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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?

#121

Post by ptsd_dalmatian »

jjcm wrote: post #113
CaptainFever wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally the use case for cryptocurrencies -- digital cash, not investments. 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.

Please correct me if I'm wrong here (I've been out of the crypto game for a couple years), but I don't think crypto holds up here. The nature of transaction fees with crypto is they scale exponentially with demand. Monero fees are low because volume is low. Bitcoin fees are high ($9.97 was the average transaction fee yesterday!) because volume is high. Any fully decentralized crypto at the scale of use that the Web M…

this is the point of lightning network for btc, way lower costsand nearly instantaneous transactions. I haven’t tried it so far.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#122

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

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…

I'm grateful this hasn't been worked out yet. The magnitude of the shittification of the internet which will occur once this is a solved problem is almost too much to think about. If you are working on this, for the sake of humanity, please stop.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#123

Post by thinkmassive »

indigochill wrote: post #50
stevekemp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding (possibly mistaken - I've only been casually watching from the sidelines) is bitcoin (and at least most other blockchain currencies) suffers a similar problem to credit/debit cards, in that there is effort involved in validating/recording the transaction and that work needs to be compensated, and therefore there are transaction fees that are effectively independent of the value transferred, therefore…

The Lightning Network is a layer on top of Bitcoin, which allows users to aggregate a huge number of transactions into a payment channel that’s tracked off-ledger. The only transactions that need to be settled on the base layer (broadcast to the public Bitcoin blockchain) are channel open and close events.

There are already APIs protected by an L402 paywall that charges tiny fractions of a cent for access to protected resources.

http://l402.tech

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#124

Post by dlbucci »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #122
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…

I'm grateful this hasn't been worked out yet. The magnitude of the shittification of the internet which will occur once this is a solved problem is almost too much to think about. If you are working on this, for the sake of humanity, please stop.

I think a large portion of enshittification comes from sites being advertising revenue driven. This leads to them needing more users with higher engagement, so they grow beyond their scope first and then shittify everything when they need to start making money (see reddit). A large reason sites have to be ad driven is that requiring users to sign up and pay for a site is a huge blocker for most people. So I feel like having a standard easy way for users to send money to a site they use for the utility they receive would go some ways to reduce enshittification, not increase it. But maybe I'm just an optimist.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#125

Post by kerkeslager »

carlosjobim wrote: post #95
kerkeslager wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of HN works in industries which benefit from advertising. It's motivated reasoning. 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. ;)

No need to sugar coat it. If that's what you really think, then write it clearly: "Hey guys! Hey my fellow hackers! That poster is a... is a... CORPORATE SHILL!"

That's not what I really think.

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.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#126

Post by gamepsys »

jjcm wrote: post #113
CaptainFever wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally the use case for cryptocurrencies -- digital cash, not investments. 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.

Please correct me if I'm wrong here (I've been out of the crypto game for a couple years), but I don't think crypto holds up here. The nature of transaction fees with crypto is they scale exponentially with demand. Monero fees are low because volume is low. Bitcoin fees are high ($9.97 was the average transaction fee yesterday!) because volume is high. Any fully decentralized crypto at the scale of use that the Web M…

The current bitcoin blocksize is limited to 1mb. This means, on average, only 1mb worth of transactions can be written to the ledger. With that 1mb we save thousands of transactions. When you pay a transaction fee you are essentially bidding on your data being written to the ledger every 10 minutes. You are correct that the more people bidding, the higher we can expect the price to be.

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.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#127

Post by ForHackernews »

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…

It doesn't even need to be that fast, as long as it's secure and credible. Stock trades in the US happen "instantly" (or near enough), but actual settlement takes place two or three days later.

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

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#128

Post by ethbr1 »

Wazako wrote: post #101
ethbr1 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:/ 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?

I'd ask how you decentralize without having a government requiring KYC?

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)

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#129

Post by notatoad »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #122
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…

I'm grateful this hasn't been worked out yet. The magnitude of the shittification of the internet which will occur once this is a solved problem is almost too much to think about. If you are working on this, for the sake of humanity, please stop.

Most of the "enshittification" that you're talking about is the result of having to find roundabout ways for people to get paid for their work, because simply charging the consumer isn't feasible.

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.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#130

Post by kerkeslager »

nerdo wrote: post #85
kerkeslager wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right... so far this has happened to 3 sites in the top 10 of this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites 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 e…

Porn can be an understandable concern because of the amount of chargebacks it can create for processors, though the excessive chargebacks should be the rule not the porn. Hate speech they never tried to explain afaik. FWIW repealing fair banking[1] was immediate priority for Biden up there with fortifying elections[2]. 1: https://reason.com/2021/02/11/biden-administration-suspends-... 2: https://www.congress.gov/bill…

You're not saying anything I don't already know, you're just changing the topic.

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.

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