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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?

#181

Post by nerdo »

kerkeslager wrote: post #130
nerdo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The regime doesn’t want people saying or thinking things they aren’t being currently told to say and think. The regime is technically not allowed to use the legal system directly to punish people for this quasi-crime but is very happy to ruin everything else in same pursuit. So why should a protocol for p2p financial transactions the regime doesn’t control be allowed to exist?

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#182

Post by paulddraper »

CaptainFever wrote: post #80
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…

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.

> This is literally the use case for cryptocurrencies

This is literally where cryptocurrencies do the worst...high transaction fees.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#183

Post by yokem55 »

Sargos wrote: post #148
EE84M3i wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way to use crypto for this without adding a bunch of new capital gain/loss items to my taxes? For foreign currency, there's a personal use exemption, right? Does this apply to crypto?

This would most likely be based on stablecoins (US users would use USDC/USDT etc) so no tax issues there.

Technically, you are creating taxable events when going in and out of stables to normal USD. Its just that there usually only very minimal gain or loss in the transaction.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#184

Post by dns_snek »

solardev wrote: post #173
lostmsu wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? I don't want a bunch of small operators independently moderating, or hope for a bug free implementation of a smart contract. The whole point is regulatory instead of technical protection. I don't want code to supercede the laws that exist to protect us. I especially don't want my finances under the care of the kinds of companies and opportunistic individuals normally drawn to crypto. One mistake and everything i…

> One mistake and everything is gone.

What do you mean? You could lose 1 transaction if the merchant turns out to be a scammer and there was no escrow involved, same as cash.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#185

Post by Mistletoe »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #94
Mistletoe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there is, there are tons of cryptocurrencies that can do this but everyone here hates crypto and throws the baby out with the bathwater and won’t stop parroting “SCAM!” every time they hear the word. It’s too expensive to use on-chain transactions on things like Bitcoin or Ethereum but there are other coins. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth... You could also use Lightning Network…

Pointing to my comment elsewhere on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39279246

Some blockchains have private transactions and very good at it indeed.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-xmr...

Monero has fees of six cents it looks like and a novel and private way of performing transactions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#186

Post by Filligree »

frutiger wrote: post #7
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 This is anathema here in the US but the rest of the world typically does not use credit cards as the default payment method.

Americans use credit cards as the default payment method? Why?

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#187

Post by JacobThreeThree »

gnatman wrote: post #107
imiric wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

Exactly the point I was hoping to read. Well said.

Rampant fraud and scams are what's at the root of the "negative discussion".

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#188

Post by alisonatwork »

kelnos wrote: post #176
didntcheck wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A paid web could eliminate the ad ecosystem and all its toxicity (surveillance technology, etc.) It could, but we've now seen the absolute vitriol levelled at sites who dare to ask for a bit of money in return for content, and the lengths people will go to to avoid paying then make up some excuse to justify it. It's funny how a common excuse for ad blocking used to be "I'd pay for content if there was an option", y…

I think it's a little more nuanced than that. I would be fine paying per-article on a lot of news sites, if the cost was on the order of single-digit cents. I consume most of my news via aggregators like HN, so I have no loyalty to any particular news site. I'm not going to pay $30/mo for a subscription when I read maybe 5-10 articles on a site per month, at most. And I'm certainly not going to pay for subscriptions…

This is exactly the same problem that happened with streaming services. When there was only one streaming service that had most of the stuff on it, a lot of people felt it was reasonable to pay $15 per month. But then the streaming services splintered and it would now cost n * $15 per month to watch the exact same shows you were watching before.

The economics of it make sense from the perspective of the creators, but they don't from the perspective of the consumers. Creators need enough cash that they can afford to survive flops, but consumers only want to pay for hits. This is why I think micropayments will never be a great solution for TV, journalism etc.

As a consumer, I can see the appeal of taking a Robin Hood approach. Pay for one streaming service and pirate the rest. Pay for one newspaper subscription and bypass paywalls on the rest. Adblock all of the things. If the law of big numbers holds then all of the content providers with at least some content worth consuming should end up getting fairly compensated. If those economics don't work out, then neither would micropayments anyway.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#189

Post by djbusby »

thrwwycbr wrote: post #180
paxys wrote: post #174

The problem with web payments isn't the lack of a standard API, it's everything that happens under the hood. As a developer it makes no difference to me whether the browser natively supports a payments interface or I add it in via one line of JavaScript. Now tell me how to deal with credit card fees, sales tax, direct debit, crypto transfer and a million other jurisdiction-dependent payment mechanisms and rules. Does…

The core issues with the Web Monetization API is that all the things you mentioned get dangerously close to SAP and Salesforce waters, and there's a reason these systems are the definition of bloated legacy accounting tech.

It's not bloat when you "need" those features (read: BIG Company)

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#190

Post by tzs »

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? Or an approach that doesn't require one company to have a monopoly over it?

Either one company with a monopoly or maybe a small number of companies is probably the only feasible way to do it, because efficient payment processing is only half the problem.

The other half is taxes. Every time someone in a browser pays to unlock content provided by someone in a different tax jurisdiction some government is likely to view that as a taxable sale that someone has to collect sales tax or VAT for.

In many places (EU, US) it is the jurisdiction where the buyer resides that is owed the tax, but the seller who is supposed to deal with collecting and paying it.

Unless we can get a lot of countries to make special rules for small consumer content purchases that greatly simplify this, the most practical approach is to have a small number of content marketplaces.

So say you are in the EU and want to buy an article from the New York Times. Instead of directly paying the NYT you would go to one of the market sites and buy a NYT access token from them. You can use that access token to get your article from the Times.

What going through the intermediate marketplace does is make it so your monetary transaction is with them, not the NYT. Instead of each content provider having to deal with taxes in dozens of different jurisdictions it is just the marketplaces.

The marketplace would pay the NYT for the access token, but that would be a business to business sale of a product for resale which most places exempt from sales tax and VAT. It's just going to be ordinary income for the content providers that they report on their own income tax.

You don't want too many separate marketplaces so that content providers can reasonably offer their content in all of the marketplaces. That way consumers just need an account at one marketplace.

The marketplace approach also largely solves the problem of transaction fees. Instead of each article you unlock for $0.10 being a separate charge on your card you'd preload your account at the marketplace you use. You credit card would only be charged for the initial prepay and then whenever you need to refill it.

The big issue I see is keeping it from devolving to something like the current streaming movie/TV market where content providers make exclusive deals with different marketplaces.

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