Mastodawn

Literally the only thing I want from the internet is some way to put €100 into my browser wallet and when I navigate to a paywall site they can prompt me and say “give us €.50 and we’ll show you the article without ads or a login” and I hit yes and then I read the goddamn article.

I don’t know if this is a W3C thing or a browser thing. I have no idea how to make such a thing happen. But there must be a way to pay people for stuff they put on the internet that doesn’t involve me signing up for 60 different services.

@matdevdug This concept was added to the Brave browser! (https://brave.com/blog/introducing-brave-payments/)

It uses a cryptocurrency (because moving actual money around for that is astonishingly hard and it's simpler to move the virtual currency instead, then the web sites can convert to real money).

I personally never used Brave but i've always been delighted by the concept and wished this had caught on.

Introducing Brave Payments | Brave

As part of our 0.11.6 release of Brave for desktop today, we are pleased to announce the beta version of Brave Payments, our Bitcoin-based micropayments system that can automatically and privately pay your favorite websites.

Brave

matdevdug Mar 25

@harpaa01 Huh I’ve never used brave but good on them.

Nik | Klampfradler 🎸🚲Mar 24

The web standard is https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/, and the wallet (that will hopefully implement the W3 standard!) is @Taler .

Payment Request API

This specification standardizes an API to allow merchants (i.e. web sites selling physical or digital goods) to utilize one or more payment methods with minimal integration. User agents (e.g., browsers) facilitate the payment flow between merchant and user.

matdevdug Mar 25

@nik @Taler The problem with this is that you wouldn’t be able to do each one as a separate transaction because of fees. So 2.9% + $.30 would make that impossible. I think you’d end up having to layer in a ledger so that the funds were centralized in the browser and then paid out by Mozilla or Google when a threshold was met.

I love this for solving the problem of checkout though. Maybe I’m misreading how it works.

@matdevdug @nik @Taler Mobile telcos fumbled this badly.

They had experience billing for micro transactions back when SMS messages were charged per message, no additional transaction fees.

🇨🇦 CowMan 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 🇲🇽Mar 25

@nik @matdevdug @Taler

Also, older:
https://www.w3.org/ECommerce/?Micropayments/

And broader:
https://www.w3.org/ecosystems/e-commerce/

W3C Micropayments Interest Group

Pettolina Mar 24

@matdevdug we and our 953 partners would like your data nonetheless

blausand 🐟Mar 24

flattr did this in a very sexy way, but still people were too lazy to adopt.

Obviously, the "literally one thing you want from the internet" is not the one thing all the others want 🤣

Gabriel N Mar 25

@matdevdug it was called XANADU, and it predates the interwebs: maybe in another timeline?

Gabriel N Mar 25

@matdevdug https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/

The Curse of Xanadu

It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form.

WIRED

Anton 🇺🇦🇪🇺Mar 25

@matdevdug Interledger peeps are working on it: https://interledger.org/web-monetization

Web Monetization

Web Monetization allows websites to automatically and passively receive payments from visitors.

Interledger Foundation

Tim Chase Mar 25

@matdevdug @jpmens

At least on desktop browsers, you can press control+w and it will provide a reasonably alternative solution 😆

@matdevdug there is a standard called x402

@matdevdug We had this 30 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash

Ecash - Wikipedia

@matdevdug IIRC, that was part of the plan for Project Xanadu

Tim McCormack May 3

@matdevdug I think it's an intrinsically hard problem simply because fraud is pervasive in *any* system that deals with money, and that drives up overhead. High overhead kills microtransactions.

I don't think it's impossible, but it's really hard to get right, and if you screw it up the fraudsters can kill your business/protocol/whatever and you have to start all over again. Starting over isn't cheap, because each time you want to introduce a new solution there are network effects to overcome.

@matdevdug It has been tried in the Netherlands with Blendle.. Somehow it failed getting all newspapers on board, not having enough income and then switched to subscription based for a moderated selection of articles.
Nowadays dutch language papers from e.g DPG media group are accessible via any of the newspapers from their group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

Blendle - Wikipedia

Irenes (many)May 16

so this was investigated heavily about 25 years ago. many people put it forward very seriously as the answer to how to fund independent authors and artists online.

the short answer to why it never happened is that payment processors have a lot of transaction fees that would drastically outweigh the payment itself, and neither payment processors nor financial reporting laws make it easy on the recipient's end to deal with a very large number of very small payments.

Irenes (many)May 16

@matdevdug to some extent the reason it failed was also that browser vendors had no interest in it*, and effectively vetoed it

but browsers being interested isn't enough to make it happen. there have to be real answers to the actual payment processing problems.

Irenes (many)May 16

@matdevdug * the thing Brave does, today, is more in the nature of a cryptography-themed pyramid scheme rather than a real way to compensate anyone for their work, but we're not immersed in the details, this is just the impression we've gotten from afar. also, that didn't exist back in the day.

Irenes (many)May 16

@matdevdug apologies if this is stuff you knew, it just seemed like it might be helpful context

matdevdug May 16

@ireneista No it’s a totally valid point. I have worked quite a bit in credit card processing and payment processing in general so this is definitely a known issue to me where you cannot really have micropayments.

I assumed it would work similar to Google Ad Network in that the user would put in €100 or whatever and then a third party using JS or ideally a browser API would allow for a person to pay €.10 or whatever to see a page and then the mediator would initiate a wire transfer when the amount crossed a threshold where it made sense to pay them out.

Irenes (many)May 16

@matdevdug yeah.... we're an ex-google privacy person (the company is our abusive alma mater, but at one time we believed it made sense to fight for change from within the system)

while we were there, we took an interest in this topic because the similarity did strike us

Irenes (many)May 16

@matdevdug but the answer is what you'd think: there's a single company counting up all the ad impressions and paying them out at the end of the month (or whenever). each advertiser who pays money is paying a significant chunk, and each publisher who receives it is, too, and meanwhile it sits in the ad network's giant bank account, earning interest for them.

not really compatible with grassroots options.

Irenes (many)May 16

@matdevdug with that said, liberapay is trying to be... not a micropayment option, but at least their own aggregator in that respect. it's possible it'll work out.