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What happened with the Web Monetization API?

chriscoyier.net

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Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#131

Post by j0hnyl »

jjcm wrote: post #113
CaptainFever wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally the use case for cryptocurrencies -- digital cash, not investments. In the more... questionably legal parts of the web, Monero is pretty common since you can't use regular banking anyway. The fees are pretty low, at around USD0.001 IIRC. There's also Nano (feeless) but it doesn't seem to be very popular, unfortunately.

Please correct me if I'm wrong here (I've been out of the crypto game for a couple years), but I don't think crypto holds up here. The nature of transaction fees with crypto is they scale exponentially with demand. Monero fees are low because volume is low. Bitcoin fees are high ($9.97 was the average transaction fee yesterday!) because volume is high. Any fully decentralized crypto at the scale of use that the Web M…

It depends on the chain. Some chains can support high throughput at low fees.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#132

Post by j0hnyl »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #122
seanwilson wrote: post #5

> It needs to be built into the browsers and web standards such that it’s incredibly smooth and fast. I wanna send $1 to a website, it happens instantly and anonymously, and the developer can do things around this. Like unlock features! For instance, stop showing ads, offer more complete downloads, unlock tutorial courses, etc. Make it easier and faster than using a credit card. Are there any promising avenues toward…

I'm grateful this hasn't been worked out yet. The magnitude of the shittification of the internet which will occur once this is a solved problem is almost too much to think about. If you are working on this, for the sake of humanity, please stop.

I actually think it will solve the enshitification problem, which is mostly ad driven.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#133

Post by didntcheck »

fragmede wrote: post #75
efitz wrote: post #65

A paid web could eliminate the ad ecosystem and all its toxicity (surveillance technology, etc.) I don't see any solution that was based on customer goodwill ("that was cool, here's $1") as something that there is much demand for. What we need is a browser-mitigated micropayment ecosystem. Maybe browser vendors could come up with a standard where you can "charge up" your account like a prepaid phone card, and then wh…

Unfortunately, the Visa Mastercard duopoly charges fees which make this impractical, which means that via a cryptocurrency is how this would be implemented given today's technology.

Not to mention then taking on the role of judge, jury, and executioner on who is allowed to receive money. That's really not healthy for a free society

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#134

Post by didntcheck »

efitz wrote: post #65

A paid web could eliminate the ad ecosystem and all its toxicity (surveillance technology, etc.) I don't see any solution that was based on customer goodwill ("that was cool, here's $1") as something that there is much demand for. What we need is a browser-mitigated micropayment ecosystem. Maybe browser vendors could come up with a standard where you can "charge up" your account like a prepaid phone card, and then wh…

> A paid web could eliminate the ad ecosystem and all its toxicity (surveillance technology, etc.)

It could, but we've now seen the absolute vitriol levelled at sites who dare to ask for a bit of money in return for content, and the lengths people will go to to avoid paying then make up some excuse to justify it. It's funny how a common excuse for ad blocking used to be "I'd pay for content if there was an option", yet you don't hear that so often now that many sites do in fact offer that option

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#135

Post by tommica »

gamepsys wrote: post #126
jjcm wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please correct me if I'm wrong here (I've been out of the crypto game for a couple years), but I don't think crypto holds up here. The nature of transaction fees with crypto is they scale exponentially with demand. Monero fees are low because volume is low. Bitcoin fees are high ($9.97 was the average transaction fee yesterday!) because volume is high. Any fully decentralized crypto at the scale of use that the Web M…

The current bitcoin blocksize is limited to 1mb. This means, on average, only 1mb worth of transactions can be written to the ledger. With that 1mb we save thousands of transactions. When you pay a transaction fee you are essentially bidding on your data being written to the ledger every 10 minutes. You are correct that the more people bidding, the higher we can expect the price to be. There is however no technical r…

Does not seem to be a sustainable solution: if the amount of microtranfers increase, the blocksize is going to be an issue again

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#136

Post by solardev »

Contrarian opinion: As a regular consumer, I don't WANT a decentralized, anonymous currency. For users like me, crypto totally misses the point. I don't want digital cash that can't be traced. I'm not buying drugs or illegal shit.

I want a centralized, safe way of sending small amounts of money to some content producers, microtransactions, etc., but with basic banking guarantees. Like being able to charge back a transaction if the merchant fails to deliver, or not being liable for fraudulent uses (as opposed to losing my entire wallet, oh well, too bad).

Decentralized crypto actively hurts instead of helps my confidence in being able to conduct a safe, easy transaction online. One wrong move and I lose all my funds to some scammer. How is that even remotely enticing?

Instead, I wish there was something as easy to use as a credit card, but without the exorbitant fees (for the merchant) and interests rates (for me). I just wish we had a financial organization like Visa/Mastercard but run as a nonprofit (or at least a credit union) so they can provide similar services with similar guarantees but just make less money on the returns.

Services like Privacy.com kinda do that, but merchants still get dinged with the Visa fees, so it's not entirely practical for microtransactions. So so far the best thing I've found is still just using Google or Apple to temporarily hold transactions and batch process them at the end of a month. (Lyft also does something similar, I think, batching rides and tips until the end of the day or week or something).

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#137

Post by calmoo »

jacobn wrote: post #99
sofixa wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee One option is to have regulations about card fees, which is the case in the EU (0.2% for debit, 0.3% for credit). Another is to use an alternative payment method, like India's UPI or Eurozone's SEPA which are free and instantaneous.

SEPA via Stripe takes on average 5 days, max 14 according to their docs - instantaneous would be a game changer?! https://stripe.com/docs/payments/sepa-debit

Instant free SEPA transfers are becoming more common in the EU, but as an easy payment method it’s still annoying from a UX perspective.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#138

Post by gamepsys »

tommica wrote: post #135
gamepsys wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current bitcoin blocksize is limited to 1mb. This means, on average, only 1mb worth of transactions can be written to the ledger. With that 1mb we save thousands of transactions. When you pay a transaction fee you are essentially bidding on your data being written to the ledger every 10 minutes. You are correct that the more people bidding, the higher we can expect the price to be. There is however no technical r…

Does not seem to be a sustainable solution: if the amount of microtranfers increase, the blocksize is going to be an issue again

The number of real time electronic transactions is virtually guaranteed to increase. This is not only a big problem now, it's becoming a bigger problem over time. I consider the unwillingness of the bitcoin network to increase blocksize to be a critical flaw.

Edit: The problem is not 100mb is too small for the future. The problem is that just like we cannot go from 1mb to 100mb today, we would have no ability to go from 100mb to 1000mb when needed.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#139

Post by rglullis »

jjcm wrote: post #113
CaptainFever wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally the use case for cryptocurrencies -- digital cash, not investments. In the more... questionably legal parts of the web, Monero is pretty common since you can't use regular banking anyway. The fees are pretty low, at around USD0.001 IIRC. There's also Nano (feeless) but it doesn't seem to be very popular, unfortunately.

Please correct me if I'm wrong here (I've been out of the crypto game for a couple years), but I don't think crypto holds up here. The nature of transaction fees with crypto is they scale exponentially with demand. Monero fees are low because volume is low. Bitcoin fees are high ($9.97 was the average transaction fee yesterday!) because volume is high. Any fully decentralized crypto at the scale of use that the Web M…

The worst part of lightning is not even the centralization but the capital inefficiency. By definition, any money locked in a payment channel can not be used for anything else.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#140

Post by rglullis »

j0hnyl wrote: post #131
jjcm wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please correct me if I'm wrong here (I've been out of the crypto game for a couple years), but I don't think crypto holds up here. The nature of transaction fees with crypto is they scale exponentially with demand. Monero fees are low because volume is low. Bitcoin fees are high ($9.97 was the average transaction fee yesterday!) because volume is high. Any fully decentralized crypto at the scale of use that the Web M…

It depends on the chain. Some chains can support high throughput at low fees.

Theoretically.
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