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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

#151

Post by w10-1 »

This has a lot of potential; true disruption can happen for existing markets only when the transaction cost features change, and CloudFlare is ideally positioned to drive a new standard. Ideally they create a service that can be open and replicated in competition (not just technically but economically), and this creates the right incentives for bots and sites/services.

I dislike stablecoins because they legitimize their cousin coins and because (I think?) they have transaction fees that create the wrong incentives for providers. I'm not sure what the real benefit is over prepaid (policy-driven) fiat currency with (possibly-paid) transaction records.

I can see how selling to bots could become so profitable that no one bothers to present directly to humans, but I look forward to an ad-free, much more capable internet, where paywalls are more like a headwind than a wall.

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

#152

Post by wmf »

xlayn wrote: post #118

X402... I was not aware, I had this idea of making HTTP connection depend on a monero transaction, the monero transaction should take around 3 secs of the average computer/cellphone... once you have paid that you can access the resource. You wanna crawl the whole internet non stop, you pay non stop, 3 secs is probably the same as we pay in ads for those without adblockers and then content generators can start getting…

It's stablecoins not Monero.

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

#153

Post by ethbr1 »

wpapper wrote: post #147
johndough wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Good to hear.

I think web servers monetizing any user identifiers possible should be assumed by this point in the web's evolution, and precluded to the extent possible at the protocol level.

No one is going to say "Oh, we've got micro-transaction revenue now, let's do away with ad tracking." They're going to say "Great, now we have both streams of revenue."

If Cloudflare et al. are stepping into the middle of the transactions, I'd much rather scope my identity leakage to only them than everyone running a web server.

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

#154

Post by ethbr1 »

cphoover wrote: post #111

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…

> And if we can't tell bot from human, why would bots choose to pay rather than just use the public endpoints we serve to our customers?

Assuming technical indistinguishability, the only solution is what was originally proposed for email: balanced net $0 charges for "normal user" usage patterns (i.e. payments from - payments to = $0).

If you x402 everything, and an average user access 5 pages, but a bot accesses 500 (or 5x100 times), then you've still achieved a substantial price delta that you could offset via a rebate

The real rub is about uniqueness attribution, as being able to differentiate 20 distinct real users from 1 bot w/ 20 proxies is the crux of anything above.

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

#155

Post by ryan_n »

hedora wrote: post #89
ryan_n wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enoug…

Interesting, yea I think that makes sense. Well, that's a bummer if that ends up being the case!

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

#156

Post by IgorPartola »

wpapper wrote: post #129
arjie wrote: post #121

This is the dream of microtransactions and agents-paying-for-access that so many people have always wanted. It was never going to be implemented on existing payment rails so it would have to be something like this. I can't wait to see it in play somewhere because I am increasingly annoyed that I have to own API keys on various platforms etc. etc. I just want my agent to make decisions and spend a limited amount of mo…

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…

Please tell me this will be IPv6 only or at least IPv6 first! Or allow differentiated pricing so IPv4 calls can be made more expensive. CF, as much as I have issues with the constant CAPTCHAS I run into and blocking my Hurricane Electric tunnel every so often, is in a unique position to get us past having to support the legacy internet protocol.

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

#157

Post by rickydroll »

Animats wrote: post #68

"There is an enormous amount of value moving across the Internet today that goes unmonetized or undermonetized, not because no one would pay for it, but because the tools to charge for it have never existed." Every road a toll road. How big a cut does Cloudflare want? Whose "stablecoin" does this use? How much does each on-chain stablecoin transaction cost?[1] For comparison, FedNow bank to bank transfers cost $0.045…

Not only cloudflare's cut of the action, but your ISP, your mobile carrier, Internet exchanges, the service provider on the far end.

Seriously, everybody will have their hand out.

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

#158

Post by IgorPartola »

cphoover wrote: post #111

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…

Options:

1. Any cost of browsing an e-commerce site is taken off the next purchase, whenever it happens.

2. Give each user 100 free page viewed per day or some such before you charge.

3. You don’t actually have to charge users for browsing the site if you provide a free or cheap API allowing bots to search and index your entire catalog. Agents and bots would certainly rather parse a kilobyte of JSON than 20 megabytes of HTML generated by on page JavaScript.

4. If you don’t like this system you don’t have to participate. If Amazon wants to do their own thing, they can. But if you publish a blog and want to charge $0.00001 per page view and browsers support this out of the box, why not?

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

#159

Post by colesantiago »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #149
xlayn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We were providing free services decades ago.

That was then.

Now VPS providers are significantly increasing prices (Due to memory shortage) making it unaffordable to run servers cheaply.

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

#160

Post by cphoover »

wmf wrote: post #134
cphoover wrote: post #111

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…

The problem is that AI has made it increasingly difficult to tell bot from human. Presumably Cloudflare's answer to this is CAPTCHAs.

Some of the agents out there today can bypass Cloudflare's CAPTCHA challenges.
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