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Comment by mike-cardwell | Hacker News Reader

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mike-cardwell

Oh. They take a 5% cut. Next question, how do I prevent this system from working on any of my websites?

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Alternative: microtip [1] [2].

[1] https://autotip.io/docs/microtip-meta-tag

[2] https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/MetaExtensions

How else would you suggest they maintain the infrastructure without turning the users back into the product?

What infrastructure is there to maintain? Conceptually all that needs to happen is:

* Website sends HTTP response header containing a bitcoin address

* Browser keeps a bitcoin wallet

* Browser shows a button to send bitcoin from said wallet to said bitcoin address

And that's it.

Yes, that is ideally how it would work. Yes, they have infrastructure which needs paying for, but that infrastructure only exists in the first place so that they can take a cut of the donations.

If the system was designed right any infrastructure could be distributed (put a bitcoin address and a notification URL in your HTML or something dead simple like that) and development could be sponsored by interested parties if needed. There wouldn't be any need for a fee.

> If the system was designed right any infrastructure could be distributed (put a bitcoin address and a notification URL in your HTML or something dead simple like that) and development could be sponsored by interested parties if needed. There wouldn't be any need for a fee.

You need a fee because otherwise nobody will do (or is doing) the work to implement it.

As I said, certainly there are many websites which stand to profit from this who could contribute.

Of course, with something this small and basically one-off, given the number of open source devs building bitcoin projects I'd be surprised if no one's done something similar already.

By taking a lot less than 5% of the donations and creating a successful and widely used product.

One would hope that if they get sufficiently successfuly they'd drop the percentage, but requiring them to achieve wider scale just to initially break even doesn't seem like it sets up good incentives to me.

Implementing window.payment like Google and Apple do?

Charge for the product? A popular line from people who hate ads ;)

You could refuse to serve to web browsers with a Brave user-agent. Or I could fetch your website using wget and strip out ads. If you can't control a user agent in other situations, why do you want to control it here?

I don't want to control the user agent, I just want to programatically announce that I am not talking part in the Brave micro-tip system, so that no end-user funds are put in a wallet for me which will never be withdrawn.

Looking into this further, they would eventually email me after there are $10 worth of funds queued up for me, and then after 30 days of me ignoring them, those funds would be spread out amongst other sites who do want them.

However, until that wallet has at least $10 in it, Brave is just sitting on top of free money. I don't want that.

[edit] P.S, Brave doesn't identify it's self in the user agent header. I just downloaded the Linux version and it identified it's self thus:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2743.116 Safari/537.36

> Looking into this further, they would eventually email me after there are $10 worth of funds queued up for me, and then after 30 days of me ignoring them, those funds would be spread out amongst other sites who do want them.

And this means the users, who think they are contributing to you, actually aren't at all. This seems deceptive.

> However, until that wallet has at least $10 in it, Brave is just sitting on top of free money. I don't want that.

One reason could be they don't want to bug website owners about small amounts.

So let the website owner supply a wallet address so Brave doesn't have to hold onto the money?

How kind of them to hang on to the money instead of bugging the people it was intended for.

Doesn't justify the 30 day limit, though. That there needs to be some limit is clear, but I don't see a justification for it being only 30 days.

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