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Comment by input_sh | Hacker News Reader

And a small Coil, who you've probably never heard of before, donated 40% of Google's/Microsoft's amount ($100k).

That's pennies to Google/Microsoft. For Coil.com on the other hand...

For the unaware, Coil is a subscription service that you pay a certain amount to, and that amount gets spread through websites you visit that have a WebMonetization tag in the <head> element:

    <meta name="monetization" content="crypto-address-here">

Pretty cool initiative. My personal website earned a total of $1 from it so far.

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I've come across this before. In order to receive money, I should just be able to put:

  <meta name="monetization" content="bitcoin:my-bitcoin-address">

Or similar, on my website.

Doesn't work that way though. I have to sign up with somebody like coil.com and put an address they give me on my websites. This is just worse. Much much worse than it needs to be.

That's where the idea started but that means the user has to be able to send Bitcoin. The purpose of Interledger is to abstract away that issue which is why Web Monetization is built on Interledger.

You don't have to sign up with Coil to earn. There are other wallets that are on the Interledger network such as Uphold and Gatehub that can give you a payment pointer to put into your site's HTML. If you want your earnings to be converted to BTC that's possible I think.

I understand that the person paying probably needs an account somewhere, so that payments can be batched together to reduce transaction fees.

However, there's no reason for me to have an account anywhere in order to receive bitcoin. All I need is a bitcoin address.

I don't want to sign up with Coil, Interledger, Uphold, Gatehub, or any other random third party, in order to receive bitcoin. And there is zero reason why I would have to.

Except that Interledger is not a "random third party", it's a protocol: https://interledger.org/

So that you can make payments to someone else regardless of whether they want to use Bitcoin or not.

I believe Interledger is the right level of abstraction for this, in the same way that you wouldn't want your email server to have to know or code against the lower protocols, e.g. Ethernet or WiFi, but only IP, TCP and SMTP. This way your email server can EHLO any email server, regardless of the network topology or underlying protocols.

Interledger does the same for payments.

Ok, so my bitcoin address is "bitcoin:1PQLtWnjUi1itHLG6QCQeHM3Nxua8pRsq1". What tag do I put in my HTML in order to receive payment from this system, without having to sign up anywhere?

You can just put that there - and then you hope that user agents implement this - or you can use interledger.

The documentation for Interledger appears to be for people who want to build software, not for people who want to send or receive money. And it talks about setting up accounts with xpring.io or rafiki.money.

I see no evidence that Interledger can be used for receiving money without having to set up accounts or run software. Plenty of evidence to the contrary.

As I said before, to receive bitcoin from one of these systems, there is nothing I should need to do other than advertise my bitcoin address. Anything more than that, and the system sucks.

> the system sucks

Correct.

What you want requires support in the user agent (web browser) though.

This is a dream that the lightning network aims to one day fulfill.

What is the idea here? Open a channel with each website that I visit. Lockup the BTC that I will ever send them but only send it to them slowly each time I visit it.

Why wouldn’t you open a single channel with a well-connected routing node, and use it for all your payments?

Yes. In reality, users would have a connection open with one or a small number of routing nodes.

The end result is very cheap and quick funds transfers to any node on the network. This lightning network infrastructure would make micropayments feasible.

Granted, there are still problems to solve. But this is the dream.

bitcoin is not a currency, it's not a "money"

Thank you for your valuable contribution to the conversation.

Same here, I tried it and liked it. I've made a few dollars too, it's early days but it looks very promising. I especially like the fact that the site can know you're paying an unlock articles, hide ads, etc for you, even though you're paying a few pennies per minute.

Honestly, committing 100k to this is probably a more effective marketing spend than many...

Well... this is how I just found out about them. I find coil very interesting! Strongly thinking about becoming a member, but I would like to find out if the websites I follow use the web monetization tag first.

As far as I'm aware, there are two ways of discovering that:

1. Start a one month subscription and browse your websites. The add-on changes colour depending on whether the current site is monetized or not.

2. Try to find them here: https://coil.com/explore. If you click on "blogs", there's a search bar that you can use.

There's also a Twitter bot that tracks how many websites have it (https://twitter.com/WebMotized). Currently at 1400, with about a dozen of sites added weekly.

Finally someone seems to have done this right. Subscribed now, lets see how it goes!

so did they actually donate or did they pay the monetization amount that their algorithm determined MDN should have?

Click on the parent link, filter by $5k or more, scroll to the bottom. They actually donated. MDN doesn't seem to have that meta tag.

Not sure if this is ironical. Either way, it is a donation as the MDN pages do not have a <meta name="monetization" ...> tag and the payment wouldn't go through OpenCollective which does not seem to support Web Monetization.

Pretty sure they donated, no need to doubt the donation like that.

Ok, I wasn't necessarily doubting the donation. I thought though that if they didn't donate but gave the money that their algorithm determined that it would be an interesting thing for several reasons:

1. would show coil is getting quite a bit of money.

2. would show importance of MDN.

Ah, yeah, I don't think that many people have the extension installed yet, but I can see them not requiring big sites to add a monetization header and just sending the money to them instead.

We're working to make the Web Monetization API a standard that browsers can adopt natively: https://webmonetization.org

The extension helps us bootstrap the ecosystem but a native integration is far superior. Check out Puma browser for an example of the integrated experience for mobile.

This was a straight donation. A thriving Web ecosystem of independent developers and creators building and hosting their own content is what gets us out of bed in the morning.

Credit to Ali Spivak who kicked this all off and helped us realise what a crucial role good platform documentation plays and how important it is to fund good knowledgeable writers.

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