How do I pay the publisher of a web page?
sethmlarson.dev
sethmlarson.dev
But instead it's slow, inconsistent, inconvenient, balkanised, dripping with scams, criminals and bad actors and still involves substantial transfer fees and volatility on top of that. At this point it's a market for lemons: any new cryptocurrency venture is almost entirely indistinguishable from something that already ended up being at best a non-starter, but often just a scam.
As a vehicle for speculation, arbitrage and scams, it's a masterpiece. As a currency (you know, like in the name), it's, put lightly, not great, especially if you live in the developed world.
Hmm perhaps we don’t need more types of currency? Perhaps it’s better to push deep integration of modern banking changes like psd2, psd3 and others. Across the whole internet. So everyone can just do regular payments with their own bank in a safe and protected way, and hopefully with less intermediaries.
So there's probably always going to be some kind of transfer or network access fee. It's just that it very much not a competitive market place.
Opening up the system to competition, but still within a regulatory framework that prevents it degenerating into a Wild West hotbed of scamming does seem like a good way to achieve some of that. Certainly, the vaunted "free market" should be ensuring that the price of a transaction is pretty close to the cost of providing it, and it clearly is not currently.
The problem, or feature, depending on who you ask, is that basically only governments can provide that kind of regulation. Which will always then inject a level of geopolitics into things like which countries you're allowed to buy your blog posts from. And for governments who listen to business over citizens also leads to capture and subversion of the system.
That's the bit I don't know how to solve. I have a feeling it may not be solvable in principle, only mitigated if we could get trading on the thing turned into a crime. You'd still have black market trading, but hopefully much more limited in its impact on ordinary use.
It's not as extreme as cryptocurrency, but forex trading is a thing, and honestly the sways of USD to other currencies are meaninful enough to take into consideration when moving money internationally.
With respect to crypto, a "single currency" shouldn't be a prerequisite because, with a $3T mcap, crypto has plenty of liquidity across centralized and decentralized exchanges to allow anyone to convert between any currencies they have on-chain. (Uniswap for instance has $1B - $6B volume transacted daily.)
Declaring a single currency would also be antithetical to free market competition for currencies.
> interoperable
If "interoperable" means you can use the currency anywhere, then I think liquidity for currency conversion is sufficient.
That said, we already have dollar (USD) stablecoins[^0] on all major L1, L2, rollup blockchains. Because they are pegged to the U.S. dollar, they also meet your requirement that the currency not be speculative (Strictly speaking, the U.S. dollar is inflationary and therefore is subject to speculation, but perhaps I'm being pedantic.).
> fast
Rollups[^3] provide fast transactions. These use various cryptographic protocols to verifiably and quickly batch and compress user operations on-chain.
> deep integration of modern banking changes
"Deep integration of modern banking" sounds good but modern banking creates a choke point[^1] where users can be targeted and denied services. Ultimately we would want to be able to stay on-chain for all payments and not need off-ramps which leave users open to debanking[^2] or surveillance. Crypto is permissionless and, with little effort from the user, censorship resistant.
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[^0]: https://castleisland.vc/writing/stablecoins-the-emerging-mar... "Stablecoins – tokenized representations of fiat currencies circulating on blockchains 1 – are unambiguously the “killer app” of crypto so far. There are over $160 billion worth of stablecoins in circulation today, up from single digit billions as recently as 2020. Over 20 million addresses make a stablecoin transaction on public blockchains every month. And in the first half of 2024, stablecoins settled (according to our adjusted estimates) over $2.6 trillion dollars worth of value. Stablecoins offer considerable advantages relative to existing payment systems, including native programmability, strong auditability properties, fast settlement, the ability to self-custody, and native interoperability"
[^1]: https://www.piratewires.com/p/2023-banking-crisis "Beginning in 2013, Choke Point was a scheme which sought to marginalize specific industries operating legally — not through lawmaking, but by applying pressure via the banking sector."
[^2]: https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1862950205252874552 "[T]he FDIC and other financial regulators had secretly imposed a 15 percent cap on deposits at banks for crypto-related firms."
Yes, all real world payments, from credit cards, to bank transfers have transaction fees. Depending on where you are in the world, even cash payments can include taxes per transaction.
> Every swap costs money.
Yes, currency conversion in real life includes fees.
> I now have to choose which L2 provider to trust implicitly, with no recourse on failure.
No, the whole point of a rollup is that your transactions are posted to L1 in a provable manner. Optimistic rollups and ZK rollups all allow you to transact without having to trust the L2. (There are caveats for those L2s that are in various stages of implementation and that's all public information.)
> And at the end of it, I still have internet points, instead of something that can pay rent or buy food.
The question was how to pay the publisher of a web page and this is a technology forum. So we discuss technological solutions. Paying rent and buying food is a solved problem.
In reality, there are billions of Dollars, Euros, Pounds, AUD, and other currencies moving in and out of crypto daily via on/off-ramps. Bitcoin and Ether ETFs exist and are well capitalized and widely used. You claim "Binance is closed" yet I'm quite sure I used it this week. I also use Kraken quite happily to send money to my bank account. Coinbase of course is thriving.
If you transact in size, simply hold USDC[^1] and open an account with Circle[^2].
> Stripe stopped accepting
Your information is outdated: https://docs.stripe.com/crypto/onramp
> Mtgox is closed
Have you used or looked into crypto since MtGox? It's been quite some time since that affair. You'd probably be surprised to find how much utility there is if that was the last time you actually investigated crypto. There are also P2P options like Paxful, Telegram, or Binance P2P if you prefer.
Anyway, if you're fixated with the old guard of finance then any advancement in technology will necessarily have to meet incumbent institutions requirements, with all the problems I listed earlier in the thread. With a bit of effort, you could instead imagine an entirely digital internet economy with so-called crypto points. Even that alone would be step forward and a mere generation of users away from your landlord, a crypto user, accepting them as payment.
Reality, however is such that right now you can fund a debit card with crypto and buy coffee with no problems. [^0]
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[^0]: https://gnosispay.com/, https://www.coinbase.com/card
I wish we would all agree to just go back to mostly using paypal (or venmo, zelle, etc) for online shit and leave crypto out of it. The only advantage to crypto is anonymity, and possibly the ability to send smaller fractional payments, but honestly the existing non-crypto solutions could come up with solutions to those things.
The convenience of the scamming is partly why it _is_ a solution to this problem: people can transfer value as fast as they desire, and it works. There is also just a problem off on and off-boarding where you get hit by Visa/Mastercard level of fees. So is it really solving the problem at that point?
One area I would like to see is some kind of governed/regulated profit sharing. Basically giving your votes to content/production and this puts it on the books for some fraction of payment. You get X shares to distribute to content regularly. It would also be helpful if our government would provide support for independent producers where there's a clear trackable benefit (e.g. open source libraries that a ton of people rely on and a business can say "yes I need this, help them keep doing it").
I want to scream. This is a speculative investment with more bad actors involved than the SEC has investigated throughout its entire history.
I hate these bitcoin boom cycles. It's like all the lessons learned immediately get forgotten.
Him: "But this time is different. Last time the Democrats were holding it back. Trump is going to make a strategic crypto reserve. Trump and his allies are all pro-crypto. The Democratic party was trying to regulate it away."
I guess this will be the next lesson.
I will give Trump credit for putting AI and Crypto in the same department though.
There a couple of ways that the price of Bitcoin could drop precipitously and the unraveling of Tether is one of them.
A real-world example where Lightning Network is already working is Nostr. It's not hard to get a Nostr client with built-in Lightning functionality (like Primal) and start "zapping" tiny payments to others.
I'm not affiliated with Primal, just a fan, and a developer who wants to see a system like this work.
Only downside is that you have to reveal your account data online.
I know a guy who runs an online shop with a single product and it is a static website saying "Transfer 12 € to the following bank account with the following subject and your name/address" — apparently this works quite well since the mid 90s. The website still uses frames for its layout and has animated gif flags.
and it can't be free.. even though the systems might have no further marginal cost per transaction, banks still need to do anti-money laundering checks, and someone's gotta pay for that
Some people dream of 'micropayments' at a similar price point. Being able to buy a single article for about 2.6¢.
For consumers, a subscription model seems to fit the bill for most people but some media are apparently better suited than others.
This dream of eliminating that middle-person is still a dream.
For example for Bitcoin there's the Lightning network as L2, where you do one transaction to open the channel, and one to close it, and channels can remain open for months. Payments are routed through a network of channels, so you only need one or a few channels to other nodes and can reach all nodes in the network.
The transactions are much cheaper in this network precisely because they're not on chain, but it's still secure because each L2 transaction leads to a signed (but not published) blockchain transaction that each party of the channel can choose to publish at any time (and close the channel).
There's a bit more to it, and I recommend anyone who isn't aware of L2 networks to look into it.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rul...
It's easy to address every possible issue when your project is vaporware and you can just write "royalty mechanism" rather than having to actually implement one.
This question could easily be “I have money and I have a person’s name and address, how do I send money to them?”
The only way to do this consistently would be to mail them physical cash, since there’s no way to consistently send money electronically across the world (and you’d have a currency conversion problem too - if someone mailed me US$0.23, it’s not worth exchanging it).
Building micropayments infrastructure requires building broader financial infrastructure, not just adding a meta tag. This can use existing infrastructure to some extent, but it’s a pretty big challenge.
(For example, in Australia, you can send someone money if you have their email address (via PayID), so you could bootstrap that part - minus the international part.)
Though in my experience, publishers and creators make it pretty easy to find that information, so the use of this tech would be very niche.
In theory there'd be SWIFT, but that's too slow and expensive.
The EU has the SEPA, but few other countries actually care about joining or replicating that success.
[1] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
Send a cheque?
But I don't think the chequebook I have can be used to sent money to someone outside of France. And I only have a chequebook because that's how I have to pay my electricity bill.
I suspect if you sent me one, my credit union would figure out how to get me the money eventually.
But this obscures the fact that she was still "catering to the audience" when working in academia as a paid physicist. She was just placating a different audience and worked on topics she really didn't think was groundbreaking just to keep the grant money rolling in. The misalignment of incentives just happened outside of Youtube.
Deep link to her explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8&t=4m37s
A lot of viewers wish that "content creator" wasn't a thing and people just did Youtube for free as a hobby. Understandable. But what viewers don't realize is that it's also actually saying this: "Please continue being unhappy in your crappy day job so you don't need to live off money from Youtube ads or sponsorships."
It’s totally fair that emotionally she was done with one and able better to continue work with the other, but removing the hobby element actually did remove one set of well aligned incentives and did not replace them with another.
It's hard to get people to find it though due to the platforms all promoting professionals from which they earn more. But on the other hand I don't really care either.
But the reverse is also true: Not for everybody being content creator is the dream job. Some like creating something once in a while, but otherwise enjoy their life and job.
If I search for ANYTHING, I get a tutorial, or tips, or some clickbait like "I had no idea about this!" Every video is by someone whose job is Youtube. The giveaway is that all of them have custom thumbnails. Someone who just made a random video about something and posted on the free video platform wouldn't even have bothered getting a custom thumbnail for it. You can't find those videos, at all. At this point it wouldn't surprise me if a custom thumbnails was a requirement for the algorithm to consider your video even if it isn't spelled out anywhere.
1. https://www.avclub.com/why-does-everyone-on-youtube-make-the...
The problem is that there's no web-standard way for people who do want to be paid to indicate how.
The author of this article wants a special HTML meta property but we’ve already that solved: plain text and hyperlinks.
* they list a patreon or librepay or whatever and you support them directly * They have ads and they ask you nicely to disable your adblocker (as long as they are unobtrusive I'm fine with this)
I think that's really it, if publishers dont give you a clear way to support them, in my eyes, they are providing the service for free.
There are other platforms where micropayments have in fact been solved – see Twitch, OnlyFans, YouTube, Substack, Patreon, IAP on iOS/Android, WeChat, Gaming. That's where the innovation in the space will be because that's where the money is.
Agreed completely, assuming that "innovation" is a euphemism for "grifting". These platforms are completely dominated by rent-seeking and borderline fraudulent garbage. I'd take a web ring over the front page of the App Store in any context.
> Do Brave Ads replace ads on websites? What do Brave Ads look like?
> No, Brave Ads do not replace the ads that the Brave Browser blocks on web pages (like banner ads). You can find a list of Brave’s ad formats here.
> What do Brave Ads look like?
> You can choose which ones you’d like to see: images on the new tab page, cards in your Brave News feed, push notifications, and others.
Creators also don’t get “a” cut. Brave gives 70% of earnings on ads to users, and those can then decide how much they reward to the creators of whatever content they consume.
BAT being crypto is also nice because it automatically means you can just buy BAT directly and support sites without having to see a single ad or cumbersomely figure out how to somehow donate to each site/creator directly.
> Step Two: Brave Replaces Ads We recognize that ads pay for most of our web content. Ads are not going away. So we replace the bad ads with Brave Ads, which we use to pay publishers and users.
Maybe they don't replace ads now but they seem to have done it in the past. Or at least talked about doing it.
Really man, drop the crusade. Look at Brave their tech blog (Project Sugarcoat for example, something directly meant to make page ad hiding more cosmetically pleasing). Or the fact that their defaults are more private than Firefox its defaults.
For the weird missteps they did in the past (appending their affiliate link on crypto sites and one other scandal that eludes me), they’re a really good org / product now.
> Creators also don’t get “a” cut. Brave gives 70% of earnings on ads to users, and those can then decide how much they reward to the creators of whatever content they consume.
Ie, creators are offered a cut - in a roundabout way.
Hell, it is the opposite of a racket because other adblockers / adblocking people pay zilch. That is the racket. Any BAT user is a +70% gain.
I’ll pay you. I won’t compromise my devices for you.
Try to think about this from the perspective of another person instead of yourself.
Or think about this comparison: I own a bar where I sell drinks to the general public. Then some businessman comes in, throws out my bar staff and starts selling his own drinks to the guests, and offers 10% of revenue to me. Is that fair and honest? Who was the legitimate drink seller and who wasn't? Now you can say that alcohol is bad for your health and shouldn't be sold at all, and that you as a customer don't care. But it is very clear who is legit and who isn't.
Which is a completely wrong comparison.
- You own a bar (website) and serve drinks (ads) to the general public.
- A large subset of your visitors decides they like the atmosphere of the bar, but whenever you try to sell them a drink, they refuse to order one. Alcohol is bad, they claim, and since you aren't offering non-alcoholic drinks, they've decided its moral to not order anything and enjoy your bar for free.
- An enterprising individual (Brave) recognizes the plight of both the bar owner and the customers. They surreptitiously serve non-alcoholic drinks (clean ads) to the bothersome customers.
- They sell the drinks at 70% discount, and strongly suggest to the customers to generously tip with the net gain of money, to ensure the continued existence of the bar they enjoy so much.
Brave isn't turning non-adblocking visitors into adblocking visitors. Its converting adblocking visitors into revenue-generating visitors.
This is the reason why corruption is so rampant in the world. People skip the line to get healthcare by bribing an official. They think it's right, because they only look for their own interests. The bribe-taking official is an "enterprising individual".
The creators of Brave skillfully use this egotism of users to make them accept and even defend their illicit practices. "Oh, I get free money, then I like it". If they were honest about their business they would distribute their ad money to creators without going through the user, but which user would then enable their illicit ads?
Blocking ads as a user is completely different. Nobody makes money by blocking ads for themselves.
No, you're just an arrogant piece of work without an ounce of self-reflection in him. Bye.
I would much rather that creators who want to make money decide what they want to sell, and how they want to sell it. The web doesn't need a crypto tip jar layer.
IMO this is mind-blowing, tangible proof that micropayments in return for my time and attention works. Imagine a world where our attention is actually valued and rewarded, where all people receive income through many various streams as they navigate the physical and digital worlds. We can argue back and forth about pros/cons/ethics of arriving at my anecdotal valuation (bitcoin, crypto, etc), but that's not my point -- the point is that this type of system actually does function, and in theory could raise tides enough across the world to lift all boats in really positive ways.
Tangential, but Michael Saylor has also opined about how this type of micro-payment / micro-staking could go in the opposite direction, using smart contracts and Lightning to escrow fractional tokens to participate in social media or even prevent DDOS attacks if woven into the underlying networking appropriately. Obviously I'm skeptical about certain latencies that would be added but, conceptually, forcing people to have SOME skin in the game and doing it in an invisible, frictionless way is quite intriguing.
Anyways, just one man's journey from Milan to Minsk by way of Brave and BAT lol
It's as good of a proof for TLS certs, but it's susceptible to DNS hijacking, etc. Make the contract immutable to meet tornado.cash standard. There are already oracles for DNS lookups so this contract might already exist somewhere.
Add in a couple of features:
1. Allow tracking per domain so publishers can know that there is a demand to set it up on their end.
2. Allow refunds in case the publisher never opens it up.
My guess is that 1. there’s virtually no demand from potential supporters for a more convenient way to pay creators than existing payment/subscription apps, and 2. relatively few creators have direct control over their own internet presence anymore, so any solution that requires modifying a web page is dead in the water.
Any new attempt to pay creators that doesn’t factor these two realities in will likely fail, because it just makes things harder than existing solutions.
Yeah you essentially need a system has an internal balance that would then let you send and receive micropayments and only convert them to cash when the balance is large enough that the processing fee makes sense.
The API and standards talk in the article is putting the cart before the horse. There is currently no way to send money peer-to-peer without an intermediary that can handle the bank transfer, and intermediaries tend to charge a lot for this service.
Because of this, the best options are to add a PayPal or Ko-fi button on the site, with the understanding that the publisher won't be receiving the full amount you send.
Realistically you Ctrl-F "donate / Paypal / Patreon / support" and click that link. Good web design should make it clear on a screen and in the code what is site content and what is third-party content such as comments with spam links.
The problem is that payments that cannot be centrally surveilled and centrally vetoed (without burden of proof of probable cause, usually) are actually illegal to implement.
To do anything like this requires strong ID and KYC for payer and recipient and that isn’t what bare URLs and the web are about.
All of the cool applications of online payments that would spread quickly and efficiently are illegal.
It’s truly sad.
Won't, or can't?
Do you have a good article about how to set up a paywall or tip jar for small transactions, with a clear description of what percentage goes to middlemen and (mainly in the case of proof of work) how much externality cost it incurs?
I would like to be able to pay $cents or even $dollar for instant access to an article, but only if X% actually goes to the recipient (I don't know what X is, yet), and I would lead by example on my own content. (though most likely tip jar, not paywall)
So for context, we built a lightning paywall(now defunct). All you had to do was add a single line of js to your site, as easy as Google analytics/ads. The cost was 0.01% of transaction. You could even move to self hosting and not pay us. Finally, we even built an "auto payer" so users could approve a site and auto pay a few cents with limits. Anyways, our experience is content publishers said they wanted to monetize their content but when it came down to it, were extremely reluctant to add a paywall and would maybe think of adding tipping.
Anyways I think our solution was great but no product market fit. I was especially proud how private the whole thing was but users didn't seem to really value that
The "won't" is because of two reasons: 1) too high overhead, and 2) bootstrap problem. Nobody has the ability to pay with one click set up.
When I say "can't" I mean that they can't set up a payment system that everybody can use, and also doesn't have too high fees. Of course they can set up a method that nobody will use. They could set up a bitcoin paywall, and have huge waiting times, enormously expensive overhead, and no customers for the payment method.
> All you had to do was add a single line of js to your site, as easy as Google analytics/ads.
Super easy on the server side. Yay.
> The cost was 0.01% of transaction. You could even move to self hosting and not pay us.
Oh, neat. But you're missing a step in the explanation, I think. How did it work on the client side? Presumably:
1. Clients need to create an account with you (lose 99% of people already)
2a. Client needs to create a balance with you, e.g. by paying in $10 in one go, to spend this month. (lose further 99% of people); or
2b. Client gets charged once a month for their total amount (probably better client acceptance)
But in any case, what are your card fees? I can't imagine this product had 0.01% end to end fees, given the hoops I have to jump through just to send money between my own bank accounts without paying fees.
And that's not even tackling currency exchange.
Some (but definitely not all) cryptocurrencies may fare better in the fees department, but not only does that have its own sets of problems (e.g. legal and PR), most people would still need to acquire a balance.
> Anyways I think our solution was great but no product market fit.
It does sound great. But also doesn't sound like it solved the hard problem.
When you pitched this to publishers, how many users could you say were ready to send them money today, using installed extensions and pre-filled wallets?
Maybe the digital euro will help, here.
This is why so many sponsorship platforms are effectively subscription models with additional exclusive content or early access. And for that to work, you need more than just a payment button, you need a content publishing platform that will handle all the subs and content gating.
Humans have no problem tipping, the issue is that a single article or piece of content is rarely worth than a fractional amount of whatever your preferred currency is, and it costs more than that amount to transfer that currency. Sponsorships work because you pay normal amounts of currency to receive a larger future block of content.
To make tipping work, you need a system that supports allowing you to deposit normal sums of money but then dole it out in micropayments, and also not charge more than those payments for processing the micropayments. A payment system like Paypal, that maintains an internal balance that is used instead of just transferring from one bank account to another (zelle, venmo), could handle this but I don't think the financial incentives are there for them to bother with it.
It's manual for now, but the computer tracks who to pay next, who to stop paying, and give you links to speed up the process.
See: https://fosstodon.org/@sethmlarson/113575887792359030
Happy to answer questions :)
> I wish I could click a button to easily send a "tip" to someone who created something I enjoy or to browse other options for supporting them.
I believe most people invested in getting donations already have a similar button on their page.
With an explicit button, you have to read and acknowledge who you are giving to.
Come to think of it you can do this with normal DNS by just setting a wallet address in a TXT record but that's not integrated into anything. It's just text.
People want to be paid in cash. Not some internet money that has to go through an exchange to be converted into actual cash. If ENS was so great, people would already be using it.
The answer to the riddle, how to pay the publisher: You make your own website and write your own article(s) If the reward worthy publisher wrote something that fits the context of your website (or one of them) and it is worth reading for your readers you make a link to it. <a href=""> etc An endorsement like that, from the right person, is worth a lot but it is not required. You just make a nice article for other people, they could do the same. We all win or lose together.
If this could be turned into a world wide standard, one could add a link to a QR code in a web page to request for donations. One should realize that there are very different payments systems in the world and that there are payment companies, think credit card companies, that have good reasons to resist these kind of global standards.
[1] https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/document-library/guid...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40972106
Would be nice for the EU to implement such a feature.
Still, fragmentation of crypto makes the whole experience shitty - but we've been working on this to fix that: https://docs.peanut.to/checkout-api
Those transaction costs you're talking about are still a couple orders of magnitude (or more!) too high for this to be a viable solution for these kinds of micro payments.
This doesn't even get into the necessary transaction throughput that's still it's own unsolved problem
The problem is that crypto doesn't provide anything that non-crypto shouldn't wouldn't also provide in a cheaper and easier to implement way.
- worldwide
- private
- anonymous
- no middle man
- no censorship
- costs 0.0X per transaction
- take less than 10 minutes
If we're talking "direct" payments, as much as it pains me to say it, it would be bitcoin, wouldn't it? Just put a wallet address in a <meta> and you're done. But with its operational overhead it may be a waste for micro-transactions compared to traditional payment methods.
To be honest, the real problem isn't that there is no way to mark this up, is that even if there WAS a way to mark this up, most people wouldn't because it's not a browser API. People don't even use RSS because browsers don't tell users about RSS links. There needs to be a tangible consequence of using a tag for people to bother with it. If a $ doesn't appear on the address bar, what is the point?