What happened with the Web Monetization API? • Hacker News Board

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#151

Post by epolanski » Tue, Feb 06, 2024, 10:25 PM UTC

gamepsys wrote: post #138

tommica wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does not seem to be a sustainable solution: if the amount of microtranfers increase, the blocksize is going to be an issue again

The number of real time electronic transactions is virtually guaranteed to increase. This is not only a big problem now, it's becoming a bigger problem over time. I consider the unwillingness of the bitcoin network to increase blocksize to be a critical flaw. 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 f…

Yet bitcointalk and /r/bitcoin were able to sway what later become to be known as Bitcoin Cash into the wrong fork.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#152

Post by lostmsu » Tue, Feb 06, 2024, 10:25 PM UTC

solardev wrote: post #136

Contrarian opinion: As a regular consumer, I don't WANT a decentralized, anonymous currency. For users like me, crypto totally misses the point. I don't want digital cash that can't be traced. I'm not buying drugs or illegal shit. 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 tra…

IMHO, you don't quite understand what you are talking about. Your centralized requirement is entirely bogus. If participants wish so, they could use any of the cryptos to run a subnet with an external oracle/moderator. Or even just build moderation right into smart contracts.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#153

Post by cchance » Tue, Feb 06, 2024, 10:26 PM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #145

gamepsys wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

> Realistically a 100mb block would be large enough to handle all transaction data our species currently generates. 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 s…

Why are you comparing this to bitcoin, bitcoin was never meant to be a fast network lol it was to be a network for cash to sit in "digital gold"...

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.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#154

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 » Tue, Feb 06, 2024, 10:27 PM UTC

dlbucci wrote: post #124

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not saying there aren't good use-cases for this. There absolutely are. What I'm saying is that this tool WILL be used well beyond those cases in ways that make the internet much worse than the ad and surveillance nonsense we currently have to deal with.

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.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#155

Post by epolanski » Tue, Feb 06, 2024, 10:28 PM UTC

downWidOutaFite wrote: post #141

gamepsys wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

That was the reason for the fork of Bitcoin Cash, and indeed BCH blocks are bigger and fees are much smaller. But BTC is still inexplicably way more popular.

Value of technology is not why people aggregate towards Bitcoin.

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.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#156

Post by epolanski » Tue, Feb 06, 2024, 10:28 PM UTC

ptsd_dalmatian wrote: post #121

jjcm wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because it's still theory 7 years after announcement it has been proven again and again to not be a real alternative.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#157

Post by Sargos » Tue, Feb 06, 2024, 10:29 PM UTC

NetOpWibby wrote: post #83

redder23 wrote: post #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 Monop…

Your argument _almost_ sounded cohesive, and I'm a proponent of crypto. 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: /.well-known/wallets/SYMBOL" rel="nofollow">https:// /.well-known/wallets/SYMBOL . You could even utilize IBAN to send to fiat like so: https://example/.well-known…

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) provides this functionality in a standard protocol. You can associate Microsoft.com with an ETH, BTC, SOL, etc address. GoDaddy yesterday actually integrated this in a no-gas free manner [https://aboutus.godaddy.net/newsroom/company-news/news-detai...]. Other DNS providers will likely follow suite over the next few years.

Bonus, most web3 tooling already supports ENS so no jumping through hoops most of the time.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#158

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 » Tue, Feb 06, 2024, 10:29 PM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #129

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adv…

I don't disagree about what the problem is. I just think this particular solution will cause more new problems then the old ones it will theoretically solve.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#159

Post by epolanski » Tue, Feb 06, 2024, 10:30 PM UTC

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?

Why is that even a real need?

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.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#160

Post by Jommi » Tue, Feb 06, 2024, 10:30 PM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #9

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…

> 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.

Where did you read that SEPA is free? Thats not true.