The problem with web payments isn't the lack of a standard API, it's everything that happens under the hood. As a developer it makes no difference to me whether the browser natively supports a payments interface or I add it in via one line of JavaScript. Now tell me how to deal with credit card fees, sales tax, direct debit, crypto transfer and a million other jurisdiction-dependent payment mechanisms and rules. Does the standard account for the fact that in India every online credit card payment requires a one-time code sent via SMS? Or that every bank has its own online payments interface? Or that UPI is now a thing? The folks publishing the Web Monetization spec sure aren't thinking about any of this.
The core issues with the Web Monetization API is that all the things you mentioned get dangerously close to SAP and Salesforce waters, and there's a reason these systems are the definition of bloated legacy accounting tech.
The spec/interface for developer does not have the handle the complexity of implementation browsers have to . Do you as the app developer deal with any of that integrating Stripe ? of course not, you yourself say it is just one line of JS for the app developer.
If the API goes through, it will be a key stream of income for browser developers, They can then monetize their most important asset - brand and trust people have on their product without diluting it and not be dependent on advertisements or search engine placements from competitors or crypto to support the development.
It is no different from IAP APIs mobile platform provides, they are not complex(for the app developer). Complexities of geography and taxation is not the app(website) developer's problem it is the platform's nothing in the interface has to handle that. Browsers will charge 30% the Apple and Google do for variety of reasons, but just Stripe level rates is enormous income source for them to support development.
> 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 towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee? Or an approach that doesn't require one company to have a monopoly over it?
I'm really curious how the internet would change if there was a fast and easy way for site visitors to give something like $0.10 to unlock content or just to say thanks.
> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee? Or an approach that doesn't require one company to have a monopoly over it?
The short answer is, no. For the long answer, I really recommend people read a blog like Bits About Money or some Matt Levine columns to start learning about the actual plumbing of finance and payment processors, to see why such a thing is actually difficult or impossible to build. Something that seems like a simple transaction to us, like sending $0.10 to a webiste, actually involves many parties, all of whom are a) hedging against counterparty risk, b) required by law to do KYC/AML and c) required by law to have safeguards against leaving customers in the lurch. Providing a, b and c is expensive in both money and time.
There are a lot of layers of abstraction in this system to make sure that you, the end user, don't usually have to think about all the complexity, and so to you it just looks like "I sent money from A to B", but the complexity is nonetheless there and it's a real impediment to getting the kinds of fast, cheap microtxns you want.
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 ($9.97 was the average transaction fee yesterday!) because volume is high.
Any fully decentralized crypto at the scale of use that the Web Monetization API would need would have enormous tx prices. There are ways to scale this, ie the lightning network, but those are essentially centralized solutions to scale.
> This is literally the use case for cryptocurrencies -- digital cash, not investments.
It should be, but the cryptocurrency crowd have internalized Austrian deflationary bullshit as a premise for their money system, it's just doomed to be unused as a payment mechanism and keep being used as securities.
It's literally Economics illiteracy killing the use-case.
Interestingly enough, the fact that they are used as securities is also responsible for why bitcoin is still the biggest fish in the pond while being technically pretty meh and long obsolete (very long block time, no “smart contracts”, failed as a decentralized system because ASICs, etc.).
Of course there is, there are tons of cryptocurrencies that can do this but everyone here hates crypto and throws the baby out with the bathwater and won’t stop parroting “SCAM!” every time they hear the word. It’s too expensive to use on-chain transactions on things like Bitcoin or Ethereum but there are other coins.
Frankly, this is probably just going to manifest as a digital currency. Add 10$ to your wallet. At the end of the month that's distributed or something
Agreed. Brave actually implemented this exact thing[1], and then got dumped together with other crypto scam projects, which continues to happen in this very thread.
Crypto haters are quick to shout that cryptocurrencies have no practical use, and introduce many problems, but this is a perfect use case for them. The negative discussion has detracted from some truly disrupting technologies being adopted, which is a damn shame.
Brave Inc. has made some missteps, sure, but I don't think they're overall an evil or scam company. A solution like BAT can eventually move us away from the current ad-infested web where advertising leeches serve as sleazy middlemen between users and companies, and scams and fake content flood the web in order to trick SEO and get easy ad revenue. The modern web is a minefield corrupted by advertising, and things will only get worse as AI generated content gets widespread adoption.
If browsers integrated with a decentralized wallet, that can either be filled by watching privacy-preserving ads OR by manually adding credit to them, had Humble Bundle-like sliders for users to control how much of their credit is allocated for each site, and the web had standardized APIs for websites to set their minimum price, then it would solve the monetization issue once and for all. The basic customer-business relationship would be preserved, where customers actually pay for the services they use, instead of the corrupt business models of today where web users are not even the customers, but a piece of rock gold can be mined from, and its value milked in perpetuity.
I think the single largest reason this hasn't happened yet is because it would negatively impact the profits of adtech giants who are running the web, and have a strong sway in directing its future. If any solution has a chance in getting mass adoption it needs to happen outside of the web, and be built from the ground up by avoiding the mistakes we now know have lead us to where we currently are.
Flattr tried to do something similar, but yes I agree. It's unfortunate that bitcoin became a hoarding/speculation thing, rather than a useful thing.
Decentralized micro-transactions would have been cool had they been used with a decent friendly UI and been integrated into a browser or two as an extension.
I think you need the browsers to act as a broker/escrow.
Brave tried to do this, but I'm not sure what ever happened to it. The way their system worked (as I understood it) is you deposited an amount in the browser each month and it was split between the sites you visited that month weighted by how much time you spent on each site, but it only worked for sites that signed up for the Brave reward program (or whatever they called it).
Brave/BAT is a massive "crypto" grift. It's an ERC20 token that they hold like 30% of in reserves. You also need to signup for Uphold / sign up with Brave to receive payment.
It's a cryptocurrency only in implementation, but the actual experience could be replicated with (GoFundMe or any other "creator platform") + A chrome extension.
It doesn't even need to be that fast, as long as it's secure and credible. Stock trades in the US happen "instantly" (or near enough), but actual settlement takes place two or three days later.
The cryptocurrency people are hung up on the idea of "fast, irreversible payments" (that settle at the same time as the trade) because they desperately want a trustless, digital equivalent of cash for political reasons.
But for merchants and mainstream users, a fair, trustworthy payment system run by known intermediaries would be much better. It can be slow, as long as merchants know they'll get their money in some reasonable timeframe. The problem is that the Visa/Mastercard duopoly makes it hard to innovate.
I'm working on something under a different use case that could fit for this, but maybe not at the scale people on this forum are looking for without additional support
I wont blab about myself here, but I do feel I have relevant background and a couple solid connections to implement something that works.
Cryptocurrency has failings for my use-case, based on what I've tried for designing around it so far. For strictly donating money in one direction towards a website, those failings may not be relevant though.
Sadly this project is not my day job, though, but it is something I plan to use for myself with or without more widespread adoption so it's moving forward regardless. I'm honestly only working on it because I wanted to do a different project that would work way nicer if tiny transactions with users are possible.
> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee? Or an approach that doesn't require one company to have a monopoly over it?
Either one company with a monopoly or maybe a small number of companies is probably the only feasible way to do it, because efficient payment processing is only half the problem.
The other half is taxes. Every time someone in a browser pays to unlock content provided by someone in a different tax jurisdiction some government is likely to view that as a taxable sale that someone has to collect sales tax or VAT for.
In many places (EU, US) it is the jurisdiction where the buyer resides that is owed the tax, but the seller who is supposed to deal with collecting and paying it.
Unless we can get a lot of countries to make special rules for small consumer content purchases that greatly simplify this, the most practical approach is to have a small number of content marketplaces.
So say you are in the EU and want to buy an article from the New York Times. Instead of directly paying the NYT you would go to one of the market sites and buy a NYT access token from them. You can use that access token to get your article from the Times.
What going through the intermediate marketplace does is make it so your monetary transaction is with them, not the NYT. Instead of each content provider having to deal with taxes in dozens of different jurisdictions it is just the marketplaces.
The marketplace would pay the NYT for the access token, but that would be a business to business sale of a product for resale which most places exempt from sales tax and VAT. It's just going to be ordinary income for the content providers that they report on their own income tax.
You don't want too many separate marketplaces so that content providers can reasonably offer their content in all of the marketplaces. That way consumers just need an account at one marketplace.
The marketplace approach also largely solves the problem of transaction fees. Instead of each article you unlock for $0.10 being a separate charge on your card you'd preload your account at the marketplace you use. You credit card would only be charged for the initial prepay and then whenever you need to refill it.
The big issue I see is keeping it from devolving to something like the current streaming movie/TV market where content providers make exclusive deals with different marketplaces.
Because of extra complexity ? But the payment software itself can figure out the exact amounts. Which then can also be aggregated monthly/yearly.
Not to mention that plenty of jurisdictions only require that for businesses, while non-businesses don't have to report anything about their donations/sales unless they cross a yearly threshold.
You've just described the value proposition for bitcoin, a peer to peer electronic cash system. Sadly, bitcoin has been captured by banks and is now only useful for gambling and parasitic investment scams.
Looks like https://getcode.com/ just launched to solve this problem. There have been many attempts at web3 micropayments, but this one seems slicker than most. Hat tip from USV, one of their investors.
> Privacy taken too far, however, can lead to bad outcomes. To mitigate the potential of Code being used for nefarious activity, Code users are limited to $250 USD per payment, up to $1000 USD per day.
This is a joke. Everything seems to be designed around their proprietary app, so why bother with a blockchain and custom currency at all?
This already works with Crypto, something like Hedera is dirt cheap (1/100 of a cent) and fast and scales really well. Wallets are easy to connect, but the disconnect to regular $$$ is still a bit too big for the regular surfin' user.
I had for a while Coil installed in the browser and nobody cared about it, so I uninstalled it half a year later. I honestly couldn't care less if there's a blockchain behind it or whatever, but as long no sites (useful to me) implement it... Under the line I paid Coil some money for nothing, so maybe for them it was a business success.
The best way to do this today is through any crypto exchange that supports USDC.
I just tested this - I went in to Robinhood and sent 0.01 USDC to a SOL address. It cost me $0.001 as a transfer fee and took about 30 seconds total. I agree the process could be a bit smoother, but it works fairly well.
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 think a large portion of enshittification comes from sites being advertising revenue driven. This leads to them needing more users with higher engagement, so they grow beyond their scope first and then shittify everything when they need to start making money (see reddit). A large reason sites have to be ad driven is that requiring users to sign up and pay for a site is a huge blocker for most people. So I feel like having a standard easy way for users to send money to a site they use for the utility they receive would go some ways to reduce enshittification, not increase it. But maybe I'm just an optimist.
Most of the "enshittification" that you're talking about is the result of having to find roundabout ways for people to get paid for their work, because simply charging the consumer isn't feasible.
websites charging money for the content and services they provide is not enshittification. it's just business. expecting everything to be delivered for free is what leads us to things like invasive tracking and targeted advertising.
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?
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 site spit out an address to send the tokens to with my wallet.
The transaction cost me $0.05, the conversion rates were totally fair and actually quite good, it only took a couple hours, and as an added bonus, didn't even require any sort of KYC because it was just a small amount of money.
For those of you dumping on crypto, I can tell you that it doesn't get any easier than that. There is no way that I can do something like that otherwise. We need more of this, not less.
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.
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. Security theater at its finest. It is also easily circumvented too, making it questionable at best [0].
Lastly, saying something doesn't solve a real world problem, after I just explained to you that it does, is mind blowing absurd.
I love crypto. I even built an SDK to make crypto payment easy [0]
However, KYC is there for a reason. Personally, I don't touch any crypto on/offramp service without proper KYC
You don't go on to explain that reason though, so let me explain it for anyone reading this.
The definition of KYC from my quick google search is:
"Know Your Customer (KYC) standards are designed to protect financial institutions against fraud, corruption, money laundering and terrorist financing."
Key words: "Protect financial institutions"
In other words, they don't protect the people using the system.
In this case, it is two friends a world apart who want to simply share some funds with each other. There is no institution here other than the use of fiat money on the receiving end (my friends bank account).
I would have preferred to just use crypto the whole way, but my friend doesn't know anything about it and I didn't want to bother them since they were so upset about not being able to be with their family during Tet.
So, I found a middleman that was willing to take my crypto and convert it to local currency, with very little effort or cost. In my eyes, there is absolutely nothing ethically wrong with what I did. Transactions like this do not and should not require government intervention. The fact that we've been so brainwashed to believe that they do, is just wrong.
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 things. It doesn't have to be widely adopted to be useful, which is something that I find to be just grand :-)
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.
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 before you haven’t been watching.
I think another interesting development related to this space is GNU Taler[0], which has gotten EU and NLnet grants, and could probably hook into these APIs.
I'm eager to see what the extra funding does for the project. UX, setup, and everything else that relates to integration wasn't something I wanted to work with last time I took a serious look at the project.
Taler is basically just a cover to allow countries to stop printing banknotes and minting coins.
Once banknotes and coins have fallen out of use, there's absolutely nothing in Taler preventing those governments from changing all the rules. They can simply decide to abandon the payer-anonymity as soon as they've migrated people off of banknotes-and-coins. Sorry folks! We had to stop doing blind-signing because AML and terrorists. But that's okay, we'll sign your unblinded tokens instead! And we promise not to store all those token identifiers in some huge surveillance database somewhere. Pinky-swear.
Taler really has very little to do with the internet. It's all about shutting down the presses and mints without provoking riots.
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 when you browse to a URL you get the option of an ad-ful experience like today or a micropayment option, e.g. "nytimes.com requires a subscription or a $0.50 payment to view this page OK/Cancel". Micropayments would avoid the fee overload of the credit card companies and your browser could display your balance in the toolbar. The server could be provided with a cryptographically signed receipt and there could be a periodic reconciliation.
Note that there is no need for the complexity of a blockchain anywhere in this; IMO a blockchain just complexifies the solution and turns off people who don't trust cryptocurrencies.
> Maybe browser vendors could come up with a standard where you can "charge up" your account like a prepaid phone card
This will, sadly, never happen. When an adtech giant controls not only the world's most popular web browser, but also has major power in directing the future of the web itself, there's no scenario where they would voluntarily align against their own business interests.
Brave actually has a browser that does what you say, but it will never gain major adoption, either from web users or sites. Course correction of a ship that has sailed long ago, and is run by people who benefit from its current direction, will never happen.
Presumably the browser would take a fee for facilitating the transaction, which could replace any lost ad revenue.
And imo most websites would double dip: Have paid content and advertising. You already see that for online newspaper/magazine subscriptions. If Google is on both sides of that, that's extra revenue for them.
I agree that it'll never happen, but moreso because a lack imagination and willpower from Google.
It isn’t that surprising that Google isn’t bringing us to the post-ad web, but I’m surprised Apple isn’t. The idea of an app or something asking the OS for a payment, and then the user trusting the OS to handle the details behind the scenes is already conventional on iOS, right?
They already have a nice way of doing subscriptions to podcasts too. So it isn’t like Apple is totally allergic to giving content providers with a way to offer their users premium services. It just hasn’t happened for websites for some reason.
> 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
I think it's a little more nuanced than that. I would be fine paying per-article on a lot of news sites, if the cost was on the order of single-digit cents.
I consume most of my news via aggregators like HN, so I have no loyalty to any particular news site. I'm not going to pay $30/mo for a subscription when I read maybe 5-10 articles on a site per month, at most. And I'm certainly not going to pay for subscriptions to, say, the 15-20 different news sites that show up with that frequency on aggregators, with headlines I'm likely to click on.
Put another way, let's say I read 10 articles per day, so about 300 per month. Those articles are spread across a lot of different sites, let's say probably 100 of them, ranging from single article from random blogs, up to 7 articles from a larger publication like WaPo or WSJ.
At even 10 cents per article, on average, that's $30/mo, total. I'm comfortable with that. In contrast, with the current "system", if I had to subscribe to even 15 of those medium to large publications, at, say, $15/mo, that's $225/mo, which I'm absolutely not comfortable with. At that point -- assuming there were no ways to bypass paywalls -- I'd simply just do without, and find other free sources covering the same stories.
But still, I don't think micropayments will work, even if the friction is pretty low. There is a surprisingly huge psychological gulf between free and even one cent. Once you ask someone for money, they are going to agonize (even if just a little bit) over whether or not the article they're about to read is actually worth it.
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
> A paid web could eliminate the ad ecosystem and all its toxicity (surveillance technology, etc.)
I don't know how anyone can still live under this delusion when we're currently seeing multiple paid streaming services putting ads on their paid plans that were advertised as ad-free.
Corporations will never be happy with the profit they're making. If they can make you pay AND show you ads, they will.
That's why it has to be lightweight. The thing that would drive prices down and keep ads at bay is competition. Since setting up a new streaming service is difficult-bordering-on-impossible, the players are protected from competition and can squeeze their customers. In other markets, if you had a lightweight payment system that isn't just a component of a walled garden (ala Medium or YouTube), you could see actual competition. Then, if some player started showing ads or raising prices, people could just up and move elsewhere.
Imagine the early internet if we didn't have HTTP & HTML. It would have been a bunch of specialized AOL- or CompuServ-type walled-garden services, each of which could have wrung their customers dry. That's the world we ended up with in streaming. But the WWW doesn't have a mechanism for simple payments, so payment infrastructure can be used to lure and trap content creators. That's why we need a simple, lightweight, portable and open payment mechanism, to complement open web protocols.
As an aside, I don't think that's greed, I think it's perverse incentives - e.g. if a VP wants that big stock bonus next year, they have to figure out how to cause x% revenue growth, rinse and repeat. Sooner or later you hit market saturation and have exhausted all the easy, user-friendly solutions.
The whole goal is to get rid of (middlemen) corporations and to start paying authors directly.
(Of course, unlike what OP suggests, this is probably hard to accomplish in a (variety of) browsers directly while Google and Chrome are still allowed to exist.)
The problem with micropayments has ALWAYS been malicious actors. It will ALWAYS be malicious actors. This is not a technical problem but a problem with the whole concept that is structurally inseparable.
The problem with Ads on the web has ALWAYS been malicious actors. It will ALWAYS be malicious actors. This is not a technical problem but a problem with the whole concept that is structurally inseparable.
I was ruminating around this topic the other day and came to conclusion it is probably terribly missed opportunity for certain advertising company. Now it sounds super scary privacy-wise, smells monopol-y and overall may not happen anymore (I think), but consider:
In situation when "all" users are being in fact "logged into" their service anyway, then features such as
- pay to hide ads on this particular web (basically "overpay the advertiser"),
- pay to keep ads and support the author of this particular web,
- pay for extra features but remain anonymous for web's author,
- provide data about yourself that the company gathered about yourself to the web's author,
then it sounds like quite low-hanging fruit.
Web authors would gain "auth" for free, integration would allow some "serverless" features for otherwise basic webs and so on. My initial idea was (probably akin to Brave(?)):
- pay advertiser one centralized "ransom" to disable X ad impressions, so they can be distributed to websites authors as I go, just the same way as if I was exposed to a real ad.
For favourite websites I could either top that by also allowing ads again, or paying them more, obviously with certain share ending up as a fee for that mediator.
I guess there was/is some blatant obstacle that prevented this (perhaps advertisers would all bail out when the could be legally "overpaid" by users?) or it in fact had been implemented somehow in the past (distant enough I missed it completely), but it was a fun thought exercise anyway.
If I understand your proposal correctly, why would advertisers be needed at all if users had the ability to directly pay for the content they consume? You'd just be giving adtech even more power over the user experience, something that adtech always prioritizes, right? :) Users are not even customers to them, but a shiny gold rock they can extract value from.
I don't think that website really wants to call attention to the fact that it's serving you ads. They want it to be a seamless part of the Internet experience. Ideally, you wouldn't even notice the ads are ads. They don't want to support services that remind you that they're there, and are annoying. And if you want to monetize your site, they already have a preferred solution for you: sign up to show ads and get a check from them.
I remember Brave introducing BAT tokens that you could earn for seeing ads and then donate to other websites and content creators. How did that experiment end up? Was it just a crypto hype thing?
I'd much rather my browser mine crypto for that website when I visit a website than get ads. (But only while I have that tab open, it is the focused tab, and the browser is not minimized.)
The concept is a deliberate scam. Brave removes the legitimate ads from the website owners, and puts their own ads on top. Then presents that as somehow helping website owners.
Even those are solvable problems, the real issue is social. There's a reason Flattr failed and Patreon has been a huge success. People would rather personally support a handful of creators at $5/month than put the equivalent money in a tip jar at a bunch of faceless websites.
Historically, there have been a lot of people eager to erect barriers to make payments difficult for those who want to gamble, sell porn, buy porn, donate to controversial political causes, avoid taxes, sell drugs, buy drugs, etc etc
So a system that lets me send $40/month of untraceable cash to strangers on the internet might face a lot of opposition.
I mean I’m sure that’s what the processors want people to believe. But even if those problems are difficult, they aren’t insurmountable: I’m sure that libraries would be developed over time that would allow for these things to happen, securely and without error, much as the SSL libraries have developed over the decades.
You have missed my point. Actually carrying out "Shift 10 US cents from Account2732 to Account8462" is trivial. A simple server could deal with 5 million such requests an hour.
Now imagine you had to deal with $500000 moving around your system per hour.
* How many of those are fraudulent?
* How do you handle chargebacks? No one will use your system if you don't support them.
* How do people move money in and (worse) out of their accounts? That means interacting with banking and a small army of accountants.
* 99% of your customers will make $5 a month but 1% will take possibly millions, effectively becoming business partners. Do you police what they are doing? Are they laundering money? What do you do if they come to you asking for reduced rates?
Readit News
The spec/interface for developer does not have the handle the complexity of implementation browsers have to . Do you as the app developer deal with any of that integrating Stripe ? of course not, you yourself say it is just one line of JS for the app developer.
If the API goes through, it will be a key stream of income for browser developers, They can then monetize their most important asset - brand and trust people have on their product without diluting it and not be dependent on advertisements or search engine placements from competitors or crypto to support the development.
It is no different from IAP APIs mobile platform provides, they are not complex(for the app developer). Complexities of geography and taxation is not the app(website) developer's problem it is the platform's nothing in the interface has to handle that. Browsers will charge 30% the Apple and Google do for variety of reasons, but just Stripe level rates is enormous income source for them to support development.
Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee? Or an approach that doesn't require one company to have a monopoly over it?
I'm really curious how the internet would change if there was a fast and easy way for site visitors to give something like $0.10 to unlock content or just to say thanks.
The short answer is, no. For the long answer, I really recommend people read a blog like Bits About Money or some Matt Levine columns to start learning about the actual plumbing of finance and payment processors, to see why such a thing is actually difficult or impossible to build. Something that seems like a simple transaction to us, like sending $0.10 to a webiste, actually involves many parties, all of whom are a) hedging against counterparty risk, b) required by law to do KYC/AML and c) required by law to have safeguards against leaving customers in the lurch. Providing a, b and c is expensive in both money and time.
There are a lot of layers of abstraction in this system to make sure that you, the end user, don't usually have to think about all the complexity, and so to you it just looks like "I sent money from A to B", but the complexity is nonetheless there and it's a real impediment to getting the kinds of fast, cheap microtxns you want.
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.
Any fully decentralized crypto at the scale of use that the Web Monetization API would need would have enormous tx prices. There are ways to scale this, ie the lightning network, but those are essentially centralized solutions to scale.
IIRC this spam attack cost the attacker only $5000 but rendered the network pretty much useless for hours
This is literally where cryptocurrencies do the worst...high transaction fees.
For foreign currency, there's a personal use exemption, right? Does this apply to crypto?
It should be, but the cryptocurrency crowd have internalized Austrian deflationary bullshit as a premise for their money system, it's just doomed to be unused as a payment mechanism and keep being used as securities.
It's literally Economics illiteracy killing the use-case.
Interestingly enough, the fact that they are used as securities is also responsible for why bitcoin is still the biggest fish in the pond while being technically pretty meh and long obsolete (very long block time, no “smart contracts”, failed as a decentralized system because ASICs, etc.).
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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.
https://stripe.com/docs/payments/sepa-debit
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth...
You could also use Lightning Network on Bitcoin or any of the Layer 2s on Ethereum like Arbitrum or Optimism. Fees are in the cents range.
https://l2fees.info/
Crypto haters are quick to shout that cryptocurrencies have no practical use, and introduce many problems, but this is a perfect use case for them. The negative discussion has detracted from some truly disrupting technologies being adopted, which is a damn shame.
Brave Inc. has made some missteps, sure, but I don't think they're overall an evil or scam company. A solution like BAT can eventually move us away from the current ad-infested web where advertising leeches serve as sleazy middlemen between users and companies, and scams and fake content flood the web in order to trick SEO and get easy ad revenue. The modern web is a minefield corrupted by advertising, and things will only get worse as AI generated content gets widespread adoption.
If browsers integrated with a decentralized wallet, that can either be filled by watching privacy-preserving ads OR by manually adding credit to them, had Humble Bundle-like sliders for users to control how much of their credit is allocated for each site, and the web had standardized APIs for websites to set their minimum price, then it would solve the monetization issue once and for all. The basic customer-business relationship would be preserved, where customers actually pay for the services they use, instead of the corrupt business models of today where web users are not even the customers, but a piece of rock gold can be mined from, and its value milked in perpetuity.
I think the single largest reason this hasn't happened yet is because it would negatively impact the profits of adtech giants who are running the web, and have a strong sway in directing its future. If any solution has a chance in getting mass adoption it needs to happen outside of the web, and be built from the ground up by avoiding the mistakes we now know have lead us to where we currently are.
[1]: https://basicattentiontoken.org/
Decentralized micro-transactions would have been cool had they been used with a decent friendly UI and been integrated into a browser or two as an extension.
This is anathema here in the US but the rest of the world typically does not use credit cards as the default payment method.
Brave tried to do this, but I'm not sure what ever happened to it. The way their system worked (as I understood it) is you deposited an amount in the browser each month and it was split between the sites you visited that month weighted by how much time you spent on each site, but it only worked for sites that signed up for the Brave reward program (or whatever they called it).
It's a cryptocurrency only in implementation, but the actual experience could be replicated with (GoFundMe or any other "creator platform") + A chrome extension.
The cryptocurrency people are hung up on the idea of "fast, irreversible payments" (that settle at the same time as the trade) because they desperately want a trustless, digital equivalent of cash for political reasons.
But for merchants and mainstream users, a fair, trustworthy payment system run by known intermediaries would be much better. It can be slow, as long as merchants know they'll get their money in some reasonable timeframe. The problem is that the Visa/Mastercard duopoly makes it hard to innovate.
It's possible FedNow will fix this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow
I wont blab about myself here, but I do feel I have relevant background and a couple solid connections to implement something that works.
Cryptocurrency has failings for my use-case, based on what I've tried for designing around it so far. For strictly donating money in one direction towards a website, those failings may not be relevant though.
Sadly this project is not my day job, though, but it is something I plan to use for myself with or without more widespread adoption so it's moving forward regardless. I'm honestly only working on it because I wanted to do a different project that would work way nicer if tiny transactions with users are possible.
Either one company with a monopoly or maybe a small number of companies is probably the only feasible way to do it, because efficient payment processing is only half the problem.
The other half is taxes. Every time someone in a browser pays to unlock content provided by someone in a different tax jurisdiction some government is likely to view that as a taxable sale that someone has to collect sales tax or VAT for.
In many places (EU, US) it is the jurisdiction where the buyer resides that is owed the tax, but the seller who is supposed to deal with collecting and paying it.
Unless we can get a lot of countries to make special rules for small consumer content purchases that greatly simplify this, the most practical approach is to have a small number of content marketplaces.
So say you are in the EU and want to buy an article from the New York Times. Instead of directly paying the NYT you would go to one of the market sites and buy a NYT access token from them. You can use that access token to get your article from the Times.
What going through the intermediate marketplace does is make it so your monetary transaction is with them, not the NYT. Instead of each content provider having to deal with taxes in dozens of different jurisdictions it is just the marketplaces.
The marketplace would pay the NYT for the access token, but that would be a business to business sale of a product for resale which most places exempt from sales tax and VAT. It's just going to be ordinary income for the content providers that they report on their own income tax.
You don't want too many separate marketplaces so that content providers can reasonably offer their content in all of the marketplaces. That way consumers just need an account at one marketplace.
The marketplace approach also largely solves the problem of transaction fees. Instead of each article you unlock for $0.10 being a separate charge on your card you'd preload your account at the marketplace you use. You credit card would only be charged for the initial prepay and then whenever you need to refill it.
The big issue I see is keeping it from devolving to something like the current streaming movie/TV market where content providers make exclusive deals with different marketplaces.
Because of extra complexity ? But the payment software itself can figure out the exact amounts. Which then can also be aggregated monthly/yearly.
Not to mention that plenty of jurisdictions only require that for businesses, while non-businesses don't have to report anything about their donations/sales unless they cross a yearly threshold.
I'm aware that tremendous effort has been and is being invested in that.
But I have yet to be convinced efforts in that direction won't all boil down to "trading decentralization for efficiency."
In which case, why not use a centralized, much more efficient solution?
This is a joke. Everything seems to be designed around their proprietary app, so why bother with a blockchain and custom currency at all?
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https://www.coil.com/#:~:text=On%20March%2015%2C%202023%2C%2....
I just tested this - I went in to Robinhood and sent 0.01 USDC to a SOL address. It cost me $0.001 as a transfer fee and took about 30 seconds total. I agree the process could be a bit smoother, but it works fairly well.
websites charging money for the content and services they provide is not enshittification. it's just business. expecting everything to be delivered for free is what leads us to things like invasive tracking and targeted advertising.
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 site spit out an address to send the tokens to with my wallet.
The transaction cost me $0.05, the conversion rates were totally fair and actually quite good, it only took a couple hours, and as an added bonus, didn't even require any sort of KYC because it was just a small amount of money.
For those of you dumping on crypto, I can tell you that it doesn't get any easier than that. There is no way that I can do something like that otherwise. We need more of this, not less.
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.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hawala.asp
I've met the founder in person. Very nice guy and not even Vietnamese!
Kyc exists for a reason, the same friction free transfer beneath your mental limit can be rerun 10000x by machine and achieve aml outcomes.
KYC exists to make life hard. It solves no real problems, just like the TSA at airports. Security theater at its finest. It is also easily circumvented too, making it questionable at best [0].
Lastly, saying something doesn't solve a real world problem, after I just explained to you that it does, is mind blowing absurd.
[0] https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1754514949995384996
[0] https://1pay.network
You don't go on to explain that reason though, so let me explain it for anyone reading this.
The definition of KYC from my quick google search is:
"Know Your Customer (KYC) standards are designed to protect financial institutions against fraud, corruption, money laundering and terrorist financing."
Key words: "Protect financial institutions"
In other words, they don't protect the people using the system.
In this case, it is two friends a world apart who want to simply share some funds with each other. There is no institution here other than the use of fiat money on the receiving end (my friends bank account).
I would have preferred to just use crypto the whole way, but my friend doesn't know anything about it and I didn't want to bother them since they were so upset about not being able to be with their family during Tet.
So, I found a middleman that was willing to take my crypto and convert it to local currency, with very little effort or cost. In my eyes, there is absolutely nothing ethically wrong with what I did. Transactions like this do not and should not require government intervention. The fact that we've been so brainwashed to believe that they do, is just wrong.
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 things. It doesn't have to be widely adopted to be useful, which is something that I find to be just grand :-)
You don’t seem like that per se but if you haven’t seen it before you haven’t been watching.
[0]: https://taler.net/en/index.html
Once banknotes and coins have fallen out of use, there's absolutely nothing in Taler preventing those governments from changing all the rules. They can simply decide to abandon the payer-anonymity as soon as they've migrated people off of banknotes-and-coins. Sorry folks! We had to stop doing blind-signing because AML and terrorists. But that's okay, we'll sign your unblinded tokens instead! And we promise not to store all those token identifiers in some huge surveillance database somewhere. Pinky-swear.
Taler really has very little to do with the internet. It's all about shutting down the presses and mints without provoking riots.
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 when you browse to a URL you get the option of an ad-ful experience like today or a micropayment option, e.g. "nytimes.com requires a subscription or a $0.50 payment to view this page OK/Cancel". Micropayments would avoid the fee overload of the credit card companies and your browser could display your balance in the toolbar. The server could be provided with a cryptographically signed receipt and there could be a periodic reconciliation.
Note that there is no need for the complexity of a blockchain anywhere in this; IMO a blockchain just complexifies the solution and turns off people who don't trust cryptocurrencies.
This will, sadly, never happen. When an adtech giant controls not only the world's most popular web browser, but also has major power in directing the future of the web itself, there's no scenario where they would voluntarily align against their own business interests.
Brave actually has a browser that does what you say, but it will never gain major adoption, either from web users or sites. Course correction of a ship that has sailed long ago, and is run by people who benefit from its current direction, will never happen.
And imo most websites would double dip: Have paid content and advertising. You already see that for online newspaper/magazine subscriptions. If Google is on both sides of that, that's extra revenue for them.
I agree that it'll never happen, but moreso because a lack imagination and willpower from Google.
They already have a nice way of doing subscriptions to podcasts too. So it isn’t like Apple is totally allergic to giving content providers with a way to offer their users premium services. It just hasn’t happened for websites for some reason.
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
LOOK AT THIS PUPPY. HE CRIES WHEN YOU DON'T GIVE US MONEY. YOU DON'T WANT TO MAKE HIM SAD DO YOU?!
[X] BE A GOOD PERSON AND GIVE US MONEY
[_] I ENJOY BEING A DRAIN ON SOCIETY, ANNOY ME AGAIN TOMORROW
And you can't just give them a dollar to get them to shut up. It's always $2.99/mo BEST VALUE (billed centennially $3588.00).
I consume most of my news via aggregators like HN, so I have no loyalty to any particular news site. I'm not going to pay $30/mo for a subscription when I read maybe 5-10 articles on a site per month, at most. And I'm certainly not going to pay for subscriptions to, say, the 15-20 different news sites that show up with that frequency on aggregators, with headlines I'm likely to click on.
Put another way, let's say I read 10 articles per day, so about 300 per month. Those articles are spread across a lot of different sites, let's say probably 100 of them, ranging from single article from random blogs, up to 7 articles from a larger publication like WaPo or WSJ.
At even 10 cents per article, on average, that's $30/mo, total. I'm comfortable with that. In contrast, with the current "system", if I had to subscribe to even 15 of those medium to large publications, at, say, $15/mo, that's $225/mo, which I'm absolutely not comfortable with. At that point -- assuming there were no ways to bypass paywalls -- I'd simply just do without, and find other free sources covering the same stories.
But still, I don't think micropayments will work, even if the friction is pretty low. There is a surprisingly huge psychological gulf between free and even one cent. Once you ask someone for money, they are going to agonize (even if just a little bit) over whether or not the article they're about to read is actually worth it.
I don't know how anyone can still live under this delusion when we're currently seeing multiple paid streaming services putting ads on their paid plans that were advertised as ad-free.
Corporations will never be happy with the profit they're making. If they can make you pay AND show you ads, they will.
Imagine the early internet if we didn't have HTTP & HTML. It would have been a bunch of specialized AOL- or CompuServ-type walled-garden services, each of which could have wrung their customers dry. That's the world we ended up with in streaming. But the WWW doesn't have a mechanism for simple payments, so payment infrastructure can be used to lure and trap content creators. That's why we need a simple, lightweight, portable and open payment mechanism, to complement open web protocols.
As an aside, I don't think that's greed, I think it's perverse incentives - e.g. if a VP wants that big stock bonus next year, they have to figure out how to cause x% revenue growth, rinse and repeat. Sooner or later you hit market saturation and have exhausted all the easy, user-friendly solutions.
(Of course, unlike what OP suggests, this is probably hard to accomplish in a (variety of) browsers directly while Google and Chrome are still allowed to exist.)
Hmmm
In situation when "all" users are being in fact "logged into" their service anyway, then features such as - pay to hide ads on this particular web (basically "overpay the advertiser"), - pay to keep ads and support the author of this particular web, - pay for extra features but remain anonymous for web's author, - provide data about yourself that the company gathered about yourself to the web's author, then it sounds like quite low-hanging fruit.
Web authors would gain "auth" for free, integration would allow some "serverless" features for otherwise basic webs and so on. My initial idea was (probably akin to Brave(?)): - pay advertiser one centralized "ransom" to disable X ad impressions, so they can be distributed to websites authors as I go, just the same way as if I was exposed to a real ad.
For favourite websites I could either top that by also allowing ads again, or paying them more, obviously with certain share ending up as a fee for that mediator.
I guess there was/is some blatant obstacle that prevented this (perhaps advertisers would all bail out when the could be legally "overpaid" by users?) or it in fact had been implemented somehow in the past (distant enough I missed it completely), but it was a fun thought exercise anyway.
Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
https://piped.video/watch?v=uSudkID3zJM
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I haven't used Brave for years and don't own their token, but that's just not how Brave ads work at all.
The ads are shown as notifications and aren't replacing ads embedded in websites.
Why mislead people?
September is the most recent month because I turned the Brave stuff off after that.
Most notably, they defrauded the person who runs archive.today/archive.is:
https://archive.ph/2zdET#issuecomment-671599658
... which seems like a particularly stupid decision.
Dealing with money is a real pain due to fraud, security, and legal compliance and those problems don't go away when the amounts are small.
Are they?
Historically, there have been a lot of people eager to erect barriers to make payments difficult for those who want to gamble, sell porn, buy porn, donate to controversial political causes, avoid taxes, sell drugs, buy drugs, etc etc
So a system that lets me send $40/month of untraceable cash to strangers on the internet might face a lot of opposition.
Now imagine you had to deal with $500000 moving around your system per hour.
* How many of those are fraudulent?
* How do you handle chargebacks? No one will use your system if you don't support them.
* How do people move money in and (worse) out of their accounts? That means interacting with banking and a small army of accountants.
* 99% of your customers will make $5 a month but 1% will take possibly millions, effectively becoming business partners. Do you police what they are doing? Are they laundering money? What do you do if they come to you asking for reduced rates?