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What happened with the Web Monetization API?

chriscoyier.net

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Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#101

Post by Wazako »

ethbr1 wrote: post #98
uncletammy wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just described the value proposition for bitcoin, a peer to peer electronic cash system. Sadly, bitcoin has been captured by banks and is now only useful for gambling and parasitic investment scams.

:/ Distributed ledger technology ever being a viable solution for small, high-frequency transactions seems like a pipe dream. 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?

How do you centralize without having a government requiring KYC?

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#102

Post by pants2 »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #93
internetter wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Blockchain isn't really the solution there, though. 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 restricti…

You can just send a transaction from your exchange.

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.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#103

Post by J_Shelby_J »

ethbr1 wrote: post #98
uncletammy wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just described the value proposition for bitcoin, a peer to peer electronic cash system. Sadly, bitcoin has been captured by banks and is now only useful for gambling and parasitic investment scams.

:/ Distributed ledger technology ever being a viable solution for small, high-frequency transactions seems like a pipe dream. 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?

I mean, Solana does 3k tps on a good day (with less electricity than a google search and a fraction of a penny fee). So it’s not un-believable there will be a decentralized ledger that hits visa levels of throughput in the next few years.

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…

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#104

Post by jacobr1 »

seanwilson wrote: post #5

> 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…

Looks like https://getcode.com/ just launched to solve this problem. There have been many attempts at web3 micropayments, but this one seems slicker than most. Hat tip from USV, one of their investors.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#105

Post by AndrewStephens »

photochemsyn wrote: post #56
michaelt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You can send $40 a month easily but receiving $40 a month from 20000 people is difficult and will raise questions.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#106

Post by RamblingCTO »

pelorat wrote: post #47
teitoklien wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unfettered speech can lead to a cult following which, as we here in Europe know very well, can be extremely fucking dangerous. Which is precisely why some speech will land you in prison.

Yes, exactly. We wouldn't have had hitler if we'd had hate speech laws back in the days!11!1

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#107

Post by gnatman »

imiric wrote: post #68
internetter wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Agreed. Brave actually implemented this exact thing[1], and then got dumped together with other crypto scam projects, which continues to happen in this very thread. 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 dam…

>> 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.

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.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#108

Post by tromp »

stevekemp wrote: post #21
internetter wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Flattr tried to do something similar, but yes I agree. It's unfortunate that bitcoin became a hoarding/speculation thing, rather than a useful thing. 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.

> It's unfortunate that bitcoin became a hoarding/speculation thing

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.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#109

Post by johannes1234321 »

pants2 wrote: post #102
johannes1234321 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain isn't really the solution there, though. 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 restricti…

You can just send a transaction from your exchange. 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 blockc…

Okay, so the solution is to use a bank, not Blockchain money.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#110

Post by Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 »

jacobr1 wrote: post #104
seanwilson wrote: post #5

> 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…

Looks like https://getcode.com/ just launched to solve this problem. There have been many attempts at web3 micropayments, but this one seems slicker than most. Hat tip from USV, one of their investors.

> Privacy taken too far, however, can lead to bad outcomes. To mitigate the potential of Code being used for nefarious activity, Code users are limited to $250 USD per payment, up to $1000 USD per day.

This is a joke. Everything seems to be designed around their proprietary app, so why bother with a blockchain and custom currency at all?

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