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Comment by kohtatsu | Hacker News Reader

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kohtatsu

Woo DRM for websites! Thanks Google!

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Indeed, just what we needed. /s

So why not instead come up with a workable micropayment system?

I am quite excited about the Web Monetization API and Coil’s implementation.

https://webmonetization.org/ https://coil.com/

What forms of payment does Coil accept?

It's answered in a rather roundabout way on their FAQ page for for membership accounts [1]:

>Can I use cryptocurrency to pay for my membership?

>No, all memberships must be paid by credit card in US dollars.

[1]:https://help.coil.com/accounts/membership-accounts

Oh well.

It is possible to go ~anonymously from cryptocurrency to "paid by credit card in US dollars". Basically you barter cryptocurrency for a credit card payment. You can do it with someone you trust. Or you can negotiate online. But then you may get a stolen card account, which might be embarrassing.

I wonder if they accept gift cards.

Nothing stops someone from creating a competitor to Coil that also uses the Web Monetization API emerging standard and that competitor accepting subscriptions in another currency, including crypto. That’s one reason why it’s such a compelling idea.

So not a solution for content likely to be censored or adult content.

Seems like BAT is still the way to go.

The Web Monetization API standard Coil is based on does not reveal knowledge of what content is being paid for.

Sure, but the hard part of "getting paid on the internet for content" was never really "there isn't an open standard for payments!" – it was that established payment providers didn't generally want to enable transactions for certain types of content or to certain actors and/or charged prohibitive fees for the privilege of performing transactions at all.

What about BAT?

I think that would have been possible without google's help too. Could someone not just send the content encrypted to the client and after signing in sending the corresponding key to decrypt it? Like by using the relatively new Web Crypto API?

Possible? Sure. Widespread? Unlikely.

I am not looking forward to having bandwidth wasted on this crap.

To be clear I'm a big fan of use of the WebCrypto API in general.

As a small rant I can't stand Amp as a whole, and haven't been using Google services for a few years. YouTube being the begrudged exception; and there I use it 95% in incognito, with frequent cookie flushes outside of incognito. They're capable of tying the shadow profiles together but I'm expecting them not to.

Sure, but mostly people settle for just not sending the gated content in the first place. The reason for sending people data they can't use is somewhat unclear...

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