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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?

#241

Post by knlam »

latchkey wrote: post #198

A friend of mine in Vietnam needed some quick cash to go home for Tet holiday and asked me for help in paying for their travel costs and some spending money. Nothing nefarious, just a few hundred USD. I'm happy to help them. I went to a popular VN crypto website, put in their name and bank account number and how much I wanted to send them (and on what crypto network and token, as they support a bunch of them). The si…

I love crypto. I even built an SDK to make crypto payment easy [0] However, KYC is there for a reason. Personally, I don't touch any crypto on/offramp service without proper KYC

[0] https://1pay.network

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#242

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

Filligree wrote: post #186
frutiger wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Fraud protection, mostly.

If someone steals your debit card and spends all your money, you might very well be fucked.

But (in America) if someone steals your credit card and spends a bunch of money, they technically stole money from the bank, so it's the bank that might be fucked, not you. All you have to say is "yeah that wasn't me" and the bank reverses the transaction.

If you're blatantly abusing this the bank will end their relationship with you and cancel your card, but that's pretty much worst case scenario, and you won't be on the hook for anything. And they obviously make enough money off of people who carry a balance and pay interest that they still come out way ahead.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#243

Post by sofixa »

Jommi wrote: post #160
sofixa wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is. Some shitty banks charge for SEPA Instant, but otherwise SEPA transfers themselves are fully free. Where aren't they?

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#244

Post by crotchfire »

latchkey wrote: post #210
ggm wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you amortise the kyc cost then wise or similar does this just as frictionless. Basically, crypto does not solve any real world problems that don't have other solutions. Kyc exists for a reason, the same friction free transfer beneath your mental limit can be rerun 10000x by machine and achieve aml outcomes.

Of course I've used Wise to send money. It was full of confusing KYC friction that took several days to resolve. Cost more than $0.05, took more than a few hours to complete, didn't allow me to use my own currency (crypto) and required my friend to also setup a Wise account and go through the same contortions on their end. KYC exists to make life hard. It solves no real problems, just like the TSA at airports. Securi…

KYC exists to make life hard. It solves no real problems, just like the TSA at airports.

I love this analogy.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#245

Post by crotchfire »

TotempaaltJ wrote: post #2

I think another interesting development related to this space is GNU Taler[0], which has gotten EU and NLnet grants, and could probably hook into these APIs. [0]: https://taler.net/en/index.html

Taler is basically just a cover to allow countries to stop printing banknotes and minting coins.

Once banknotes and coins have fallen out of use, there's absolutely nothing in Taler preventing those governments from changing all the rules. They can simply decide to abandon the payer-anonymity as soon as they've migrated people off of banknotes-and-coins. Sorry folks! We had to stop doing blind-signing because AML and terrorists. But that's okay, we'll sign your unblinded tokens instead! And we promise not to store all those token identifiers in some huge surveillance database somewhere. Pinky-swear.

Taler really has very little to do with the internet. It's all about shutting down the presses and mints without provoking riots.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#246

Post by crotchfire »

hubraumhugo wrote: post #4

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?

They basically scammed everybody who tried to use, spend, or exchange those BATs, using silly AML/KYC nonsense as an excuse.

Most notably, they defrauded the person who runs archive.today/archive.is:

https://archive.ph/2zdET#issuecomment-671599658

... which seems like a particularly stupid decision.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#247

Post by wtracy »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #229
tzs wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But why is the VAT a showstopper ? Because of extra complexity ? But the payment software itself can figure out the exact amounts. Which then can also be aggregated monthly/yearly. Not to mention that plenty of jurisdictions only require that for businesses, while non-businesses don't have to report anything about their donations/sales unless they cross a yearly threshold.

I can't find it now, but several years ago a dev posted his experiences here dealing with VAT when selling software across the EU.

He had to comply with a completely different set of tax laws for each EU member state that he received a purchase from. The cost he paid to his accountant to be able to be in compliance was like twice what he paid in actual taxes.

A big party of the problem is that many of the tax laws were so inconsistent and vaguely worded that every transaction had to be gone over manually.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#248

Post by _heimdall »

starttoaster wrote: post #170
acchow wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bitcoin was never meant to be a fast network lol it was to be a network for cash to sit in "digital gold"... Your claim is opposed to the contents of the original Bitcoin whitepaper https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

That white paper was written when? 2008, give or take a couple years? "Speed," as we refer to it, is relative to the age. In 2008, the threshold for terms like "fast" was much lower than it is today.

Where are you getting "speed is relative to age" from? As far as I'm aware 100mph in 2008 is the same as 100mph today, and 10 minutes hasn't changed either.

The bitcoin white paper clearly describes the goal as a digital cash with and low fee transactions without the used of a trusted third party. We have none of those today in bitcoin.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#249

Post by _heimdall »

pants2 wrote: post #119
johannes1234321 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But you can't send $0.01 instantly and anonymously with bank rails. The solution is to use a crypto exchange on crypto rails - just not a regular crypto wallet (you could, but perhaps not very user friendly)

Isn't that just turning the exchanges into unregulated banks?

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#250

Post by _heimdall »

bee_rider wrote: post #88
pelorat wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck getting something like that past Eu regulators.

Why? It seems like the sort of privacy-supporting thing they’d like.

They also like taxes, and this seems like a nightmare for VAT.
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