I think the way you support publishers is one of a few things
* they list a patreon or librepay or whatever and you support them directly
* They have ads and they ask you nicely to disable your adblocker (as long as they are unobtrusive I'm fine with this)
I think that's really it, if publishers dont give you a clear way to support them, in my eyes, they are providing the service for free.
Some people don't want to be paid. They do things as a hobby and for fun. As soon as one is being paid there is a ned to publish more and good quality stuff, which turns a fun project into work.
That is sad reality. As an example, I wish Sabine Hossenfelder didn't have to leave academia. Her content (blog posts not videos) were one of the ways I kept up with development in theoretical physics. But now that she is a full time video content creator, she is under pressure to publish click bait and very questionable content. I understand that she is catering to the audience but this is one example why alignment of the incentives works. Before, she was earning her living as a working physicist so she did not have to cater to anyone actually and she produced very good content -with exceptions- for years.
Avocations can turn into a nice revenue stream if the stars align. But online content almost certainly requires that you really work at it and think about what you need to do to boost revenue in ways that might not happen organically.
>, I wish Sabine Hossenfelder didn't have to leave academia. [...] I understand that she is catering to the audience but this is one example why alignment of the incentives works. Before, she was earning her living as a working physicist so she did not have to cater to anyone actually
But this obscures the fact that she was still "catering to the audience" when working in academia as a paid physicist. She was just placating a different audience and worked on topics she really didn't think was groundbreaking just to keep the grant money rolling in. The misalignment of incentives just happened outside of Youtube.
A lot of viewers wish that "content creator" wasn't a thing and people just did Youtube for free as a hobby. Understandable. But what viewers don't realize is that it's also actually saying this: "Please continue being unhappy in your crappy day job so you don't need to live off money from Youtube ads or sponsorships."
Her personal motivations make total sense and this isn’t a judgment of her, but your comment makes it sound a little like misaligned incentives just switched places, but the misaligned research incentives remain (and she doesn’t do research professionally anymore) and now she introduced a new misalignment: the content creation business.
It’s totally fair that emotionally she was done with one and able better to continue work with the other, but removing the hobby element actually did remove one set of well aligned incentives and did not replace them with another.
Please continue being unhappy in your crappy day job so you don't need to live off money from Youtube ads or sponsorships.
The problem is that we shouldn’t be a society where most day jobs are crappy and where we accept that because people who are “not entrepreneurial” deserve to suffer.
We could have been all sorts of things. We chose Office Space and then we chose influencer grift.
Not all day jobs need to be crap of course. I enjoy mine and I like to produce some content on the side.
It's hard to get people to find it though due to the platforms all promoting professionals from which they earn more. But on the other hand I don't really care either.
> But what viewers don't realize is that it's also actually saying this: "Please continue being unhappy in your crappy day job so you don't need to live off money from Youtube ads or sponsorships."
But the reverse is also true: Not for everybody being content creator is the dream job. Some like creating something once in a while, but otherwise enjoy their life and job.
Personally, I don't mind that "content creator" is a thing, but what irks me is that, at least in the Youtube I see, "content creator" is the ONLY thing.
If I search for ANYTHING, I get a tutorial, or tips, or some clickbait like "I had no idea about this!" Every video is by someone whose job is Youtube. The giveaway is that all of them have custom thumbnails. Someone who just made a random video about something and posted on the free video platform wouldn't even have bothered getting a custom thumbnail for it. You can't find those videos, at all. At this point it wouldn't surprise me if a custom thumbnails was a requirement for the algorithm to consider your video even if it isn't spelled out anywhere.
Even if we installed fully automated communism and nobody had to work crappy day jobs to feed themselves anymore, the inherent human drive for fame and approval of one's peers would probably still make people placate their audiences to an extent. It's probably just inescapable
This also means that the people who want to be paid will tell you exactly how on their page. E.g., all the “buy me a coffee” links you can find on open source projects.
The author of this article wants a special HTML meta property but we’ve already that solved: plain text and hyperlinks.
> I have money and I have a URL, how do I send money to the publisher of that URL?
This question could easily be “I have money and I have a person’s name and address, how do I send money to them?”
The only way to do this consistently would be to mail them physical cash, since there’s no way to consistently send money electronically across the world (and you’d have a currency conversion problem too - if someone mailed me US$0.23, it’s not worth exchanging it).
Building micropayments infrastructure requires building broader financial infrastructure, not just adding a meta tag. This can use existing infrastructure to some extent, but it’s a pretty big challenge.
(For example, in Australia, you can send someone money if you have their email address (via PayID), so you could bootstrap that part - minus the international part.)
I think the (not clearly stated) intention is for an automated way to detect the pubisher's explicitly preferred method of compensation. Which is a sensible request, since it can allow a browser button/extension that sends you there with the click of a button, rather than having to search the page (or a video) for a mention of it.
Though in my experience, publishers and creators make it pretty easy to find that information, so the use of this tech would be very niche.
The EU is also working on a digital Euro [1] that is supposed to roll out to the whole EU and support digital payments without any fees. Let's see, if they succeed with that, but if they do it would be great.
I don't know about other places, but here there's no bank that will turn that slip of paper into real money. I've never even seen a cheque or chequebook in person, it's almost exclusively mentioned by Americans (In my experience)
the last two payments I sent by cheque here in France got processed, one by the national electricity provider for about 50€ and the second by an association/company (I'm not sure) for 200€. The last cheque I received, in 2021 (my grandmother reimbursing me the gas refill I did on her car one week before she died), got processed for free by my bank.
But I don't think the chequebook I have can be used to sent money to someone outside of France. And I only have a chequebook because that's how I have to pay my electricity bill.
Isn't this the problem Brave browser set out to solve? It's just that they did it with cryptocurrency so everyone shunned it. https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
It’s so funny how the Brave haters will constantly outright lie just to get their point.
> Do Brave Ads replace ads on websites? What do Brave Ads look like?
> No, Brave Ads do not replace the ads that the Brave Browser blocks on web pages (like banner ads). You can find a list of Brave’s ad formats here.
> What do Brave Ads look like?
> You can choose which ones you’d like to see: images on the new tab page, cards in your Brave News feed, push notifications, and others.
Creators also don’t get “a” cut. Brave gives 70% of earnings on ads to users, and those can then decide how much they reward to the creators of whatever content they consume.
BAT being crypto is also nice because it automatically means you can just buy BAT directly and support sites without having to see a single ad or cumbersomely figure out how to somehow donate to each site/creator directly.
> Step Two: Brave Replaces Ads
We recognize that ads pay for most of our web content. Ads are not going away. So we replace the bad ads with Brave Ads, which we use to pay publishers and users.
Maybe they don't replace ads now but they seem to have done it in the past. Or at least talked about doing it.
Really man, drop the crusade. Look at Brave their tech blog (Project Sugarcoat for example, something directly meant to make page ad hiding more cosmetically pleasing). Or the fact that their defaults are more private than Firefox its defaults.
For the weird missteps they did in the past (appending their affiliate link on crypto sites and one other scandal that eludes me), they’re a really good org / product now.
I don't hate Brave, but blocking legitimate ads and then putting in their own ads is a racket.
> Creators also don’t get “a” cut. Brave gives 70% of earnings on ads to users, and those can then decide how much they reward to the creators of whatever content they consume.
Ie, creators are offered a cut - in a roundabout way.
It is not a racket when the website owners are mass-injecting trackers and security risks into my browser. Some egregious pages have 700+ (!!) ad partners.
Hell, it is the opposite of a racket because other adblockers / adblocking people pay zilch. That is the racket. Any BAT user is a +70% gain.
I’ll pay you. I won’t compromise my devices for you.
OK, even if we say that the ads from the website creator are not legitimate, it doesn't make the ads from brave legitimate.
Try to think about this from the perspective of another person instead of yourself.
Or think about this comparison: I own a bar where I sell drinks to the general public. Then some businessman comes in, throws out my bar staff and starts selling his own drinks to the guests, and offers 10% of revenue to me. Is that fair and honest? Who was the legitimate drink seller and who wasn't? Now you can say that alcohol is bad for your health and shouldn't be sold at all, and that you as a customer don't care. But it is very clear who is legit and who isn't.
> Or think about this comparison: I own a bar where I sell drinks to the general public. Then some businessman comes in, throws out my bar staff and starts selling his own drinks to the guests, and offers 10% of revenue to me.
Which is a completely wrong comparison.
- You own a bar (website) and serve drinks (ads) to the general public.
- A large subset of your visitors decides they like the atmosphere of the bar, but whenever you try to sell them a drink, they refuse to order one. Alcohol is bad, they claim, and since you aren't offering non-alcoholic drinks, they've decided its moral to not order anything and enjoy your bar for free.
- An enterprising individual (Brave) recognizes the plight of both the bar owner and the customers. They surreptitiously serve non-alcoholic drinks (clean ads) to the bothersome customers.
- They sell the drinks at 70% discount, and strongly suggest to the customers to generously tip with the net gain of money, to ensure the continued existence of the bar they enjoy so much.
Brave isn't turning non-adblocking visitors into adblocking visitors. Its converting adblocking visitors into revenue-generating visitors.
Like I suspected, you unfortunately don't have the capacity to see things from another persons perspective. That's normal, that's how most people are. The only way you could understand would be if you yourself had to make a living from ad-supported creativity. Until then, you will not be capable of understanding. Or you've effectively used sophistry enough in life to make it a habit. But everybody sees through it.
This is the reason why corruption is so rampant in the world. People skip the line to get healthcare by bribing an official. They think it's right, because they only look for their own interests. The bribe-taking official is an "enterprising individual".
The creators of Brave skillfully use this egotism of users to make them accept and even defend their illicit practices. "Oh, I get free money, then I like it". If they were honest about their business they would distribute their ad money to creators without going through the user, but which user would then enable their illicit ads?
Blocking ads as a user is completely different. Nobody makes money by blocking ads for themselves.
I look at Brave as another business looking to take their cut as a middleman between users and creators. It's an ad network that takes the 30% cut like Apple does to apps making over $1M.
I would much rather that creators who want to make money decide what they want to sell, and how they want to sell it. The web doesn't need a crypto tip jar layer.
Cryptocurrency might have been ok, but this is their own custom currency. In other words, they’re paying people in scrip. They shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t like that.
I (rather diligently) accepted 10 ads an hour on Brave for about a year, received BAT regularly, and immediately converted it to BTC upon receipt. Eventually my BAT payments stopped coming (I somehow got algorithmically blocked and didn't bother opening a ticket with Brave for almost another year), but I withdrew the BTC from Uphold and it's worth about $450 now. That's like being paid almost 40 bucks a month to just go about your business while browsing the web!
IMO this is mind-blowing, tangible proof that micropayments in return for my time and attention works. Imagine a world where our attention is actually valued and rewarded, where all people receive income through many various streams as they navigate the physical and digital worlds. We can argue back and forth about pros/cons/ethics of arriving at my anecdotal valuation (bitcoin, crypto, etc), but that's not my point -- the point is that this type of system actually does function, and in theory could raise tides enough across the world to lift all boats in really positive ways.
Tangential, but Michael Saylor has also opined about how this type of micro-payment / micro-staking could go in the opposite direction, using smart contracts and Lightning to escrow fractional tokens to participate in social media or even prevent DDOS attacks if woven into the underlying networking appropriately. Obviously I'm skeptical about certain latencies that would be added but, conceptually, forcing people to have SOME skin in the game and doing it in an invisible, frictionless way is quite intriguing.
Anyways, just one man's journey from Milan to Minsk by way of Brave and BAT lol
Browsers should have pay/tip button to support website owners. And browser vendors should handle the payment. This would limit ads and tracking as well which aligns with Mozilla goals. Can I pitch this idea to Mozilla somewhere?
The browser vendors can earn small commission from each transaction. This ensures steady stream of income for them as well. They have created a piece of public infrastructure that is absolutely critical they should earn from direct payments of their users instead of relying on single entity who may or may not have their best interest at heart.
So if this became popular enough, then in a sense browser makers would be gatekeeping who’s allowed to receive payments. Website owners could of course still show ads or independently earn money other ways, but wouldn’t browser makers then be incentivized to tailor the browser experience to favor sites that earn them a commission?
But they don't have the infrastructure to reveive the payments internationally,(apple and google do) but there wouldn't be a conflict of interest for example google with their ads businesses and imagine apple charges 30% for every transaction like the do on the apple store
Browser companies can't handle payments unless they decide to pivot to becoming a payments company like PayPal.
The API and standards talk in the article is putting the cart before the horse. There is currently no way to send money peer-to-peer without an intermediary that can handle the bank transfer, and intermediaries tend to charge a lot for this service.
Because of this, the best options are to add a PayPal or Ko-fi button on the site, with the understanding that the publisher won't be receiving the full amount you send.
Come to think of it you can do this with normal DNS by just setting a wallet address in a TXT record but that's not integrated into anything. It's just text.
There's a difference between 'doable' and 'viable'.
People want to be paid in cash. Not some internet money that has to go through an exchange to be converted into actual cash. If ENS was so great, people would already be using it.
I don't see much of a point. If someone makes a website and wants people to be able to send money to them for that, a link on that website should work just fine. I'm failing to see the benefit of a HTML meta tag related to that.
> I wish I could click a button to easily send a "tip" to someone who created something I enjoy or to browse other options for supporting them.
I believe most people invested in getting donations already have a similar button on their page.
Plus, to me it seems like this could be ripe for abuse. If you are reading a great post on something, how do you know if the HTML meta tag actually would go to the author of that post, or the hosting platform instead (who sneakily puts in that meta tag on all their hosted content).
With an explicit button, you have to read and acknowledge who you are giving to.
Worst part about such small payments is that intermediary, that will process the payment, might get 50% or even more of said payment, leaving not much to receiver. If someone really wants support, they will either have a link to "merch" store, or links to Patreon, Kofi or some other platform. Worth noting, that content creators usually seek recurring payments, not a single tip.
>Worst part about such small payments is that intermediary, that will process the payment, might get 50% or even more of said payment, leaving not much to receiver.
Yeah you essentially need a system has an internal balance that would then let you send and receive micropayments and only convert them to cash when the balance is large enough that the processing fee makes sense.
The open web is a platform for freeloaders. Since day 1 the expectation is that whatever is accessible will be free. And whatever isn't will be made free by whatever means necessary. Web content creators/publishers don't bother with micropayments infrastructure because no one is going to pay. Ads are a proven business model and they are going to stay.
There are other platforms where micropayments have in fact been solved – see Twitch, OnlyFans, YouTube, Substack, Patreon, IAP on iOS/Android, WeChat, Gaming. That's where the innovation in the space will be because that's where the money is.
> That's where the innovation in the space will be because that's where the money is.
Agreed completely, assuming that "innovation" is a euphemism for "grifting". These platforms are completely dominated by rent-seeking and borderline fraudulent garbage. I'd take a web ring over the front page of the App Store in any context.
7 years ago I tried to start a project to allow customers to pay through the ad networks. IE rather than seeing ads, you'd see something saying how much you were providing to the web page owner. I've so far been unable to actually build it though.
This is the one thing that I actually thought cryptocurrency would help - getting small adhoc payments out from under the bootheel of Mastercard and Visa, and especially for international transfers that cross between, say, the MC/Visa duopoly regions into other ones like the Asian ecosystems.
But instead it's slow, inconsistent, inconvenient, balkanised, dripping with scams, criminals and bad actors and still involves substantial transfer fees and volatility on top of that. At this point it's a market for lemons: any new cryptocurrency venture is almost entirely indistinguishable from something that already ended up being at best a non-starter, but often just a scam.
As a vehicle for speculation, arbitrage and scams, it's a masterpiece. As a currency (you know, like in the name), it's, put lightly, not great, especially if you live in the developed world.
Fully agree. We should just settle on a single internet currency thats fast, interoperable and not a market for speculation.
Hmm perhaps we don’t need more types of currency? Perhaps it’s better to push deep integration of modern banking changes like psd2, psd3 and others. Across the whole internet. So everyone can just do regular payments with their own bank in a safe and protected way, and hopefully with less intermediaries.
Yes, indeed. The thing is MasterCard, Visa and all their foreign counterparts actually do provide a lot of value in keeping the ecosystem relatively safe for normal people. When I see a contactless touch point in a shop, I know it's almost certainly legit. If they didn't, people would just use cash.
So there's probably always going to be some kind of transfer or network access fee. It's just that it very much not a competitive market place.
Opening up the system to competition, but still within a regulatory framework that prevents it degenerating into a Wild West hotbed of scamming does seem like a good way to achieve some of that. Certainly, the vaunted "free market" should be ensuring that the price of a transaction is pretty close to the cost of providing it, and it clearly is not currently.
The problem, or feature, depending on who you ask, is that basically only governments can provide that kind of regulation. Which will always then inject a level of geopolitics into things like which countries you're allowed to buy your blog posts from. And for governments who listen to business over citizens also leads to capture and subversion of the system.
That's the bit I don't know how to solve. I have a feeling it may not be solvable in principle, only mitigated if we could get trading on the thing turned into a crime. You'd still have black market trading, but hopefully much more limited in its impact on ordinary use.
Even modern currency isn't free of being a market for speculation.
It's not as extreme as cryptocurrency, but forex trading is a thing, and honestly the sways of USD to other currencies are meaninful enough to take into consideration when moving money internationally.
> We should just settle on a single internet currency that's fast, interoperable and not a market for speculation.
With respect to crypto, a "single currency" shouldn't be a prerequisite because, with a $3T mcap, crypto has plenty of liquidity across centralized and decentralized exchanges to allow anyone to convert between any currencies they have on-chain. (Uniswap for instance has $1B - $6B volume transacted daily.)
Declaring a single currency would also be antithetical to free market competition for currencies.
> interoperable
If "interoperable" means you can use the currency anywhere, then I think liquidity for currency conversion is sufficient.
That said, we already have dollar (USD) stablecoins[^0] on all major L1, L2, rollup blockchains. Because they are pegged to the U.S. dollar, they also meet your requirement that the currency not be speculative (Strictly speaking, the U.S. dollar is inflationary and therefore is subject to speculation, but perhaps I'm being pedantic.).
> fast
Rollups[^3] provide fast transactions. These use various cryptographic protocols to verifiably and quickly batch and compress user operations on-chain.
> deep integration of modern banking changes
"Deep integration of modern banking" sounds good but modern banking creates a choke point[^1] where users can be targeted and denied services. Ultimately we would want to be able to stay on-chain for all payments and not need off-ramps which leave users open to debanking[^2] or surveillance. Crypto is permissionless and, with little effort from the user, censorship resistant.
---
[^0]: https://castleisland.vc/writing/stablecoins-the-emerging-mar...
"Stablecoins – tokenized representations of fiat currencies circulating on blockchains 1 – are unambiguously the “killer app” of crypto so far. There are over $160 billion worth of stablecoins in circulation today, up from single digit billions as recently as 2020. Over 20 million addresses make a stablecoin transaction on public blockchains every month. And in the first half of 2024, stablecoins settled (according to our adjusted estimates) over $2.6 trillion dollars worth of value. Stablecoins offer considerable advantages relative to existing payment systems, including native programmability, strong auditability properties, fast settlement, the ability to self-custody, and native interoperability"
[^1]: https://www.piratewires.com/p/2023-banking-crisis
"Beginning in 2013, Choke Point was a scheme which sought to marginalize specific industries operating legally — not through lawmaking, but by applying pressure via the banking sector."
Every transfer costs money. Every swap costs money. I now have to choose which L2 provider to trust implicitly, with no recourse on failure. And at the end of it, I still have internet points, instead of something that can pay rent or buy food.
Yes, all real world payments, from credit cards, to bank transfers have transaction fees. Depending on where you are in the world, even cash payments can include taxes per transaction.
> Every swap costs money.
Yes, currency conversion in real life includes fees.
> I now have to choose which L2 provider to trust implicitly, with no recourse on failure.
No, the whole point of a rollup is that your transactions are posted to L1 in a provable manner. Optimistic rollups and ZK rollups all allow you to transact without having to trust the L2. (There are caveats for those L2s that are in various stages of implementation and that's all public information.)
> And at the end of it, I still have internet points, instead of something that can pay rent or buy food.
The question was how to pay the publisher of a web page and this is a technology forum. So we discuss technological solutions. Paying rent and buying food is a solved problem.
Look, if there’s no reasonable way to transfer in bitcoin and transfer out USD there’s no point to any of it. Mtgox is closed, binance is closed, quadriga is closed, and kraken isn’t looking terribly good either. Stripe stopped accepting, visa stopped accepting, it’s … coinbase?
> Look, if there’s no reasonable way to transfer in bitcoin and transfer out USD there’s no point to any of it.
In reality, there are billions of Dollars, Euros, Pounds, AUD, and other currencies moving in and out of crypto daily via on/off-ramps. Bitcoin and Ether ETFs exist and are well capitalized and widely used. You claim "Binance is closed" yet I'm quite sure I used it this week. I also use Kraken quite happily to send money to my bank account. Coinbase of course is thriving.
If you transact in size, simply hold USDC[^1] and open an account with Circle[^2].
Have you used or looked into crypto since MtGox? It's been quite some time since that affair. You'd probably be surprised to find how much utility there is if that was the last time you actually investigated crypto. There are also P2P options like Paxful, Telegram, or Binance P2P if you prefer.
Anyway, if you're fixated with the old guard of finance then any advancement in technology will necessarily have to meet incumbent institutions requirements, with all the problems I listed earlier in the thread. With a bit of effort, you could instead imagine an entirely digital internet economy with so-called crypto points. Even that alone would be step forward and a mere generation of users away from your landlord, a crypto user, accepting them as payment.
Reality, however is such that right now you can fund a debit card with crypto and buy coffee with no problems. [^0]
>Fully agree. We should just settle on a single internet currency thats fast, interoperable and not a market for speculation.
I wish we would all agree to just go back to mostly using paypal (or venmo, zelle, etc) for online shit and leave crypto out of it. The only advantage to crypto is anonymity, and possibly the ability to send smaller fractional payments, but honestly the existing non-crypto solutions could come up with solutions to those things.
Keybase's integration with XLM was pretty great. It's too bad the community revolted for reasons that amounted to a form of begging the question about the things you list here.
There are options, however just saying anything is going to get you labeled as a shill heh. You're right that any new crypto is indistinguishable, but that is part of the risk in trying to outlast the rest. Some crypto that have survived should be worth more for hitting some of these milestones, but unfortunately that still isn't reflected in the top 10/20/100 because people are so desperate they throw cash at anything that moves.
The convenience of the scamming is partly why it _is_ a solution to this problem: people can transfer value as fast as they desire, and it works. There is also just a problem off on and off-boarding where you get hit by Visa/Mastercard level of fees. So is it really solving the problem at that point?
One area I would like to see is some kind of governed/regulated profit sharing. Basically giving your votes to content/production and this puts it on the books for some fraction of payment. You get X shares to distribute to content regularly. It would also be helpful if our government would provide support for independent producers where there's a clear trackable benefit (e.g. open source libraries that a ton of people rely on and a business can say "yes I need this, help them keep doing it").
I have a friend claiming bitcoin is a "store of value, tool for the de-banked (politically right), hedge against the rapidly inflating dollar, more valuable than gold" (paraphrasing). He further claims that "bitcoin can't be faked like 'uninspected' gold reserves" that are supposedly just "painted iron ingots".
I want to scream. This is a speculative investment with more bad actors involved than the SEC has investigated throughout its entire history.
I hate these bitcoin boom cycles. It's like all the lessons learned immediately get forgotten.
Him: "But this time is different. Last time the Democrats were holding it back. Trump is going to make a strategic crypto reserve. Trump and his allies are all pro-crypto. The Democratic party was trying to regulate it away."
Notice he isn't claiming its a currency, even if we take all the claims at face value. Apparently he is not alone though as the value has climbed 33% since the election. I had not even heard of this fantasy of a TrUmP crypto boom.
He might be right in some ways about Bitcoin but he fails to take into account that the price of Bitcoin may be inflated by Tether, a stable coin traded in large numbers for Bitcoin. New tether is minted by the billions, and has questionable auditing and oversight, and is used to buy Bitcoin on the open market.
There a couple of ways that the price of Bitcoin could drop precipitously and the unraveling of Tether is one of them.
I think this is a good application for the Lightning Network, specifically if people use a Lightning Address where the address uses the same domain as the URL of the webpage. There are a lot of people in Lightning world who also hate scams (and any other crypto coin for that matter) and just want to make this work as money (and already have).
A real-world example where Lightning Network is already working is Nostr. It's not hard to get a Nostr client with built-in Lightning functionality (like Primal) and start "zapping" tiny payments to others.
I'm not affiliated with Primal, just a fan, and a developer who wants to see a system like this work.
I am not sure if people are aware, but with SEPA you can transfer money to other peoples account without any fee (depending on where you live of course).
Only downside is that you have to reveal your account data online.
I know a guy who runs an online shop with a single product and it is a static website saying "Transfer 12 € to the following bank account with the following subject and your name/address" — apparently this works quite well since the mid 90s. The website still uses frames for its layout and has animated gif flags.
SEPA is not free - it's just often free for consumers (and likely until your bank considers your usage patterns to be 'too business like')
and it can't be free.. even though the systems might have no further marginal cost per transaction, banks still need to do anti-money laundering checks, and someone's gotta pay for that
And that's probably around the price point that people mean by micropayments. It's not $1 per article. And that's probably an exhausting amount of mental transaction costs as Clay Shirky observed ages ago and probably not a sustainable revenue stream for producers.
For consumers, a subscription model seems to fit the bill for most people but some media are apparently better suited than others.
My dream is for ~5c micropayments, where the money goes either goes to the publisher or a charity depending on if I liked it after the fact. Basically fighting low quality clickbait without the publisher being able to tell which I specifically did.
Single digit cents is not a large fee, but blockchain fees are dynamic. And the more traffic, the more expensive. I would not appreciate if that 2.6 cents suddenly became $2.60. Also the maximum number of transactions for Bitcoin (not sure etherium) is about 10/s. Processors like Visa and MasterCard process thousands of transactions per second. And if every article read is another transaction that would need at least 1-2 orders of magnitude more transactions. The way I see it, blockchain is a broken model for micro payments. If I am missing something, please let me know.
Yes you missed something: He talked about L2, which is a general term for "layer 2" networks that work on top of the blockchain.
For example for Bitcoin there's the Lightning network as L2, where you do one transaction to open the channel, and one to close it, and channels can remain open for months. Payments are routed through a network of channels, so you only need one or a few channels to other nodes and can reach all nodes in the network.
The transactions are much cheaper in this network precisely because they're not on chain, but it's still secure because each L2 transaction leads to a signed (but not published) blockchain transaction that each party of the channel can choose to publish at any time (and close the channel).
There's a bit more to it, and I recommend anyone who isn't aware of L2 networks to look into it.
There were probably some useful concepts and possibilities in the blockchain space but they became so intermixed with the crypto-scum that the whole area became toxic.
And one effect of that is that the energy/investment level of legit promoters of blockchain has gone down while other promoters have stayed the same or increased.
This is a relatively straightforward problem to solve. There is a “payment required” HTTP status code and lightning network micropayments are very easy to set up and use.
The problem is that payments that cannot be centrally surveilled and centrally vetoed (without burden of proof of probable cause, usually) are actually illegal to implement.
To do anything like this requires strong ID and KYC for payer and recipient and that isn’t what bare URLs and the web are about.
All of the cool applications of online payments that would spread quickly and efficiently are illegal.
I think another problem with micropayments is competing with free is hard. Say you have the best lightning paywall with an amazing UX where it's super easy and automatic to pay a creator a few sats. Most people assume the problem is user's don't want to pay but it's actually publishers who won't put up micropayments on their content. Here's why: for a big publisher, adding a lightning paywall is a big risk which may lose them their audience. For small publisher's, they don't care if 10 people send 10 sats, all they care about is becoming a big publisher
> it's actually publishers who won't put up micropayments on their content
Won't, or can't?
Do you have a good article about how to set up a paywall or tip jar for small transactions, with a clear description of what percentage goes to middlemen and (mainly in the case of proof of work) how much externality cost it incurs?
I would like to be able to pay $cents or even $dollar for instant access to an article, but only if X% actually goes to the recipient (I don't know what X is, yet), and I would lead by example on my own content. (though most likely tip jar, not paywall)
Soz for the late reply. I think you kind of answered your own question. It's not can't, it's won't as you are willing to add tipping but not a paywall to your content :D
So for context, we built a lightning paywall(now defunct). All you had to do was add a single line of js to your site, as easy as Google analytics/ads. The cost was 0.01% of transaction. You could even move to self hosting and not pay us. Finally, we even built an "auto payer" so users could approve a site and auto pay a few cents with limits. Anyways, our experience is content publishers said they wanted to monetize their content but when it came down to it, were extremely reluctant to add a paywall and would maybe think of adding tipping.
Anyways I think our solution was great but no product market fit. I was especially proud how private the whole thing was but users didn't seem to really value that
> It's not can't, it's won't as you are willing to add tipping but not a paywall to your content
The "won't" is because of two reasons: 1) too high overhead, and 2) bootstrap problem. Nobody has the ability to pay with one click set up.
When I say "can't" I mean that they can't set up a payment system that everybody can use, and also doesn't have too high fees. Of course they can set up a method that nobody will use. They could set up a bitcoin paywall, and have huge waiting times, enormously expensive overhead, and no customers for the payment method.
> All you had to do was add a single line of js to your site, as easy as Google analytics/ads.
Super easy on the server side. Yay.
> The cost was 0.01% of transaction. You could even move to self hosting and not pay us.
Oh, neat. But you're missing a step in the explanation, I think. How did it work on the client side? Presumably:
1. Clients need to create an account with you (lose 99% of people already)
2a. Client needs to create a balance with you, e.g. by paying in $10 in one go, to spend this month. (lose further 99% of people); or
2b. Client gets charged once a month for their total amount (probably better client acceptance)
For the server side to create an account, that's not a problem at all. If you had said that you had your software on 30 million users, payment set up and done, then I'd imagine more publishers would be willing to add a tip jar / alternative paywall.
But in any case, what are your card fees? I can't imagine this product had 0.01% end to end fees, given the hoops I have to jump through just to send money between my own bank accounts without paying fees.
And that's not even tackling currency exchange.
Some (but definitely not all) cryptocurrencies may fare better in the fees department, but not only does that have its own sets of problems (e.g. legal and PR), most people would still need to acquire a balance.
> Anyways I think our solution was great but no product market fit.
It does sound great. But also doesn't sound like it solved the hard problem.
When you pitched this to publishers, how many users could you say were ready to send them money today, using installed extensions and pre-filled wallets?
My guess is that 1. there’s virtually no demand from potential supporters for a more convenient way to pay creators than existing payment/subscription apps, and 2. relatively few creators have direct control over their own internet presence anymore, so any solution that requires modifying a web page is dead in the water.
Any new attempt to pay creators that doesn’t factor these two realities in will likely fail, because it just makes things harder than existing solutions.
Honestly this is one of the main usecases of crypto, in my opinion. And it's only in 2024 where the transaction costs are cheap enough that it's worth it.
Still, fragmentation of crypto makes the whole experience shitty - but we've been working on this to fix that: https://docs.peanut.to/checkout-api
Crypto's obsession with public blockchains and the requisite fees to make this work prevent this from being a viable solution.
Those transaction costs you're talking about are still a couple orders of magnitude (or more!) too high for this to be a viable solution for these kinds of micro payments.
This doesn't even get into the necessary transaction throughput that's still it's own unsolved problem
We’re three decades in with the web and it’s pretty clear that voluntary payment nudges don’t work. Most people won’t pay for free content after they’ve consumed it. Humans need an extra incentive to pay for free content.
This is why so many sponsorship platforms are effectively subscription models with additional exclusive content or early access. And for that to work, you need more than just a payment button, you need a content publishing platform that will handle all the subs and content gating.
I don’t think payment friction has been reduced nearly enough to make that statement. If it was possible to click a button to instantly send ten cents to the creator of an article, and people still didn’t do it, then we could conclude that it doesn’t work. But we’re extremely far from that now.
I think you're missing a small yet significant portion of people who will pay for content after consuming it. Off the top of my head I've "tipped" after the fact for: An awesome free work time recording app, "free" walking tours when I'm traveling, free online chess, Wikipedia — all after using them.
Most people won't do that though. The walking tour is an example of a situation where there is likely a societal expectation to tip. No such thing on the internet where the publisher is a faceless unknown.
>We’re three decades in with the web and it’s pretty clear that voluntary payment nudges don’t work. Most people won’t pay for free content after they’ve consumed it.
Humans have no problem tipping, the issue is that a single article or piece of content is rarely worth than a fractional amount of whatever your preferred currency is, and it costs more than that amount to transfer that currency. Sponsorships work because you pay normal amounts of currency to receive a larger future block of content.
To make tipping work, you need a system that supports allowing you to deposit normal sums of money but then dole it out in micropayments, and also not charge more than those payments for processing the micropayments. A payment system like Paypal, that maintains an internal balance that is used instead of just transferring from one bank account to another (zelle, venmo), could handle this but I don't think the financial incentives are there for them to bother with it.
Seems fairly simple to have a smart contract do a DNS validation to unlock funds. For example, someone sends to a contract "$1 to example.com". Then the URL owner publishes either a TXT file or DNS record that has a list of crypto wallet addresses. Contract then forwards the payments. You could even make the keys just the ISO codes for each currency.
It's as good of a proof for TLS certs, but it's susceptible to DNS hijacking, etc. Make the contract immutable to meet tornado.cash standard. There are already oracles for DNS lookups so this contract might already exist somewhere.
Add in a couple of features:
1. Allow tracking per domain so publishers can know that there is a demand to set it up on their end.
2. Allow refunds in case the publisher never opens it up.
You scan the qrcode on the page which will launch your banking app that initiates the transfer and fills out the details leaving for you to enter the amount and the fingerprint confirmation to send it off.
Author here! My primary motivation is to tip the hundreds of web creators that I enjoy every year without linearly increasing my spend (I can only afford so many $3/month Patreons).
It's manual for now, but the computer tracks who to pay next, who to stop paying, and give you links to speed up the process.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] thread* they list a patreon or librepay or whatever and you support them directly * They have ads and they ask you nicely to disable your adblocker (as long as they are unobtrusive I'm fine with this)
I think that's really it, if publishers dont give you a clear way to support them, in my eyes, they are providing the service for free.
But this obscures the fact that she was still "catering to the audience" when working in academia as a paid physicist. She was just placating a different audience and worked on topics she really didn't think was groundbreaking just to keep the grant money rolling in. The misalignment of incentives just happened outside of Youtube.
Deep link to her explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8&t=4m37s
A lot of viewers wish that "content creator" wasn't a thing and people just did Youtube for free as a hobby. Understandable. But what viewers don't realize is that it's also actually saying this: "Please continue being unhappy in your crappy day job so you don't need to live off money from Youtube ads or sponsorships."
It’s totally fair that emotionally she was done with one and able better to continue work with the other, but removing the hobby element actually did remove one set of well aligned incentives and did not replace them with another.
The problem is that we shouldn’t be a society where most day jobs are crappy and where we accept that because people who are “not entrepreneurial” deserve to suffer.
We could have been all sorts of things. We chose Office Space and then we chose influencer grift.
It's hard to get people to find it though due to the platforms all promoting professionals from which they earn more. But on the other hand I don't really care either.
But the reverse is also true: Not for everybody being content creator is the dream job. Some like creating something once in a while, but otherwise enjoy their life and job.
If I search for ANYTHING, I get a tutorial, or tips, or some clickbait like "I had no idea about this!" Every video is by someone whose job is Youtube. The giveaway is that all of them have custom thumbnails. Someone who just made a random video about something and posted on the free video platform wouldn't even have bothered getting a custom thumbnail for it. You can't find those videos, at all. At this point it wouldn't surprise me if a custom thumbnails was a requirement for the algorithm to consider your video even if it isn't spelled out anywhere.
1. https://www.avclub.com/why-does-everyone-on-youtube-make-the...
The problem is that there's no web-standard way for people who do want to be paid to indicate how.
The author of this article wants a special HTML meta property but we’ve already that solved: plain text and hyperlinks.
[1]: https://humanstxt.org/
This question could easily be “I have money and I have a person’s name and address, how do I send money to them?”
The only way to do this consistently would be to mail them physical cash, since there’s no way to consistently send money electronically across the world (and you’d have a currency conversion problem too - if someone mailed me US$0.23, it’s not worth exchanging it).
Building micropayments infrastructure requires building broader financial infrastructure, not just adding a meta tag. This can use existing infrastructure to some extent, but it’s a pretty big challenge.
(For example, in Australia, you can send someone money if you have their email address (via PayID), so you could bootstrap that part - minus the international part.)
Though in my experience, publishers and creators make it pretty easy to find that information, so the use of this tech would be very niche.
In theory there'd be SWIFT, but that's too slow and expensive.
The EU has the SEPA, but few other countries actually care about joining or replicating that success.
[1] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
Send a cheque?
But I don't think the chequebook I have can be used to sent money to someone outside of France. And I only have a chequebook because that's how I have to pay my electricity bill.
I suspect if you sent me one, my credit union would figure out how to get me the money eventually.
> Do Brave Ads replace ads on websites? What do Brave Ads look like?
> No, Brave Ads do not replace the ads that the Brave Browser blocks on web pages (like banner ads). You can find a list of Brave’s ad formats here.
> What do Brave Ads look like?
> You can choose which ones you’d like to see: images on the new tab page, cards in your Brave News feed, push notifications, and others.
Creators also don’t get “a” cut. Brave gives 70% of earnings on ads to users, and those can then decide how much they reward to the creators of whatever content they consume.
BAT being crypto is also nice because it automatically means you can just buy BAT directly and support sites without having to see a single ad or cumbersomely figure out how to somehow donate to each site/creator directly.
> Step Two: Brave Replaces Ads We recognize that ads pay for most of our web content. Ads are not going away. So we replace the bad ads with Brave Ads, which we use to pay publishers and users.
Maybe they don't replace ads now but they seem to have done it in the past. Or at least talked about doing it.
Really man, drop the crusade. Look at Brave their tech blog (Project Sugarcoat for example, something directly meant to make page ad hiding more cosmetically pleasing). Or the fact that their defaults are more private than Firefox its defaults.
For the weird missteps they did in the past (appending their affiliate link on crypto sites and one other scandal that eludes me), they’re a really good org / product now.
> Creators also don’t get “a” cut. Brave gives 70% of earnings on ads to users, and those can then decide how much they reward to the creators of whatever content they consume.
Ie, creators are offered a cut - in a roundabout way.
Hell, it is the opposite of a racket because other adblockers / adblocking people pay zilch. That is the racket. Any BAT user is a +70% gain.
I’ll pay you. I won’t compromise my devices for you.
Try to think about this from the perspective of another person instead of yourself.
Or think about this comparison: I own a bar where I sell drinks to the general public. Then some businessman comes in, throws out my bar staff and starts selling his own drinks to the guests, and offers 10% of revenue to me. Is that fair and honest? Who was the legitimate drink seller and who wasn't? Now you can say that alcohol is bad for your health and shouldn't be sold at all, and that you as a customer don't care. But it is very clear who is legit and who isn't.
Which is a completely wrong comparison.
- You own a bar (website) and serve drinks (ads) to the general public.
- A large subset of your visitors decides they like the atmosphere of the bar, but whenever you try to sell them a drink, they refuse to order one. Alcohol is bad, they claim, and since you aren't offering non-alcoholic drinks, they've decided its moral to not order anything and enjoy your bar for free.
- An enterprising individual (Brave) recognizes the plight of both the bar owner and the customers. They surreptitiously serve non-alcoholic drinks (clean ads) to the bothersome customers.
- They sell the drinks at 70% discount, and strongly suggest to the customers to generously tip with the net gain of money, to ensure the continued existence of the bar they enjoy so much.
Brave isn't turning non-adblocking visitors into adblocking visitors. Its converting adblocking visitors into revenue-generating visitors.
This is the reason why corruption is so rampant in the world. People skip the line to get healthcare by bribing an official. They think it's right, because they only look for their own interests. The bribe-taking official is an "enterprising individual".
The creators of Brave skillfully use this egotism of users to make them accept and even defend their illicit practices. "Oh, I get free money, then I like it". If they were honest about their business they would distribute their ad money to creators without going through the user, but which user would then enable their illicit ads?
Blocking ads as a user is completely different. Nobody makes money by blocking ads for themselves.
No, you're just an arrogant piece of work without an ounce of self-reflection in him. Bye.
I would much rather that creators who want to make money decide what they want to sell, and how they want to sell it. The web doesn't need a crypto tip jar layer.
IMO this is mind-blowing, tangible proof that micropayments in return for my time and attention works. Imagine a world where our attention is actually valued and rewarded, where all people receive income through many various streams as they navigate the physical and digital worlds. We can argue back and forth about pros/cons/ethics of arriving at my anecdotal valuation (bitcoin, crypto, etc), but that's not my point -- the point is that this type of system actually does function, and in theory could raise tides enough across the world to lift all boats in really positive ways.
Tangential, but Michael Saylor has also opined about how this type of micro-payment / micro-staking could go in the opposite direction, using smart contracts and Lightning to escrow fractional tokens to participate in social media or even prevent DDOS attacks if woven into the underlying networking appropriately. Obviously I'm skeptical about certain latencies that would be added but, conceptually, forcing people to have SOME skin in the game and doing it in an invisible, frictionless way is quite intriguing.
Anyways, just one man's journey from Milan to Minsk by way of Brave and BAT lol
The API and standards talk in the article is putting the cart before the horse. There is currently no way to send money peer-to-peer without an intermediary that can handle the bank transfer, and intermediaries tend to charge a lot for this service.
Because of this, the best options are to add a PayPal or Ko-fi button on the site, with the understanding that the publisher won't be receiving the full amount you send.
https://ens.domains/
Come to think of it you can do this with normal DNS by just setting a wallet address in a TXT record but that's not integrated into anything. It's just text.
People want to be paid in cash. Not some internet money that has to go through an exchange to be converted into actual cash. If ENS was so great, people would already be using it.
> I wish I could click a button to easily send a "tip" to someone who created something I enjoy or to browse other options for supporting them.
I believe most people invested in getting donations already have a similar button on their page.
With an explicit button, you have to read and acknowledge who you are giving to.
Yeah you essentially need a system has an internal balance that would then let you send and receive micropayments and only convert them to cash when the balance is large enough that the processing fee makes sense.
There are other platforms where micropayments have in fact been solved – see Twitch, OnlyFans, YouTube, Substack, Patreon, IAP on iOS/Android, WeChat, Gaming. That's where the innovation in the space will be because that's where the money is.
Agreed completely, assuming that "innovation" is a euphemism for "grifting". These platforms are completely dominated by rent-seeking and borderline fraudulent garbage. I'd take a web ring over the front page of the App Store in any context.
But instead it's slow, inconsistent, inconvenient, balkanised, dripping with scams, criminals and bad actors and still involves substantial transfer fees and volatility on top of that. At this point it's a market for lemons: any new cryptocurrency venture is almost entirely indistinguishable from something that already ended up being at best a non-starter, but often just a scam.
As a vehicle for speculation, arbitrage and scams, it's a masterpiece. As a currency (you know, like in the name), it's, put lightly, not great, especially if you live in the developed world.
Hmm perhaps we don’t need more types of currency? Perhaps it’s better to push deep integration of modern banking changes like psd2, psd3 and others. Across the whole internet. So everyone can just do regular payments with their own bank in a safe and protected way, and hopefully with less intermediaries.
So there's probably always going to be some kind of transfer or network access fee. It's just that it very much not a competitive market place.
Opening up the system to competition, but still within a regulatory framework that prevents it degenerating into a Wild West hotbed of scamming does seem like a good way to achieve some of that. Certainly, the vaunted "free market" should be ensuring that the price of a transaction is pretty close to the cost of providing it, and it clearly is not currently.
The problem, or feature, depending on who you ask, is that basically only governments can provide that kind of regulation. Which will always then inject a level of geopolitics into things like which countries you're allowed to buy your blog posts from. And for governments who listen to business over citizens also leads to capture and subversion of the system.
That's the bit I don't know how to solve. I have a feeling it may not be solvable in principle, only mitigated if we could get trading on the thing turned into a crime. You'd still have black market trading, but hopefully much more limited in its impact on ordinary use.
It's not as extreme as cryptocurrency, but forex trading is a thing, and honestly the sways of USD to other currencies are meaninful enough to take into consideration when moving money internationally.
With respect to crypto, a "single currency" shouldn't be a prerequisite because, with a $3T mcap, crypto has plenty of liquidity across centralized and decentralized exchanges to allow anyone to convert between any currencies they have on-chain. (Uniswap for instance has $1B - $6B volume transacted daily.)
Declaring a single currency would also be antithetical to free market competition for currencies.
> interoperable
If "interoperable" means you can use the currency anywhere, then I think liquidity for currency conversion is sufficient.
That said, we already have dollar (USD) stablecoins[^0] on all major L1, L2, rollup blockchains. Because they are pegged to the U.S. dollar, they also meet your requirement that the currency not be speculative (Strictly speaking, the U.S. dollar is inflationary and therefore is subject to speculation, but perhaps I'm being pedantic.).
> fast
Rollups[^3] provide fast transactions. These use various cryptographic protocols to verifiably and quickly batch and compress user operations on-chain.
> deep integration of modern banking changes
"Deep integration of modern banking" sounds good but modern banking creates a choke point[^1] where users can be targeted and denied services. Ultimately we would want to be able to stay on-chain for all payments and not need off-ramps which leave users open to debanking[^2] or surveillance. Crypto is permissionless and, with little effort from the user, censorship resistant.
---
[^0]: https://castleisland.vc/writing/stablecoins-the-emerging-mar... "Stablecoins – tokenized representations of fiat currencies circulating on blockchains 1 – are unambiguously the “killer app” of crypto so far. There are over $160 billion worth of stablecoins in circulation today, up from single digit billions as recently as 2020. Over 20 million addresses make a stablecoin transaction on public blockchains every month. And in the first half of 2024, stablecoins settled (according to our adjusted estimates) over $2.6 trillion dollars worth of value. Stablecoins offer considerable advantages relative to existing payment systems, including native programmability, strong auditability properties, fast settlement, the ability to self-custody, and native interoperability"
[^1]: https://www.piratewires.com/p/2023-banking-crisis "Beginning in 2013, Choke Point was a scheme which sought to marginalize specific industries operating legally — not through lawmaking, but by applying pressure via the banking sector."
[^2]: https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1862950205252874552 "[T]he FDIC and other financial regulators had secretly imposed a 15 percent cap on deposits at banks for crypto-related firms."
[^3]: https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary
Yes, all real world payments, from credit cards, to bank transfers have transaction fees. Depending on where you are in the world, even cash payments can include taxes per transaction.
> Every swap costs money.
Yes, currency conversion in real life includes fees.
> I now have to choose which L2 provider to trust implicitly, with no recourse on failure.
No, the whole point of a rollup is that your transactions are posted to L1 in a provable manner. Optimistic rollups and ZK rollups all allow you to transact without having to trust the L2. (There are caveats for those L2s that are in various stages of implementation and that's all public information.)
> And at the end of it, I still have internet points, instead of something that can pay rent or buy food.
The question was how to pay the publisher of a web page and this is a technology forum. So we discuss technological solutions. Paying rent and buying food is a solved problem.
In reality, there are billions of Dollars, Euros, Pounds, AUD, and other currencies moving in and out of crypto daily via on/off-ramps. Bitcoin and Ether ETFs exist and are well capitalized and widely used. You claim "Binance is closed" yet I'm quite sure I used it this week. I also use Kraken quite happily to send money to my bank account. Coinbase of course is thriving.
If you transact in size, simply hold USDC[^1] and open an account with Circle[^2].
> Stripe stopped accepting
Your information is outdated: https://docs.stripe.com/crypto/onramp
> Mtgox is closed
Have you used or looked into crypto since MtGox? It's been quite some time since that affair. You'd probably be surprised to find how much utility there is if that was the last time you actually investigated crypto. There are also P2P options like Paxful, Telegram, or Binance P2P if you prefer.
Anyway, if you're fixated with the old guard of finance then any advancement in technology will necessarily have to meet incumbent institutions requirements, with all the problems I listed earlier in the thread. With a bit of effort, you could instead imagine an entirely digital internet economy with so-called crypto points. Even that alone would be step forward and a mere generation of users away from your landlord, a crypto user, accepting them as payment.
Reality, however is such that right now you can fund a debit card with crypto and buy coffee with no problems. [^0]
---
[^0]: https://gnosispay.com/, https://www.coinbase.com/card
[^1]: https://www.usdc.com/providers
[^2]: https://www.circle.com/usdc
I wish we would all agree to just go back to mostly using paypal (or venmo, zelle, etc) for online shit and leave crypto out of it. The only advantage to crypto is anonymity, and possibly the ability to send smaller fractional payments, but honestly the existing non-crypto solutions could come up with solutions to those things.
The convenience of the scamming is partly why it _is_ a solution to this problem: people can transfer value as fast as they desire, and it works. There is also just a problem off on and off-boarding where you get hit by Visa/Mastercard level of fees. So is it really solving the problem at that point?
One area I would like to see is some kind of governed/regulated profit sharing. Basically giving your votes to content/production and this puts it on the books for some fraction of payment. You get X shares to distribute to content regularly. It would also be helpful if our government would provide support for independent producers where there's a clear trackable benefit (e.g. open source libraries that a ton of people rely on and a business can say "yes I need this, help them keep doing it").
I want to scream. This is a speculative investment with more bad actors involved than the SEC has investigated throughout its entire history.
I hate these bitcoin boom cycles. It's like all the lessons learned immediately get forgotten.
Him: "But this time is different. Last time the Democrats were holding it back. Trump is going to make a strategic crypto reserve. Trump and his allies are all pro-crypto. The Democratic party was trying to regulate it away."
I guess this will be the next lesson.
I will give Trump credit for putting AI and Crypto in the same department though.
There a couple of ways that the price of Bitcoin could drop precipitously and the unraveling of Tether is one of them.
A real-world example where Lightning Network is already working is Nostr. It's not hard to get a Nostr client with built-in Lightning functionality (like Primal) and start "zapping" tiny payments to others.
I'm not affiliated with Primal, just a fan, and a developer who wants to see a system like this work.
Only downside is that you have to reveal your account data online.
I know a guy who runs an online shop with a single product and it is a static website saying "Transfer 12 € to the following bank account with the following subject and your name/address" — apparently this works quite well since the mid 90s. The website still uses frames for its layout and has animated gif flags.
and it can't be free.. even though the systems might have no further marginal cost per transaction, banks still need to do anti-money laundering checks, and someone's gotta pay for that
Some people dream of 'micropayments' at a similar price point. Being able to buy a single article for about 2.6¢.
For consumers, a subscription model seems to fit the bill for most people but some media are apparently better suited than others.
This dream of eliminating that middle-person is still a dream.
For example for Bitcoin there's the Lightning network as L2, where you do one transaction to open the channel, and one to close it, and channels can remain open for months. Payments are routed through a network of channels, so you only need one or a few channels to other nodes and can reach all nodes in the network.
The transactions are much cheaper in this network precisely because they're not on chain, but it's still secure because each L2 transaction leads to a signed (but not published) blockchain transaction that each party of the channel can choose to publish at any time (and close the channel).
There's a bit more to it, and I recommend anyone who isn't aware of L2 networks to look into it.
The problem is that payments that cannot be centrally surveilled and centrally vetoed (without burden of proof of probable cause, usually) are actually illegal to implement.
To do anything like this requires strong ID and KYC for payer and recipient and that isn’t what bare URLs and the web are about.
All of the cool applications of online payments that would spread quickly and efficiently are illegal.
It’s truly sad.
Won't, or can't?
Do you have a good article about how to set up a paywall or tip jar for small transactions, with a clear description of what percentage goes to middlemen and (mainly in the case of proof of work) how much externality cost it incurs?
I would like to be able to pay $cents or even $dollar for instant access to an article, but only if X% actually goes to the recipient (I don't know what X is, yet), and I would lead by example on my own content. (though most likely tip jar, not paywall)
So for context, we built a lightning paywall(now defunct). All you had to do was add a single line of js to your site, as easy as Google analytics/ads. The cost was 0.01% of transaction. You could even move to self hosting and not pay us. Finally, we even built an "auto payer" so users could approve a site and auto pay a few cents with limits. Anyways, our experience is content publishers said they wanted to monetize their content but when it came down to it, were extremely reluctant to add a paywall and would maybe think of adding tipping.
Anyways I think our solution was great but no product market fit. I was especially proud how private the whole thing was but users didn't seem to really value that
The "won't" is because of two reasons: 1) too high overhead, and 2) bootstrap problem. Nobody has the ability to pay with one click set up.
When I say "can't" I mean that they can't set up a payment system that everybody can use, and also doesn't have too high fees. Of course they can set up a method that nobody will use. They could set up a bitcoin paywall, and have huge waiting times, enormously expensive overhead, and no customers for the payment method.
> All you had to do was add a single line of js to your site, as easy as Google analytics/ads.
Super easy on the server side. Yay.
> The cost was 0.01% of transaction. You could even move to self hosting and not pay us.
Oh, neat. But you're missing a step in the explanation, I think. How did it work on the client side? Presumably:
For the server side to create an account, that's not a problem at all. If you had said that you had your software on 30 million users, payment set up and done, then I'd imagine more publishers would be willing to add a tip jar / alternative paywall.But in any case, what are your card fees? I can't imagine this product had 0.01% end to end fees, given the hoops I have to jump through just to send money between my own bank accounts without paying fees.
And that's not even tackling currency exchange.
Some (but definitely not all) cryptocurrencies may fare better in the fees department, but not only does that have its own sets of problems (e.g. legal and PR), most people would still need to acquire a balance.
> Anyways I think our solution was great but no product market fit.
It does sound great. But also doesn't sound like it solved the hard problem.
When you pitched this to publishers, how many users could you say were ready to send them money today, using installed extensions and pre-filled wallets?
Maybe the digital euro will help, here.
My guess is that 1. there’s virtually no demand from potential supporters for a more convenient way to pay creators than existing payment/subscription apps, and 2. relatively few creators have direct control over their own internet presence anymore, so any solution that requires modifying a web page is dead in the water.
Any new attempt to pay creators that doesn’t factor these two realities in will likely fail, because it just makes things harder than existing solutions.
Still, fragmentation of crypto makes the whole experience shitty - but we've been working on this to fix that: https://docs.peanut.to/checkout-api
Those transaction costs you're talking about are still a couple orders of magnitude (or more!) too high for this to be a viable solution for these kinds of micro payments.
This doesn't even get into the necessary transaction throughput that's still it's own unsolved problem
The problem is that crypto doesn't provide anything that non-crypto shouldn't wouldn't also provide in a cheaper and easier to implement way.
- worldwide
- private
- anonymous
- no middle man
- no censorship
- costs 0.0X per transaction
- take less than 10 minutes
This is why so many sponsorship platforms are effectively subscription models with additional exclusive content or early access. And for that to work, you need more than just a payment button, you need a content publishing platform that will handle all the subs and content gating.
Humans have no problem tipping, the issue is that a single article or piece of content is rarely worth than a fractional amount of whatever your preferred currency is, and it costs more than that amount to transfer that currency. Sponsorships work because you pay normal amounts of currency to receive a larger future block of content.
To make tipping work, you need a system that supports allowing you to deposit normal sums of money but then dole it out in micropayments, and also not charge more than those payments for processing the micropayments. A payment system like Paypal, that maintains an internal balance that is used instead of just transferring from one bank account to another (zelle, venmo), could handle this but I don't think the financial incentives are there for them to bother with it.
It's as good of a proof for TLS certs, but it's susceptible to DNS hijacking, etc. Make the contract immutable to meet tornado.cash standard. There are already oracles for DNS lookups so this contract might already exist somewhere.
Add in a couple of features:
1. Allow tracking per domain so publishers can know that there is a demand to set it up on their end.
2. Allow refunds in case the publisher never opens it up.
It's manual for now, but the computer tracks who to pay next, who to stop paying, and give you links to speed up the process.
See: https://fosstodon.org/@sethmlarson/113575887792359030
Happy to answer questions :)