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How do I pay the publisher of a web page?

sethmlarson.dev

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Re: How do I pay the publisher of a web page?

#111

Post by radicalriddler »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #110
interactivecode wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree. We should just settle on a single internet currency thats fast, interoperable and not a market for speculation. Hmm perhaps we don’t need more types of currency? Perhaps it’s better to push deep integration of modern banking changes like psd2, psd3 and others. Across the whole internet. So everyone can just do regular payments with their own bank in a safe and protected way, and hopefully with less inter…

> and not a market for speculation. That's the bit I don't know how to solve. I have a feeling it may not be solvable in principle, only mitigated if we could get trading on the thing turned into a crime. You'd still have black market trading, but hopefully much more limited in its impact on ordinary use.

Even modern currency isn't free of being a market for speculation.

It's not as extreme as cryptocurrency, but forex trading is a thing, and honestly the sways of USD to other currencies are meaninful enough to take into consideration when moving money internationally.

Re: How do I pay the publisher of a web page?

#112

Post by pixodaros »

I'm out of the web dev game but wouldn't you just write code to search for links to the ten or so most popular wrappers for Paypal or Stripe and then an API to perform the transaction? That should cover 99% of the actual payments that happen (there are LiberaPay and crypto schemes and bank transfer and SEPA for nerds). I think that basically all the money that moves to support free webpages is through PayPal or Stripe, maybe a few percent by the EU SEPA and Canadian eTransfer systems.

Realistically you Ctrl-F "donate / Paypal / Patreon / support" and click that link. Good web design should make it clear on a screen and in the code what is site content and what is third-party content such as comments with spam links.

Re: How do I pay the publisher of a web page?

#114

Post by mminer237 »

wat10000 wrote: post #58
tekchip wrote: post #13

Isn't this the problem Brave browser set out to solve? It's just that they did it with cryptocurrency so everyone shunned it. https://brave.com/brave-rewards/

Cryptocurrency might have been ok, but this is their own custom currency. In other words, they’re paying people in scrip. They shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t like that.

It/Uphold can automatically convert it to USD. You don't have to concern yourself with the intermediary form at all.

Re: How do I pay the publisher of a web page?

#115

Post by noch »

interactivecode wrote: post #45
grues-dinner wrote: post #33

This is the one thing that I actually thought cryptocurrency would help - getting small adhoc payments out from under the bootheel of Mastercard and Visa, and especially for international transfers that cross between, say, the MC/Visa duopoly regions into other ones like the Asian ecosystems. But instead it's slow, inconsistent, inconvenient, balkanised, dripping with scams, criminals and bad actors and still involve…

Fully agree. We should just settle on a single internet currency thats fast, interoperable and not a market for speculation. Hmm perhaps we don’t need more types of currency? Perhaps it’s better to push deep integration of modern banking changes like psd2, psd3 and others. Across the whole internet. So everyone can just do regular payments with their own bank in a safe and protected way, and hopefully with less inter…

> We should just settle on a single internet currency that's fast, interoperable and not a market for speculation.

With respect to crypto, a "single currency" shouldn't be a prerequisite because, with a $3T mcap, crypto has plenty of liquidity across centralized and decentralized exchanges to allow anyone to convert between any currencies they have on-chain. (Uniswap for instance has $1B - $6B volume transacted daily.)

Declaring a single currency would also be antithetical to free market competition for currencies.

> interoperable

If "interoperable" means you can use the currency anywhere, then I think liquidity for currency conversion is sufficient.

That said, we already have dollar (USD) stablecoins[^0] on all major L1, L2, rollup blockchains. Because they are pegged to the U.S. dollar, they also meet your requirement that the currency not be speculative (Strictly speaking, the U.S. dollar is inflationary and therefore is subject to speculation, but perhaps I'm being pedantic.).

> fast

Rollups[^3] provide fast transactions. These use various cryptographic protocols to verifiably and quickly batch and compress user operations on-chain.

> deep integration of modern banking changes

"Deep integration of modern banking" sounds good but modern banking creates a choke point[^1] where users can be targeted and denied services. Ultimately we would want to be able to stay on-chain for all payments and not need off-ramps which leave users open to debanking[^2] or surveillance. Crypto is permissionless and, with little effort from the user, censorship resistant.

---

[^0]: https://castleisland.vc/writing/stablecoins-the-emerging-mar... "Stablecoins – tokenized representations of fiat currencies circulating on blockchains 1 – are unambiguously the “killer app” of crypto so far. There are over $160 billion worth of stablecoins in circulation today, up from single digit billions as recently as 2020. Over 20 million addresses make a stablecoin transaction on public blockchains every month. And in the first half of 2024, stablecoins settled (according to our adjusted estimates) over $2.6 trillion dollars worth of value. Stablecoins offer considerable advantages relative to existing payment systems, including native programmability, strong auditability properties, fast settlement, the ability to self-custody, and native interoperability"

[^1]: https://www.piratewires.com/p/2023-banking-crisis "Beginning in 2013, Choke Point was a scheme which sought to marginalize specific industries operating legally — not through lawmaking, but by applying pressure via the banking sector."

[^2]: https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1862950205252874552 "[T]he FDIC and other financial regulators had secretly imposed a 15 percent cap on deposits at banks for crypto-related firms."

[^3]: https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary

Re: How do I pay the publisher of a web page?

#116

Post by jimmydoe »

alan wrote: post #102
paxys wrote: post #32

The open web is a platform for freeloaders. Since day 1 the expectation is that whatever is accessible will be free. And whatever isn't will be made free by whatever means necessary. Web content creators/publishers don't bother with micropayments infrastructure because no one is going to pay. Ads are a proven business model and they are going to stay. There are other platforms where micropayments have in fact been so…

7 years ago I tried to start a project to allow customers to pay through the ad networks. IE rather than seeing ads, you'd see something saying how much you were providing to the web page owner. I've so far been unable to actually build it though.

Advertisers want more scale; consumers want no ads. You are in the middle to please no one.

Re: How do I pay the publisher of a web page?

#117

Post by reticulan »

jasode wrote: post #19
elashri wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is sad reality. As an example, I wish Sabine Hossenfelder didn't have to leave academia. Her content (blog posts not videos) were one of the ways I kept up with development in theoretical physics. But now that she is a full time video content creator, she is under pressure to publish click bait and very questionable content. I understand that she is catering to the audience but this is one example why alignment…

>, I wish Sabine Hossenfelder didn't have to leave academia. [...] I understand that she is catering to the audience but this is one example why alignment of the incentives works. Before, she was earning her living as a working physicist so she did not have to cater to anyone actually But this obscures the fact that she was still "catering to the audience" when working in academia as a paid physicist. She was just pl…

Even if we installed fully automated communism and nobody had to work crappy day jobs to feed themselves anymore, the inherent human drive for fame and approval of one's peers would probably still make people placate their audiences to an extent. It's probably just inescapable

Re: How do I pay the publisher of a web page?

#118

Post by numtel »

havnagiggle wrote: post #54

Seems fairly simple to have a smart contract do a DNS validation to unlock funds. For example, someone sends to a contract "$1 to example.com". Then the URL owner publishes either a TXT file or DNS record that has a list of crypto wallet addresses. Contract then forwards the payments. You could even make the keys just the ISO codes for each currency. It's as good of a proof for TLS certs, but it's susceptible to DNS…

You're very close to https://prove.email/

Re: How do I pay the publisher of a web page?

#119

Post by rullelito »

zoezoezoezoe wrote: post #2

I think the way you support publishers is one of a few things * they list a patreon or librepay or whatever and you support them directly * They have ads and they ask you nicely to disable your adblocker (as long as they are unobtrusive I'm fine with this) I think that's really it, if publishers dont give you a clear way to support them, in my eyes, they are providing the service for free.

But crypto..

Re: How do I pay the publisher of a web page?

#120

Post by lakomen »

rmccue wrote: post #6

> I have money and I have a URL, how do I send money to the publisher of that URL? This question could easily be “I have money and I have a person’s name and address, how do I send money to them?” The only way to do this consistently would be to mail them physical cash, since there’s no way to consistently send money electronically across the world (and you’d have a currency conversion problem too - if someone mailed…

Yeah but we're in the digital age and trying to make things better than they were
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