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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

#201

Post by hliyan »

incompatible wrote: post #161
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…

A dream for some, a nightmare for others. People locked out from much of the Internet because they don't have enough money. Of course, the prices would usually be set at whatever maximises revenue, just check out scientific journal publishing.

If the choice is between micro-transactions and ad-driven content (ads -> engagement maximization -> sensationalization + enshittification -> social and industrial decay), I'll take the former.

Remember: from a business's perspective, advertising has positive ROI. Which means you as the consumer pay for it anyway. No ad supported service is free.

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

#202

Post by janandonly »

I am surprised that Cloudflare went and made their own implementation of L402/x402?

There are already a bunch of working implementations:

* https://www.l402.org/ * https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l40...

There is even an index with a long list of services that already support this tech:

* https://l402index.com/

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

#203

Post by wavemode »

yieldcrv wrote: post #192
kelvinjps10 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like a good way to do money laundering lol

It is You’re 10 years late x402 not required just segregated addresses acting as individual market participants paying for your service if you ever want your state’s currency (which is a big IF in the crypto world), then you use your segregated address to pump the price of a token that your clean and KYC’d addresses hold, sell into liquidity for a more liquid crypto, sell that crypto on an exchange. you look like a g…

"pump the price of a token" seems like the complex part that you're hand-waving. Either this token has a bunch of other traders (in which case, it's not trivial to simply "pump" its fair-market price by your own effort), or your alt wallets are themselves most of the liquidity (in which case, you're really just transacting with yourself, which is trivial to trace)

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

#204

Post by miki123211 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #158
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…

1. Bots don't make purchases (and you can't identify them anyway), so there's nothing to take the costs off of.

2. Again, no way to identify users (bots use hordes of residential proxies with only a few requests per IP).

3. Agents and bots care more about a universal solution that works for all the sites than an efficient solution. You could standardize on a header for this, but then some sites would start hiding some content in the API for "business reasons", making this header untrustworthy. Unless you're a site so large that it deserves special handling, it ain't gonna work.

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

#206

Post by sanswork »

thinkloop wrote: post #184
sanswork wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have to get almost 200 more conversions to make up for the single subscriber. Given a lot of these services offer $1 entry subscriptions and people still bounce it's unlikely you'll have a mass market excited to pay $0.10 everytime they want to read an article to make up for the person paying $20 to read a handful everyday. Microtransactions have existed in a bunch of forms over the past 20 years and always fail…

A $1 entry subscription where you have to type your name and credit card and submit and wait and now you have a relationship to manage, is infinitely more expensive than a 10 cent, automatic, non-recurring, one-time, no cancelation needed, pseudonomous, microtransaction.

Right but it means I can go read a bunch of content right away vs microtransactions where literally every click becomes a case of me deciding if it's worth 10c. That is exhausting.

Also if they are handling payments at some point you're going to be forming that relationship or they are going to get shut down for money laundering very quickly.

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

#207

Post by lagrange77 »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #56
horsawlarway wrote: post #45

I'm going to poke at a downstream consequence here. Lets say this catches on (in some form or another, whether in this precise implementation or not). So assume we have a world where resources can be gated by a payment wall that agents can interact with. I'm also assuming that world continues to have agents that are majority hosted and run by 3rd parties (ex - google/anthropic/openai/xai/etc). --- At what point can I…

>I'm also assuming that world continues to have agents that are majority hosted and run by 3rd parties (ex - google/anthropic/openai/xai/etc). That seems like a pretty big assumption, given that local models are only like a year behind frontier ones (or less). When you consider that, along with the completely unsustainable business model of all the major 3rd parties, I think a far more realistic view of our AI future…

I'm with you, but

> or on budget providers (think an "AWS of AI")

AWS was the first thing that came into your mind when you thought about budget providers?

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

#208

Post by maccard »

colesantiago wrote: post #159
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DO Droplets are still $5/mo, as are OVH VPS’es.

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

#209

Post by someonebaggy »

colesantiago wrote: post #159
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're not more expensive than a decade ago, when we were still using them.

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

#210

Post by t-3 »

cedws wrote: post #164
incompatible wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dream for some, a nightmare for others. People locked out from much of the Internet because they don't have enough money. Of course, the prices would usually be set at whatever maximises revenue, just check out scientific journal publishing.

Conversely this has the potential to unlock the internet. How often have you clicked a paywalled link on HN and moved on because you don't want to go through the hassle and pay $20 to read an article? If you could be frictionlessly billed 10c to read the article instead, wouldn't you be more willing? I'm actually OK with paying a fair price for the content I consume, I just don't want to be paying hundreds of subscri…

Which payment processor will charge less than 10c per transaction?
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