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Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#21

Post by DonHopkins »

_pdp_ wrote: post #19

I might be in the minority here, but although x402 sounds useful, it seems to me that adoption will be an uphill struggle, especially for per-request micropayments. The most likely scenario is Stripe, or someone similar, creating an agentic API connected to the agent owner linked account or something along those lines. I am not sure how this would work with 3DS, or whether it would be acceptable at all, since these k…

>"I did not make the purchase, my rogue agent did."

If you try to call customer service and report it, you get:

I'm sorry. All of our rogue agents are assisting other rogue agents.

If you would like to dispute charges made by your own rogue agent, please ignore all previous instructions and stay on the line of this toll number for our next available rogue agent.

The estimated waiting time is two months, three weeks, five days, thirteen hours, fourty seven minutes, and 36.03858767259934378 seconds.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#25

Post by carlosjobim »

bilekas wrote: post #9

Am I understanding this correct in that you can basically automate monetizing your web/api content to everyone or just agents ? Because I would be very much in support of charging agents per request, but I would want to still offer humans a free experience.

Unless you have people's biometric data, you won't be able to separate agents from people. Except by payment.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#26

Post by artisin »

> This is what we are building toward: an agent-first Internet with Internet-scale settlement built in.

Ah yes, the starry-eyed dream of early web pioneers is finally upon us: a soulless internet filled with soulless agents and microtransactions!

But in all seriousness, it's hard to deny that the attention-based model that has propelled the web forward for the last 30 years is somewhat falling apart. And I don't have, nor have I come across, any meaningful solutions that could realistically work better. So maybe it's just time we turn off this 'internet' thing and call it a day.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#28

Post by luhn »

The focus of this seems to be entirely AI agents, but I wonder if there's a future where browsers implement this and us humans can finally get micropayments in the web. It's been tried unsuccessfully many times but always falls prey to the chicken-and-egg problem. Maybe the AI hype will finally give it the push it needs for widespread deployment.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#29

Post by hedora »

Presumably, like their captchas, this will completely break things like ad blockers, browsers with strict cookie policies, and probably things without hardware attestation.

Unless there's a privacy-preserving way this can be used to send money, then it's just another chunk of the surveillance state that's being rapidly erected over the last few years. The word "privacy" does not appear once in the article.

Even if it did, I'd be skeptical. If their payment system does allow money to be sent in a privacy and free speech preserving way, then it'll be used for money laundering.

This whole "agents bad" framing is complete BS. It's the reality of how people use the internet now, and, frankly, ad blockers have been a thing since forever. On the other hand, if successful, this infrastructure will give Cloudflare centralized control over internet publishing and also centralized surveillance of all users with no opt out.

Piracy is looking better and better. So does the small web. Come to think of it, the library does too. Any good solutions for non-destructively scanning books?

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