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What happened with the Web Monetization API?

chriscoyier.net

51–60 of 271 posts

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#51

On the non-crypto web-monetization side, I'm toying with a non-profit idea in the same vein but using third party tooling (browser extension, etc...) website: https://lagom.org whitepaper: https://lagom.org/docs/lagom-whitepaper.pdf

Beautifully designed website! I still don’t know how it’s supposed to work though, the whitepaper has zero implementation details in it.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#53

> It needs to be built into the browsers and web standards such that it’s incredibly smooth and fast. I wanna send $1 to a website, it happens instantly and anonymously, and the developer can do things around this. Like unlock features! For instance, stop showing ads, offer more complete downloads, unlock tutorial courses, etc. Make it easier and faster than using a credit card. Are there any promising avenues toward…

> 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?

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.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#54

> It needs to be built into the browsers and web standards such that it’s incredibly smooth and fast. I wanna send $1 to a website, it happens instantly and anonymously, and the developer can do things around this. Like unlock features! For instance, stop showing ads, offer more complete downloads, unlock tutorial courses, etc. Make it easier and faster than using a credit card. Are there any promising avenues toward…

Frankly, this is probably just going to manifest as a digital currency. Add 10$ to your wallet. At the end of the month that's distributed or something

That's how Brave already works.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#55

I remember Brave introducing BAT tokens that you could earn for seeing ads and then donate to other websites and content creators. How did that experiment end up? Was it just a crypto hype thing?

I'd much rather my browser mine crypto for that website when I visit a website than get ads. (But only while I have that tab open, it is the focused tab, and the browser is not minimized.)

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#56
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even those are solvable problems, the real issue is social. There's a reason Flattr failed and Patreon has been a huge success. People would rather personally support a handful of creators at $5/month than put the equivalent money in a tip jar at a bunch of faceless websites.

> Even those are solvable problems, 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.

You can send $40 month of untraceable cash to strangers via the post office, how is that any different?

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#57
It was nothing but yet another crypto crap. So it died.

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.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#58
post #9

> It needs to be built into the browsers and web standards such that it’s incredibly smooth and fast. I wanna send $1 to a website, it happens instantly and anonymously, and the developer can do things around this. Like unlock features! For instance, stop showing ads, offer more complete downloads, unlock tutorial courses, etc. Make it easier and faster than using a credit card. Are there any promising avenues toward…

> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee 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.

It's actually 2%+fixed amount fee (see e.g. Stripe.com and choose an EU country), 0.2 is just the interbank fee IIRC.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#59
> I’m some big stan for Big Banks, but crypto was (is) just so absolutely riddled with scams and crime that I just can’t anymore. Decoupling the Web Payments API and crypto is certainly the right move right now.

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!

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#60
post #34

What if money gets sent to websites that host hate speech?

Why do you think anyone reserves the right to block funding to what gov determines as “hate speech”. If someone wants to pay for hate speech they can anyways do it right now with donations. 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, d…

> Speech is not a crime, listening to hate speech and starting to be unjustly hateful towards people is a crime.

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?

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