proved economic experts correct. People start holding and hoarding instead of spending, while laughing at those who do (e.g. pizza guy).
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.
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.
Layer 2s such as Bitcoin's lightning network do not use a public ledger for their transactions. The only thing public is the transaction that opens a payment channel, everything after that happens as peer to peer messaging across the network.
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
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.
>> 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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
But you can't send $0.01 instantly and anonymously with bank rails. The solution is to use a crypto exchange on crypto rails - just not a regular crypto wallet (you could, but perhaps not very user friendly)
Many exchanges are regulated, but maybe not as banks. But yes you're trusting that exchange with your money. If used for web-micropayments it shouldn't be much of an issue though.
Credit cards have by far the best in-person UX of the options that I am presented, tap my card or phone and leave and they're accepted everywhere in practice (my debit card is not).
The 'cardholder can always reverse any charge' behavior is also nice once every few years.
If someone steals your debit card and spends all your money, you might very well be fucked.
But (in America) if someone steals your credit card and spends a bunch of money, they technically stole money from the bank, so it's the bank that might be fucked, not you. All you have to say is "yeah that wasn't me" and the bank reverses the transaction.
If you're blatantly abusing this the bank will end their relationship with you and cancel your card, but that's pretty much worst case scenario, and you won't be on the hook for anything. And they obviously make enough money off of people who carry a balance and pay interest that they still come out way ahead.
I use it because if I used a debit card and it gets compromised then I lose whatever's in my bank account. Maybe I can get it back if I can prove it's fraud?
If I use a credit card and it gets compromised then my cash is still secure. If I have to fight a credit card company for 6 months to get the payments reversed I still have cash to live off of. If I don't win then hell I don't pay. Maybe I go to collections and credit gets dinged but my real assets are still mine.
To boost credit rating. When you have none credits, your credit rating is ZERO, and it is considered bad. So you could pay for example 10$ (yes, small amount) from zero percent credit, and regularly pay it and this will effectively raise credit rating.
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).
Brave/BAT is a massive "crypto" grift. It's an ERC20 token that they hold like 30% of in reserves. You also need to signup for Uphold / sign up with Brave to receive payment.
It's a cryptocurrency only in implementation, but the actual experience could be replicated with (GoFundMe or any other "creator platform") + A chrome extension.
Thanks for the info. I never actually used it and didn't know the details. Its just the only "real" attempt at direct web monetization as an alternative to ads that I've seen. Sad to hear its a crypto thing.
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.
I'm working on something under a different use case that could fit for this, but maybe not at the scale people on this forum are looking for without additional support
I wont blab about myself here, but I do feel I have relevant background and a couple solid connections to implement something that works.
Cryptocurrency has failings for my use-case, based on what I've tried for designing around it so far. For strictly donating money in one direction towards a website, those failings may not be relevant though.
Sadly this project is not my day job, though, but it is something I plan to use for myself with or without more widespread adoption so it's moving forward regardless. I'm honestly only working on it because I wanted to do a different project that would work way nicer if tiny transactions with users are possible.
> 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?
Either one company with a monopoly or maybe a small number of companies is probably the only feasible way to do it, because efficient payment processing is only half the problem.
The other half is taxes. Every time someone in a browser pays to unlock content provided by someone in a different tax jurisdiction some government is likely to view that as a taxable sale that someone has to collect sales tax or VAT for.
In many places (EU, US) it is the jurisdiction where the buyer resides that is owed the tax, but the seller who is supposed to deal with collecting and paying it.
Unless we can get a lot of countries to make special rules for small consumer content purchases that greatly simplify this, the most practical approach is to have a small number of content marketplaces.
So say you are in the EU and want to buy an article from the New York Times. Instead of directly paying the NYT you would go to one of the market sites and buy a NYT access token from them. You can use that access token to get your article from the Times.
What going through the intermediate marketplace does is make it so your monetary transaction is with them, not the NYT. Instead of each content provider having to deal with taxes in dozens of different jurisdictions it is just the marketplaces.
The marketplace would pay the NYT for the access token, but that would be a business to business sale of a product for resale which most places exempt from sales tax and VAT. It's just going to be ordinary income for the content providers that they report on their own income tax.
You don't want too many separate marketplaces so that content providers can reasonably offer their content in all of the marketplaces. That way consumers just need an account at one marketplace.
The marketplace approach also largely solves the problem of transaction fees. Instead of each article you unlock for $0.10 being a separate charge on your card you'd preload your account at the marketplace you use. You credit card would only be charged for the initial prepay and then whenever you need to refill it.
The big issue I see is keeping it from devolving to something like the current streaming movie/TV market where content providers make exclusive deals with different marketplaces.
Because of extra complexity ? But the payment software itself can figure out the exact amounts. Which then can also be aggregated monthly/yearly.
Not to mention that plenty of jurisdictions only require that for businesses, while non-businesses don't have to report anything about their donations/sales unless they cross a yearly threshold.
I can't find it now, but several years ago a dev posted his experiences here dealing with VAT when selling software across the EU.
He had to comply with a completely different set of tax laws for each EU member state that he received a purchase from. The cost he paid to his accountant to be able to be in compliance was like twice what he paid in actual taxes.
A big party of the problem is that many of the tax laws were so inconsistent and vaguely worded that every transaction had to be gone over manually.
That sounds like it was fairly long ago. With the introduction of the VAT MOSS (Mini One Stop Shop) system somewhere around 2015 it got a lot easier. VAT MOSS got replaced with something else a couple years ago, whose name I forget, but it largely works the same at least from the point of view of a non-EU company selling digital goods via the net into the EU.
The way VAT MOSS work is that instead of having to register for VAT collection in every EU country you sell in, and having to deal with reporting and remitting in every such country, you just have to register in one. You do all your reporting and remitting to just the tax authorities in that country.
You still have to collect the correct VAT on your sales into the other countries, but you report those sales to the country you are registered with and turn the money over to them. They deal with then reporting to and paying the other countries.
We're registered in Ireland. I wasn't involved in registering, but the person who handled it told me that it took something like 10 minutes on the web, with no need to interact with any humans. The quarterly reporting is, I'm told, a simple upload of a CSV file that contains a line for each EU country we had sales in listing the total amount of sales, the VAT rate, and the VAT collected.
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.
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…
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can see the risk... yet it's only a risk, and we're already starting to see the tidal wave of SPAM that ever smarter neural networks allow.
(Also, thankfully, there are still corners of the Internet that haven't been plagued by either ads or spam - because not popular enough - and are likely to remain so.)
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.
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.
The ads are never going away. We tried the 'pay your way' system with things like netflix and prime video, and guess what's on the way? Now you get to pay for it AND see ads.
The point from the OP there is less who gets paid but that not running ads leaves money on the table so money oriented people will eventually notice that and run ads as well as collect money directly.
Though I’d say this is more of an issue for the Netflixes of the world that have to please investors.
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.
The obvious solution is to have users buy a proxy currency that goes in a wallet that is then spent in frictionless (and fee-less) microtransactions. Many video game companies use this model, albeit for their own scummy monetization systems, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't work here - is there a reason you're not considering it?
A friend of mine in Vietnam needed some quick cash to go home for Tet holiday and asked me for help in paying for their travel costs and some spending money. Nothing nefarious, just a few hundred USD. I'm happy to help them.
I went to a popular VN crypto website, put in their name and bank account number and how much I wanted to send them (and on what crypto network and token, as they support a bunch of them). The site spit out an address to send the tokens to with my wallet.
The transaction cost me $0.05, the conversion rates were totally fair and actually quite good, it only took a couple hours, and as an added bonus, didn't even require any sort of KYC because it was just a small amount of money.
For those of you dumping on crypto, I can tell you that it doesn't get any easier than that. There is no way that I can do something like that otherwise. We need more of this, not less.
The lack of KYC enforcement is likely to be a temporary situation. Cryptocurrency exchanges have kind of flown under the radar in some countries. But for better or worse, crackdowns are coming.
This use of crypto is fundamentally no different from the old hawala networks, just more automated and slightly cheaper. Authorities let that go for a while but then cracked down when criminal usage grew too serious to ignore.
If you amortise the kyc cost then wise or similar does this just as frictionless. Basically, crypto does not solve any real world problems that don't have other solutions.
Kyc exists for a reason, the same friction free transfer beneath your mental limit can be rerun 10000x by machine and achieve aml outcomes.
Of course I've used Wise to send money. It was full of confusing KYC friction that took several days to resolve. Cost more than $0.05, took more than a few hours to complete, didn't allow me to use my own currency (crypto) and required my friend to also setup a Wise account and go through the same contortions on their end.
KYC exists to make life hard. It solves no real problems, just like the TSA at airports. Security theater at its finest. It is also easily circumvented too, making it questionable at best [0].
Lastly, saying something doesn't solve a real world problem, after I just explained to you that it does, is mind blowing absurd.
Paraphrasing on absolutist positions seems pretty wrong to me if that is the point you're trying to make.
I could have left the KYC portion off of the original comment and thus this one point feels like a festering wound for a meth addict (anti-crypto HN) to pick at instead of being focused on the larger message.
Regardless, we are off in the weeds debating about the word "useless" (a word neither the OP nor I never used), when it really has nothing to do with my original post at this point. This isn't interesting to discuss, so I'll stop now. Thanks.
I love crypto. I even built an SDK to make crypto payment easy [0]
However, KYC is there for a reason. Personally, I don't touch any crypto on/offramp service without proper KYC
You don't go on to explain that reason though, so let me explain it for anyone reading this.
The definition of KYC from my quick google search is:
"Know Your Customer (KYC) standards are designed to protect financial institutions against fraud, corruption, money laundering and terrorist financing."
Key words: "Protect financial institutions"
In other words, they don't protect the people using the system.
In this case, it is two friends a world apart who want to simply share some funds with each other. There is no institution here other than the use of fiat money on the receiving end (my friends bank account).
I would have preferred to just use crypto the whole way, but my friend doesn't know anything about it and I didn't want to bother them since they were so upset about not being able to be with their family during Tet.
So, I found a middleman that was willing to take my crypto and convert it to local currency, with very little effort or cost. In my eyes, there is absolutely nothing ethically wrong with what I did. Transactions like this do not and should not require government intervention. The fact that we've been so brainwashed to believe that they do, is just wrong.
Should or should not is besides the point. If you're interacting with the US financial system in any way, it's a requirement from that government. I can believe anything I want about how cannabis should be legal, my personal beliefs about that don't change the fact that I could be arrested for having some.
Sure. I'm just trying to discuss a personal experience, not give referrals to a third party business. I'm also not that hard to find... if people wanted to reach out personally, that is fine too.
HN's jerk reaction reminds me a lot of the 5 monkeys and ladder experiment. I'm sure a lot of the people railing against crypto don't understand why they hate it or just look at the negatives. I'm confident that they would be just as hostile to cash if it was invented today.
The good news is that they don't matter. Cryptocurrency is here to stay. People like you and me are using it to transfer money, donate, and buy things. It doesn't have to be widely adopted to be useful, which is something that I find to be just grand :-)
Somewhat off topic but I only recently learned that that monkeys and ladder experiment never happened, it's just a thought experiment or story to illustrate the point. But the closest real experiments were not nearly as dramatic and didn't have as strong of results.
People here railing against cryptocurrency are generally unable to see past its proclivity for scams. This is an entirely reasonable situation. Further, cryptocurrency proponents are historically completely unwilling to admit there are any flaws to the point that it’s obvious they have a stake in cryptocurrency and it’s severely biasing their judgement.
You don’t seem like that per
se but if you haven’t seen it before you haven’t been watching.
I have a stake in it and I'm willing to admit it is full of scams. Fact is though, ALL finance is full of scams. I'd argue that the inverse is true... people in traditional finance hate on crypto because it actually exposes the fact that their own stuff is full of scams. Case in point:
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.
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.
Taler is basically just a cover to allow countries to stop printing banknotes and minting coins.
Once banknotes and coins have fallen out of use, there's absolutely nothing in Taler preventing those governments from changing all the rules. They can simply decide to abandon the payer-anonymity as soon as they've migrated people off of banknotes-and-coins. Sorry folks! We had to stop doing blind-signing because AML and terrorists. But that's okay, we'll sign your unblinded tokens instead! And we promise not to store all those token identifiers in some huge surveillance database somewhere. Pinky-swear.
Taler really has very little to do with the internet. It's all about shutting down the presses and mints without provoking riots.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
I think it's a little more nuanced than that. I would be fine paying per-article on a lot of news sites, if the cost was on the order of single-digit cents.
I consume most of my news via aggregators like HN, so I have no loyalty to any particular news site. I'm not going to pay $30/mo for a subscription when I read maybe 5-10 articles on a site per month, at most. And I'm certainly not going to pay for subscriptions to, say, the 15-20 different news sites that show up with that frequency on aggregators, with headlines I'm likely to click on.
Put another way, let's say I read 10 articles per day, so about 300 per month. Those articles are spread across a lot of different sites, let's say probably 100 of them, ranging from single article from random blogs, up to 7 articles from a larger publication like WaPo or WSJ.
At even 10 cents per article, on average, that's $30/mo, total. I'm comfortable with that. In contrast, with the current "system", if I had to subscribe to even 15 of those medium to large publications, at, say, $15/mo, that's $225/mo, which I'm absolutely not comfortable with. At that point -- assuming there were no ways to bypass paywalls -- I'd simply just do without, and find other free sources covering the same stories.
But still, I don't think micropayments will work, even if the friction is pretty low. There is a surprisingly huge psychological gulf between free and even one cent. Once you ask someone for money, they are going to agonize (even if just a little bit) over whether or not the article they're about to read is actually worth it.
This is exactly the same problem that happened with streaming services. When there was only one streaming service that had most of the stuff on it, a lot of people felt it was reasonable to pay $15 per month. But then the streaming services splintered and it would now cost n * $15 per month to watch the exact same shows you were watching before.
The economics of it make sense from the perspective of the creators, but they don't from the perspective of the consumers. Creators need enough cash that they can afford to survive flops, but consumers only want to pay for hits. This is why I think micropayments will never be a great solution for TV, journalism etc.
As a consumer, I can see the appeal of taking a Robin Hood approach. Pay for one streaming service and pirate the rest. Pay for one newspaper subscription and bypass paywalls on the rest. Adblock all of the things. If the law of big numbers holds then all of the content providers with at least some content worth consuming should end up getting fairly compensated. If those economics don't work out, then neither would micropayments anyway.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
Well, but that's due to a lot of problems specific to the media landscape. Netflix started as an afterthought, the big media companies viewed it as a sideshow or as a stopgap measure while they made other plans, so there was a honeymoon phase where it was cheap and had a ton of media.
Most new entrants to the market are themselves media companies, so with each one the media landscape gets fractured. They're able to leverage popular content (over which they have a monopoly) to lure customers and raise prices. There's not many of them, and the barrier of entry is almost impossibly high (step 1: develop a 50-year back catalog of beloved films & franchises...), so the market is insular.
Compare with music, where there's a ton of smaller labels, and the barrier of entry is much lower. Streaming companies compete mostly on price, interface & experience.
I think the problem is kinda inherent in the market, and Netflix was just an anomaly because it caught the media companies flat-footed. You would need openness and competition on a much more fundamental level to solve streaming video media.
In the meantime, simple and open web payments could solve for music, podcasts, prose, reporting, art, etc. And hey, maybe somewhere in the process you could see the birth of micro-studios.
Agreed. But I think the solution to this is compulsory content licensing, not consolidation. Granted, the end result of that might still be consolidation (or many players just going out of business), but at least that would be true competition: the streaming services would be competing as streaming services (and would be judged on price, video quality, app/website stability and usability, reliability, recommendations, etc.), not as content producers.
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.
The whole goal is to get rid of (middlemen) corporations and to start paying authors directly.
(Of course, unlike what OP suggests, this is probably hard to accomplish in a (variety of) browsers directly while Google and Chrome are still allowed to exist.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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 µblockOrigin.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!"
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.
> 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.
I had forgotten but I am still a "Brave Creator", but I disabled the thing that lets Brave serve ads to people visiting your site because I thought it was yuck
So little amounts of BAT from Brave users who are doing the micropayments thing are still coming in, 5.46 in total since then ($1.18 USD)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Stripe Connect would be a good option here. Very passionate about this area. I made a website that paid people per approved image annotation (for data labeling). It was high friction to get people to sign up as workers (and enter a bunch of personal information into Stripe) but content creators might be an easier sell.
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.
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.
I think the biggest challenge is the country specific regulation with regards to money and then there is tax regulations. Add to this the checks related to money laundering and we can forget such a simple thing from existing without a whole company working in the backend to make it work.
It will happen once bitcoin has proven itself as a store of value, new layers have been built on top of it and matured and have acquired a large user base with network effect.
Right now we already have proof of concept of a decentralised micro-payment network with Lightning. But it won't gain widespread adoption until more people have bitcoin, so much that they'd like to start spending it rather than buying/holding it (see Gresham's Law), its value has stabilised to a point that it can be used as a unit of account, and shops are therefore willing to price their goods/services in it.
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).
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.
Why? I don't want a bunch of small operators independently moderating, or hope for a bug free implementation of a smart contract. The whole point is regulatory instead of technical protection. I don't want code to supercede the laws that exist to protect us.
I especially don't want my finances under the care of the kinds of companies and opportunistic individuals normally drawn to crypto. One mistake and everything is gone. That's only a plus if you're a cyber libertarian. I would much sooner trust a reputable brand or government.
"Same as cash" is part of the problem here. Credit cards offer way more protection. I don't want to give cash-equivalent to somebody I've never done business with, unless it's a physical good I can immediately examine in person and take possession of.
But really I meant more user error, like getting phished or hacked out of a wallet, a mistake in coding up a smart contract, a mistake in choosing which third-party moderator or online exchange to trust, etc. Every step of the way is fraught with risk. The same crypto opportunities that opportunists get rich on seem to be built on other people's misfortunes. It's a zero-sum game.
Just start using HTTP 402 and JSON payloads. We can just converge on whatever ends up common; for me, there is already a monetary standard for the Internet.
I participated in these meetings for some time, during the rise (and rise) of Bitcoin. It's clear that the landscape of the financial web has shifted significantly at this point (for better or worse, in many ways), but standards, as usual, lag the market.
> 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!
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.
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.
"web3" is synonymous with Ethereum so that's no surprise to me.
What is a surprise is ENS having interoperability with BTC, SOL, &c addresses. I assume these exist as TXT records? Not sure I like exposing that...of course, that's the default with .eth names.
The way BTC and HNS works, you can use a different address derived from the same seed and still receive funds. Different strokes for different folks and all that.
No one chain will (or should) be THE solve for everything.
Several years ago the team I was on worked on a custom app for Splunk. We were on a customer call where they were receiving HTTP 402 Payment Required in their error logs and thought it was coming from our app. We explained we never implemented that error code (although I got paranoid and did triple check our code) so the conclusion was that Splunk must be returning it. Even searching the web today, it appears they never documented that but there are several Splunk community forum threads asking about HTTP 402. If you do use it, it's probably best to clearly document exactly what you want your users to pay for, and how!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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)
Why do you care about the two degrees of separation ?
The people posting hate speech already get in legal trouble.
And the websites hosting that can eventually get in trouble too (if they can't show that they did due diligence / were sufficiently close to a "common carrier" status).
And if it gets bad enough (typically if these fist two categories violate a bunch of other laws), their funding might get investigated too. Money flows for that kind of use typically fairly easy to track, as long as law enforcement actually bothers to.
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.
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.
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].
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.
The regime doesn’t want people saying or thinking things they aren’t being currently told to say and think. The regime is technically not allowed to use the legal system directly to punish people for this quasi-crime but is very happy to ruin everything else in same pursuit. So why should a protocol for p2p financial transactions the regime doesn’t control be allowed to exist?
Who said anything about p2p? Crypto is poorly-suited for microtransactions due to its inefficiency.
"The regime" has nothing to do with it; "the regime" has already effectively absorbed cryptocurrency. Coinbase is listed on NASDAQ, and all the major cryptocurrencies have zero privacy, allowing the powers that be to see everything that happens on the public ledgers.
