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Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

blog.cloudflare.com

141–150 of 273 posts

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

#141

With 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…

That seems to make the case stronger. It becomes Cloudflare's problem. You can deal with Cloudflare from one country and let them figure out how to collect payment from people all over.

That said, morally, I strongly resent the fact that accepting payment has essentially become illegal for most people due to this complexity and the way globalization has been forced on people. People are essentially not allowed to receive payment to feed themselves. That's what it has come down to. Not everyone can afford an accountant and take that risk.

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

#142

With 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…

Feels like a good way to do money laundering lol

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

#144
Behold, another stake in the heart of the open Internet.

First it was GDPR government fragmentation; then it was AI slop requests, and now it is greed. Before you know it, we'll be back to the days of having to research at libraries because they'll be the only ones with taxpayer funding to pay the x402 fees.

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

#145
post #33

I 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'm old-man-yelling-at-the-clouds here. Everyone just uses Cloudflare, which is not a bad thing by itself. But do they _have_ to? Is managing your own edge really that terrifying?

Dumb question here - how can I manage effectively edges across the whole world without the huge maintenance overhead? Which tools would be recommended for that? I e.g. have a VPS at Hetzner with Coolify but users from the US have high latency. I wouldn't know how to not use CloudFlare?

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

#146
post #144

Behold, another stake in the heart of the open Internet. First it was GDPR government fragmentation; then it was AI slop requests, and now it is greed. Before you know it, we'll be back to the days of having to research at libraries because they'll be the only ones with taxpayer funding to pay the x402 fees.

Insane reflection. Nothing about the open internet has or will change because of a private, third-party payment framework making use of a http status code. Who is paying for bots like this? Every site needs to account for its costs. Just because you're too euro-poor to afford basic access to research doesn't mean others can't pay for it and benefit from it. Get a job.

Is europe just flooding online fora with doomer luddites to demoralize the US tech sector? Sounds far-fetched, but there is nothing organic about the recent rise in US/tech hatred across the web.

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the kind words! I’m a PM on the team that is building this. I’ve believed in microtransactions for over a decade and hope that we can finally bring them to life. Proper spend delegation and permissions is a big focus of ours - it’s great to let your agent have discretion, as long as the damage from going off course is limited. Definitely want people to feel comfortable experimenting with emerging tech F…

Do you have any plans on mitigating the privacy consequences of microtransactions? I'm fine with paying for (some) content, but I'd prefer if there weren't some companies using that information to manipulate me or the more impressionable members of our society.

We plan to make it easy for both buyers and sellers to rotate addresses. Done right, everything should be pseudonymous to the outside world.

(Full privacy is a harder problem to solve, but address rotation is a good 80/20 solution for now)

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

#148

This doesn't seem to solve the issue that website operators face... which is providing a free public experience to humans while the price of hosting is driven up by increased bot traffic. The issue isn't charging for API access with request caps, that's not hard to do. It's preserving the free experience for our users while our traffic is increasingly made up of bots. The problem is that AI has made it increasingly d…

We have Web Bot Auth to allow good bots to identify themselves to website operators: https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/reference/bot-verific...

Bot detection is a big problem to solve, but it’s a significant focus at Cloudflare. (It’s not my team at Cloudflare specifically, but we work closely with them)

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

#149
post #120

This doesn't seem to solve the issue that website operators face... which is providing a free public experience to humans while the price of hosting is driven up by increased bot traffic. The issue isn't charging for API access with request caps, that's not hard to do. It's preserving the free experience for our users while our traffic is increasingly made up of bots. The problem is that AI has made it increasingly d…

I would like to argue that trying to provide a free service is non achievable, most of the time it will drill down to ads, people are already paying electricity and time in ads. If we pay say 3 secs of compute time of monero, and everyone pay the same... you remove the ads from the internet, people will start gettind paid without gate keepers for content they generate, and you can charge the AI machine for ingesting…

We were providing free services decades ago. Hosting a website, or a Minecraft server, or a VOIP server, or IRC, or a forum simply doesn't cost that much. Well within "some guy's hobby budget" type expenses.

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

#150
This seems to be conflicting with the adoption of Web Bot Auth, which is still in infancy stage.

I do have some bots, they're nice and predominantly used for grounding AI harnesses which I use interactively. Knowing that most operators will whitelist maybe 5 well know bots and route the rest to the micropayments, what's the incentive for me to have my bots identify as bots with Web Both Auth when it's easier to make them mascarade as humans?

Again, my bots are nice. They're making roughly the same number of requests I would make manually via browser if I was manually working on something.

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