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Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

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

#261
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Asking customers to pay anything prior to purchase is a non-starter... Imagine a brick-and-mortar shoe store asking customers to pay an entry fee to shop before customers enter the door?

Cover charge for a shoe store is an interesting idea. I hate shopping, especially with crowds, and probably wouldn't mind, especially if it went towards a purchase, even partially. (This willingness is learned, probably only true for me since my 30s, and not strictly correlated to my income bracket.)

I often buy gas at the BP with a $0.03/gal higher price than the Shell across the street. Guess which one has a longer line more full of gas guzzlers.

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in no world is advertising worse. 0. none. you’re utterly delusional as the people pushing this are thinking anyone is going to pay for their garbage content behind 10cent micro transactions

> no world is advertising worse. 0. none. you’re utterly delusional as the people pushing this are thinking anyone is going to pay for their garbage content behind 10cent micro transactions The current political situation we find ourselves in is partly due to the destruction of real journalism caused because people won’t pay for timely and accurate news. Advertising perverts incentives; I need you entertained - not i…

I agree with you, but the reality is...

>people won’t pay for timely and accurate news.

This won't be changed by forcing payments through API contracts or other microtransactions.

I don't pay for news today. I won't pay for news tomorrow. And so ads are the only way they will make money from me, even though I block them.

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pseudonomous Which isn't private. Wallet ID 123 buys a 10c article from Leftist Newspaper A and one from Leftist Newspaper B. Leftist Newspaper A and B, being businesses, sell the information that Wallet ID 123 purchased an article to Data Broker A. Data Broker A correlates all purchases Wallet ID 123 has ever made and with a high degree of accuracy identifies who they are and their political affliation. Data Broke…

90% of people are careless and 9.9% are ignorant thinking they are safe. Microtransactional web is only a risk in an alternative universe which doesn't have spying/tracking/profiling funded by enormous ad industry. In our world it is a big improvement.

In what way is it even an improvement??? When has anyone ever said "yeah, actually, I love microtransactions!" Why is the final death of the free internet a good thing? Do you believe that by paying microtransactions you'll be exempt from the ads and spying, rather than simply being doubledipped?

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no world is advertising worse. 0. none. you’re utterly delusional as the people pushing this are thinking anyone is going to pay for their garbage content behind 10cent micro transactions The current political situation we find ourselves in is partly due to the destruction of real journalism caused because people won’t pay for timely and accurate news. Advertising perverts incentives; I need you entertained - not i…

I agree with you, but the reality is... >people won’t pay for timely and accurate news. This won't be changed by forcing payments through API contracts or other microtransactions. I don't pay for news today. I won't pay for news tomorrow. And so ads are the only way they will make money from me, even though I block them.

> I don't pay for news today. I won't pay for news tomorrow. And so ads are the only way they will make money from me, even though I block them.

So you're going to be the problem no matter what happens.

I block a lot of ads but I also pay monthly to a lot of creators through Patreon so I don't feel guilty about blocking ads on youtube. I also pay monthly for a few news sites but not most because I read an article or two at most there per year (lots of random links from friends ... etc, almost always to local / regional news).

Microtransactions are _exactly_ what those guys need. The "please give us $10/month!" banner on the regional news site is not worth it for me, they're loosing out because i'm not going to fiddle with adblocker for just this one visit. I'd pay $0.30 to support them and not be guilty about it.

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

#265
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servers, and memory, are orders of magnitude cheaper today than they were decades ago... for memory see: https://dam.stanford.edu/memory-prices.html Yes there's a slight upwards blip right now, but not even close to cancelling decades of progress in price reduction.

Yet absolute price per GB isn't the full story when the popular tools accessible for the general public require more RAM for the same task today as compared to the past. You won't get far using the latest version of MS Word on a desktop with specs from 1999, or running MS Word 97 to edit academic essays turned this year. Even for background services, rather than the general public, I would not attempt running an emai…

The tools for hosting a website have barely gone up in requirements.

And for those documents I bet you could convert them and they'd work fine.

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% of people are careless and 9.9% are ignorant thinking they are safe. Microtransactional web is only a risk in an alternative universe which doesn't have spying/tracking/profiling funded by enormous ad industry. In our world it is a big improvement.

In what way is it even an improvement??? When has anyone ever said "yeah, actually, I love microtransactions!" Why is the final death of the free internet a good thing? Do you believe that by paying microtransactions you'll be exempt from the ads and spying, rather than simply being doubledipped?

What free internet? You always pay with your time and also usually with lots of tracking and ads.

AI can easily strip any ads for fractions of a cent. AI bots can be tracked - Open Router (or equivalent) will probably don't mind. That is the point of the article - ad and tracker infested webpages will soon be struggling, and some other forms of monetization needs to come.

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

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened when you tried?

I got stuck with a very large bill for bandwidth overages due to bots hammering my photo gallery on my website. With Cloudflare in front I've since been running my site for years off a $10/mo VPS.

How much bandwidth was that?

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

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"host a ton of crap content across a wide swath of topics.." But how will anybody know it's there?

That part is describing Google SEO spam. I don't know how it works but it clearly does work if you've used Google lately.

I was unclear how Google's bot would index it if it was behind a paywall. But the "Host two crap tons of content", with the non-paywalled site pointing to the other, would get around it, allowing the hypothetical big spending AI crawlers to find it.
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