What happened with the Web Monetization API?
chriscoyier.net
chriscoyier.net
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.
I think that's the right call. You don't want the website itself to handle the complexity. It makes much more sense for the browser to handle it.
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.
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.
This is anathema here in the US but the rest of the world typically does not use credit cards as the default payment method.
The 'cardholder can always reverse any charge' behavior is also nice once every few years.
If you have good credit, you can also get 2-4% in credit card cash back on everything via rewards programs.
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.
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.
One option is to have regulations about card fees, which is the case in the EU (0.2% for debit, 0.3% for credit).
Another is to use an alternative payment method, like India's UPI or Eurozone's SEPA which are free and instantaneous.
I’d rather like Taler.
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.
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.
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.
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".
There are already APIs protected by an L402 paywall that charges tiny fractions of a cent for access to protected resources.
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.
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.
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 & "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.
Rampant fraud and scams are what's at the root of the "negative discussion".
https://www.coil.com/#:~:text=On%20March%2015%2C%202023%2C%2....
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth...
You could also use Lightning Network on Bitcoin or any of the Layer 2s on Ethereum like Arbitrum or Optimism. Fees are in the cents range.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-xmr...
Monero has fees of six cents it looks like and a novel and private way of performing transactions.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your claim is opposed to the contents of the original Bitcoin whitepaper
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.
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.
>> 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...)
Some nodes are more popular than others for open a channel to, but there are still several thousands, so calling it centralized is misleading.
For foreign currency, there's a personal use exemption, right? Does this apply to crypto?
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.
IIRC this spam attack cost the attacker only $5000 but rendered the network pretty much useless for hours
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
Having users to pay actions make spam unprofitable, as spam relies on tragedy of commons and abusing public goods. This is why there is so much less SMS spam compared to email spam.
This is literally where cryptocurrencies do the worst...high transaction fees.
It should be, but the cryptocurrency crowd have internalized Austrian deflationary bullshit as a premise for their money system, it's just doomed to be unused as a payment mechanism and keep being used as securities.
It's literally Economics illiteracy killing the use-case.
Interestingly enough, the fact that they are used as securities is also responsible for why bitcoin is still the biggest fish in the pond while being technically pretty meh and long obsolete (very long block time, no “smart contracts”, failed as a decentralized system because ASICs, etc.).
I'm aware that tremendous effort has been and is being invested in that.
But I have yet to be convinced efforts in that direction won't all boil down to "trading decentralization for efficiency."
In which case, why not use a centralized, much more efficient solution?
Anonymity of nodes?
If avoiding KYC / government-control is the primary motivation, then more centralized ledger systems look a lot like current payment networks... just with anonymous operators. (Oof)
All crypto cultists I know don't give a damn to give all of their info to any provider, out there, be tracked everywhere "they already know everything" and yet there is a problem for a 1$ 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.
I don't know if I'm the only one, but I can't see myself giving my identity for 10c to buy blog articles.
Especially since first and last names are a powerful tracking tool that's not as easy to change as your IP address.
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…
This is a joke. Everything seems to be designed around their proprietary app, so why bother with a blockchain and custom currency at all?
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
Though I’d say this is more of an issue for the Netflixes of the world that have to please investors.
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.
It's possible FedNow will fix this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow
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).
It's a cryptocurrency only in implementation, but the actual experience could be replicated with (GoFundMe or any other "creator platform") + A chrome extension.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 :-)
You don’t seem like that per se but if you haven’t seen it before you haven’t been watching.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/jpmorgan-chase-co-agrees-pay-...
Kyc exists for a reason, the same friction free transfer beneath your mental limit can be rerun 10000x by machine and achieve aml outcomes.
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.
[0] https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1754514949995384996
"KYC is useless" is a reasonable summary of "KYC exists to make life hard. It solves no real problems".
And is there a big difference between "Crypto is useless" and "crypto does not solve any real world problems"?
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 this analogy.
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.
I've met the founder in person. Very nice guy and not even Vietnamese!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hmmm
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
LOOK AT THIS PUPPY. HE CRIES WHEN YOU DON'T GIVE US MONEY. YOU DON'T WANT TO MAKE HIM SAD DO YOU?!
[X] BE A GOOD PERSON AND GIVE US MONEY
[_] I ENJOY BEING A DRAIN ON SOCIETY, ANNOY ME AGAIN TOMORROW
And you can't just give them a dollar to get them to shut up. It's always $2.99/mo BEST VALUE (billed centennially $3588.00).
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.
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.
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.
I haven't used Brave for years and don't own their token, but that's just not how Brave ads work at all.
The ads are shown as notifications and aren't replacing ads embedded in websites.
Why mislead people?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
In general, HN users can be trusted to take the side of corporations over humans in the vast majority of situations.
EDIT: Downvoting without giving reasoning just lends further credence to my point that their views are based in selfishness rather than reasoning. ;)
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.
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.
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.
September is the most recent month because I turned the Brave stuff off after that.
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)
Most notably, they defrauded the person who runs archive.today/archive.is:
https://archive.ph/2zdET#issuecomment-671599658
... which seems like a particularly stupid decision.
Dealing with money is a real pain due to fraud, security, and legal compliance and those problems don't go away when the amounts are small.
Are they?
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.
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?
website: https://lagom.org whitepaper: https://lagom.org/docs/lagom-whitepaper.pdf
Notice that almost none of the above is “Web3”, but it can use Web3 (or other means) to do periodic settlements between websites.
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.
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).
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.
What do you mean? You could lose 1 transaction if the merchant turns out to be a scammer and there was no escrow involved, same as cash.
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.
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.
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!
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.
You could even utilize IBAN to send to fiat like so: https://example/.well-known/wallets/USD.
Of course, you'd need do a bit of legwork to implement non-crypto support.
[1]: https://github.com/handshake-org/HIPs/blob/master/HIP-0002.m...
Bonus, most web3 tooling already supports ENS so no jumping through hoops most of the time.
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.
As much as in the past I wanted cryptocurrency to succeed, I agree.
The top up could even be a recurring payment if the user wants.
Cryptocurrencies get us a little closer, maybe. But we're ultimately still having the same discussions.
see also (somewhat of a jump, but the same monetary system) FedNow
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.
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.
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)
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?
Twitter/X hosts plenty of hate speech and is the #6 site in the world according to Wikipedia currently.
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.
1: https://reason.com/2021/02/11/biden-administration-suspends-...
2: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1
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" 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.
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.