I think this is a directionally good idea. I can't help but think that there's basically no way that the AI labs can actually afford to pay for their massive amounts of training data though. (This does not make me particularly sad)
Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402
81–90 of 273 posts
Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402
#82I am not a fan of the growing trend that Cloudflare is the gatekeeper of the internet. Personally I will never support this company, or firewall any of my websites behind it.
I recently had to build a system to drop inbound traffic originating from cloudflare ASNs to prevent bad actors using WARP proxies, no legitimate cloudflare traffic usecases for anything inbound.
Getting increasingly sick of cloudflare.
Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402
#83I’m curious about the decision to “aim for sub second transaction times”, rather than using something cryptography-based, such as a verifiable oblivious pseudorandom function.
That is, - as a client I could obtain a bunch of credits/tokens from my payment processor - these tokens have the cryptographic property of being verifiable (ex: “that’s definitely a stripe-verified token worth $0.001”) - these tokens also have the cryptographic property of being anonymous. (ex: neither stripe, nor the payment recipient know that I am Bob)
With this sort of cryptography based approach, cloudflare could verify my payment token without any cryptocurrency proof-of-work kerfuffle?
Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402
#84I’m amused that there is no discussion of failure modes. What if the resource someone GETs turns out not to exist? What if the POST fails and needs a retry? What if redirects are involved?
Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
But as an end user, I don't want to pay for the news of the day, regardless of if I look it up myself or my agent looks it up!
Of course nobody wants to pay for anything, and you like me would like to be given everything for free without having to give anything in exchange. But why would somebody want to give it for free?
I can read the news for free right now!
Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't speak for GP, but I wouldn't - privacy is already eroding at a startling rate, and more KYC for things that really don't need it is just a further affront to human rights. (See also the FCC's recent request for comments on requiring government-issued ID to use a cell phone.)
Are your human rights also violated by Spotify keeping track of what songs you listen to, or Netflix and YouTube keeping tabs on what shows you are watching? Internet non-ad monetization will also be in the form of massive syndication, where a subscriber gets access to thousands of high quality websites, and web publishers get access to millions of subscribers. But they need to take a hint from streaming services and…
Yes. In the past, in the US, library checkout records were private / not recorded, specifically to protect the right to privacy, which is specifically protected by the UN human rights charter.
The systems you described not only record that information and make it available for warrants, they also sell it, and allow warrantless searches of it in some circumstances.
Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who do you invoice if, for example, you own a vending machine that sells chips and sodas for cash or contactless? Why couldn’t this be treated the same?
Vending machines can't be used by thousands of people from differing tax jurisdictions at once
Airports could potentially be such a place but I admit that this is a bit contrived.
Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402
#88With payments the complexity is not only in accepting a payment, but largely in doing so legally. Someone makes a request to my company's paid service, I return 402 and get a stable coin back. Who do I invoice for this revenue? What value added tax do I apply to the invoice? If someone makes 10k paid requests within one month, do I have means of generating one invoice for them for all the usage, or is every request t…
Who do you invoice if, for example, you own a vending machine that sells chips and sodas for cash or contactless? Why couldn’t this be treated the same?
Normal vending machine transactions are B2C transactions, so the buyer cannot be a company - cannot pay with company money and cannot deduce the payment as the company cost. I guess, the buyer can take a receipt from a vending machine and ask the vending machine owner to provide a B2B invoice based on the receipt, to make this a proper B2B payment.
Can you treat your remote service access as B2C only? Perhaps yes, but then the companies will not be able to use your service, pay from a company bank account and account this as a company cost, only individuals will be able to legally pay.
Vending machine is also located in a known physical country, so the owner knows what VAT to apply, the VAT of the country the machine is in. With software services the VAT should be applied based on the country where the buyer is located.
Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you be willing for Cloudflare to "Know their customer" (you) and pay 3 cents to access the forum, instead of filling in the captcha?
I thought the goal was to only charge agents a fee, which would either 1. stop agents from scraping your site non-stop and eliminate the need for a captcha, making the human experience better or 2. make the owner of the site some money in exchange for a bajillion bots scraping their content. Maybe that's too optimistic though based on the responses in this thread.
If they only charge agents a fee, then people will just set up a mcp endpoint or whatever to desktop chrome/firefox.
As it is, their captchas are already blocking tons of human traffic.
The idea that the price will be low unless you access it a lot falls over due to caching. Big tech companies will cache whatever they scrape, paying for one copy. Regular people and smaller companies will not read the same thing enough to amortize the cost of the first fetch, so they’ll pay 1000’s to 1,000,000’s of times more than the monopolies per-use of a given piece of information.
If individuals set up a federated cache with open access, they’ll get sued for copyright infringement. (Even though that would solve the supposed problem: That cloudflare cannot afford to operate a cache).
The end result is that only closed agents will be allowed to (legally) read most content without paying extortion-level fees.
Also, like with YouTube and video, serving text will become a winner-takes-all proposition.
Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vending machines can't be used by thousands of people from differing tax jurisdictions at once
Airports could potentially be such a place but I admit that this is a bit contrived.
Not really because the transaction occurs in a specific place with specific tax rules, regardless of where the purchaser is from.