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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?

#211

Post by latchkey »

nradov wrote: post #209
latchkey wrote: post #198

A friend of mine in Vietnam needed some quick cash to go home for Tet holiday and asked me for help in paying for their travel costs and some spending money. Nothing nefarious, just a few hundred USD. I'm happy to help them. I went to a popular VN crypto website, put in their name and bank account number and how much I wanted to send them (and on what crypto network and token, as they support a bunch of them). The si…

The lack of KYC enforcement is likely to be a temporary situation. Cryptocurrency exchanges have kind of flown under the radar in some countries. But for better or worse, crackdowns are coming. This use of crypto is fundamentally no different from the old hawala networks, just more automated and slightly cheaper. Authorities let that go for a while but then cracked down when criminal usage grew too serious to ignore.…

This exchange has been operating legally in Vietnam since 2014. Not exactly the most "open" country out there.

I've met the founder in person. Very nice guy and not even Vietnamese!

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#212

Post by bruce511 »

cchance wrote: post #153
stickfigure wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Realistically a 100mb block would be large enough to handle all transaction data our species currently generates. Nonsense. With the current block size and average transaction size, the bitcoin network processes ~7 transactions per second. A 100X increase in block size gets you to 700 transactions per second. A quick google says global credit card transactions currently average more than 21,000 per second. You're s…

Why are you comparing this to bitcoin, bitcoin was never meant to be a fast network lol it was to be a network for cash to sit in "digital gold"... Other networks were designed for speed and others are working on it (etherum with layer 2 networks, and more speed focused networks, for instance as was mentioned Nano was doing 1200-1500tps years ago, with plans for increases not sure if thtey eer went further. The probl…

You'll earn downvotes for the speed part, but this part is spot on;

>> The problem is crypto has a few solid real projects and a billion loud useless scam/spam projects that make the idea of "crypto" look like its all trash, finding the networks that actually have something to really give to the world is hard

Congrats to the OP who sent money to Vietnam. It's a fantastic use case. But as a non-crypto user I can't do that with crypto because I don't know which site to trust and which is a scam.

And -reputationally- they are -all scams-, some just haven't been caught yet.

(I know, I know, there are honest players, but even the -big names I recognise- get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, that taints everyone)

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#213

Post by nradov »

starttoaster wrote: post #170
acchow wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bitcoin was never meant to be a fast network lol it was to be a network for cash to sit in "digital gold"... Your claim is opposed to the contents of the original Bitcoin whitepaper https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

That white paper was written when? 2008, give or take a couple years? "Speed," as we refer to it, is relative to the age. In 2008, the threshold for terms like "fast" was much lower than it is today.

In 2008 I could make instant, secure online payments with credit cards.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#214

Post by latchkey »

ShamelessC wrote: post #205
Zuiii wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN's jerk reaction reminds me a lot of the 5 monkeys and ladder experiment. I'm sure a lot of the people railing against crypto don't understand why they hate it or just look at the negatives. I'm confident that they would be just as hostile to cash if it was invented today. The good news is that they don't matter. Cryptocurrency is here to stay. People like you and me are using it to transfer money, donate, and buy…

People here railing against cryptocurrency are generally unable to see past its proclivity for scams. This is an entirely reasonable situation. Further, cryptocurrency proponents are historically completely unwilling to admit there are any flaws to the point that it’s obvious they have a stake in cryptocurrency and it’s severely biasing their judgement. You don’t seem like that per se but if you haven’t seen it befor…

I have a stake in it and I'm willing to admit it is full of scams. Fact is though, ALL finance is full of scams. I'd argue that the inverse is true... people in traditional finance hate on crypto because it actually exposes the fact that their own stuff is full of scams. Case in point:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/jpmorgan-chase-co-agrees-pay-...

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#215

Post by wbobeirne »

Zuiii wrote: post #203
latchkey wrote: post #198

A friend of mine in Vietnam needed some quick cash to go home for Tet holiday and asked me for help in paying for their travel costs and some spending money. Nothing nefarious, just a few hundred USD. I'm happy to help them. I went to a popular VN crypto website, put in their name and bank account number and how much I wanted to send them (and on what crypto network and token, as they support a bunch of them). The si…

HN's jerk reaction reminds me a lot of the 5 monkeys and ladder experiment. I'm sure a lot of the people railing against crypto don't understand why they hate it or just look at the negatives. I'm confident that they would be just as hostile to cash if it was invented today. The good news is that they don't matter. Cryptocurrency is here to stay. People like you and me are using it to transfer money, donate, and buy…

Somewhat off topic but I only recently learned that that monkeys and ladder experiment never happened, it's just a thought experiment or story to illustrate the point. But the closest real experiments were not nearly as dramatic and didn't have as strong of results.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#216

Post by wbobeirne »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #94
Mistletoe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there is, there are tons of cryptocurrencies that can do this but everyone here hates crypto and throws the baby out with the bathwater and won’t stop parroting “SCAM!” every time they hear the word. It’s too expensive to use on-chain transactions on things like Bitcoin or Ethereum but there are other coins. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth... You could also use Lightning Network…

Pointing to my comment elsewhere on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39279246

Layer 2s such as Bitcoin's lightning network do not use a public ledger for their transactions. The only thing public is the transaction that opens a payment channel, everything after that happens as peer to peer messaging across the network.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#217

Post by carom »

pdubouilh wrote: post #6

On the non-crypto web-monetization side, I'm toying with a non-profit idea in the same vein but using third party tooling (browser extension, etc...) website: https://lagom.org whitepaper: https://lagom.org/docs/lagom-whitepaper.pdf

Stripe Connect would be a good option here. Very passionate about this area. I made a website that paid people per approved image annotation (for data labeling). It was high friction to get people to sign up as workers (and enter a bunch of personal information into Stripe) but content creators might be an easier sell.

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#218

Post by latchkey »

wbobeirne wrote: post #215
Zuiii wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN's jerk reaction reminds me a lot of the 5 monkeys and ladder experiment. I'm sure a lot of the people railing against crypto don't understand why they hate it or just look at the negatives. I'm confident that they would be just as hostile to cash if it was invented today. The good news is that they don't matter. Cryptocurrency is here to stay. People like you and me are using it to transfer money, donate, and buy…

Somewhat off topic but I only recently learned that that monkeys and ladder experiment never happened, it's just a thought experiment or story to illustrate the point. But the closest real experiments were not nearly as dramatic and didn't have as strong of results.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/games-primates-pla...

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#219

Post by throw10920 »

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…

The obvious solution is to have users buy a proxy currency that goes in a wallet that is then spent in frictionless (and fee-less) microtransactions. Many video game companies use this model, albeit for their own scummy monetization systems, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't work here - is there a reason you're not considering it?

Re: What happened with the Web Monetization API?

#220

Post by triceratops »

latchkey wrote: post #210
ggm wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you amortise the kyc cost then wise or similar does this just as frictionless. Basically, crypto does not solve any real world problems that don't have other solutions. Kyc exists for a reason, the same friction free transfer beneath your mental limit can be rerun 10000x by machine and achieve aml outcomes.

Of course I've used Wise to send money. It was full of confusing KYC friction that took several days to resolve. Cost more than $0.05, took more than a few hours to complete, didn't allow me to use my own currency (crypto) and required my friend to also setup a Wise account and go through the same contortions on their end. KYC exists to make life hard. It solves no real problems, just like the TSA at airports. Securi…

You're criticizing GP for taking an absolutist position ("Crypto is useless") but then doing the same yourself ("KYC is useless").
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