This is basically just how we want to do micro payments. I think coinbase recently introduced a library for the same using cryptocurrency and the 402 status code. In fact yea it's called x402. https://github.com/coinbase/x402
This should be the standard business model on the web, instead of the advertising middlemen that have corrupted all our media, and the adtech that exploits our data in perpetuity. All of which is also serving to spread propaganda, corrupt democratic processes, and cause the sociopolitical unrest we've seen in the last decade+. I hope that decades from now we can accept how insidious all of this is, and prosecute and regulate these companies just like we did with Big Tobacco.
Brave's BAT is also a good attempt at fixing this, but x402 seems like a more generic solution. It's a shame that neither has any chance of gaining traction, partly because of the cryptocurrency stigma, and partly because of adtech's tight grip on the current web.
Microtransactions are the perfect solution, if you have an economic theory that assumes near-zero transaction costs. Technology can achieve low technical costs, but the problem is the human cost of a transaction. The mental overhead of deciding whether I want to make a purchase to consume every piece of content, and whether I got ripped off, adds up, and makes microtransactions exhausting.
When someone on the internet tries to sell you something for a dollar, how often do you really take them up on it? How many microtransactions have you actually made? To problem with microtransactions is they discourage people from consuming your content. Which is silly, because the marginal cost of serving one reader or viewer is nearly zero.
The solution is bundling. I make a decision to pay once, then don’t pay any marginal costs on each bit of content. Revenue goes to creators proportionally based on what fraction of each user’s consumption went to them.
People feel hesitation toward paying for the bundle, but they only have to get over the hump once, not repeatedly for every single view.
Advertising-supported content is one kind of bundle, but in my opinion, it’s just as exhausting. The best version of bundling I’ve experienced are services like Spotify and YouTube Premium, where I pay a reasonable fixed monthly fee and in return get to consume many hours of entertainment. The main problems with those services are the middlemen who take half the money.
I disagree, bundling is the problem. That strategy created the fragmented landscape that we now see in streaming video, which is pretty much universally hated.
The ideal solution would involve a flat rate which I pay monthly, and at the end of the month that money goes towards the content that I consumed during that month. If I only read a single blog, they get all of it.
Then we build a culture around preferring to share content which is configured to cite its sources, and we discourage sharing anything which has an obvious source with which it doesn't share its inbound microtransactions.
We already need to do our due dilligence re: determining if an information source is trustworthy (and if its sources are trustworthy, and so on). Might as well make money flow along the same structures.
It's not an ideal solution because any fixed cost solution is begging for a middle man/reseller to be introduced.
Like I pay the $5 monthly flat fee (or $500, $5k, $500k, whatever it's known fixed cost for me) for the system, turn around and resell all content for a $1 monthly flat fee.
There is a real cost to the content you're consuming with that flat-fee. So either the flat fee is more of "credit" system or it's relying on a middle man to do the oversubscribing calculation/arbitrage or whatever to balance the cost.
And no, introducing any form of rate limits or "abuse reduction" doesn't work because it's basically changing your flat-fee into a credit based system.
A credit system has advantages over pure micropayment system (in terms of mental overload. I know I charged my "internet content" card with $50 for this month. A movie on Netflix is selling for $2 tonight. Normally it's $0.5 a movie, but it's Valentines and everyone is "Netflix and Chilling" so surge charging)
I suppose "credit system" is indeed more accurate than "fee", it's just that I personally would set it at a flat rate and then stop thinking about it, so it would feel like a sort of admission-to-the-internet to me.
As for bandwidth and storage costs... that could just be rolled into the same attribution/payment scheme. If content is not propagating well because too few people are hosting it, then I'm ok with allocating some space and bandwidth to help distribute it. I don't think there's anything wrong with that so long as when it gets viewed, the creators still get the bulk of the credit and I only get a teensy bit for the part I played in distributing it.
The goal would be to mostly decouple the attribution/payment handling from the data handling so that it's as simple as seeding a torrent and it's the players/clients/whatever that handles giving credit. If I notice that I've got a leacher problem (whether as a creator or as a distributor) then maybe I revoke trust in the leachers and they stop getting the content from me.
A flat fee payment structure is very very, very, different from a credit based system. You might as well be conflating it with the current system. That's how very different flat fee vs credit system are.
> It's just that I personally would set it at a flat rate and then stop thinking about it, so it would feel like a sort of admission-to-the-internet to me.
That doesn't matter. A credit system is like an hourly changing flat fee. it doesn't make sense. You might set it at $10 a month, that's it for you. But where is that number coming from. What if you watch a "Just released" movie that costs $10 credits on the first day of the month. No internet for you for the rest of the month? You used to read 10 articles every month, but now $10 you can only read 2. Is that ok? it's a flat fee after all.
> If I notice that I've got a leacher problem (whether as a creator or as a distributor) then maybe I revoke trust in the leachers and they stop getting the content from me.
In other words: "If I notice a bad actor, I block them" congratulations, you have solved all of the internet problems. That idea could be worth billions. Personally I just don't write bugs to begin with and therefore bad actors can't exploit them.
> What if you watch a "Just released" movie that costs $10 credits on the first day of the month.
Well then at the end of the month, my usage will be used to allocate my media budget to the content creators, so I unless I consumed no other media that month, I guess I'm sending them less than $10 to the creators of that "Just released" movie. That's unfortunate, but it's still likely to be more than they're getting from the artificial-scarcity-enforced-by-middlemen-who-take-a-cut thing that we're currently doing.
Perhaps my friends should look at how much I'm spending on content and shame me for having it only be $10. And the people who consume my content should perhaps update their settings to pay me less for it on account of me being a stingy sort of participant. Or maybe they stop propagating my content altogether. There is a lot of room to explore incentives that might might work.
I think the costs of serving digital content are so low that you don’t need to rely on oversubscription. The user can stream 24/7 and you would still make money (assuming you got the working IP payment model like YouTube does that divide up individual user revenue proportional to that user’s watch time - I think Spotify has a problem here). The only “anti abuse” you need is to enforce that the user only streams one thing at a time.
The problem with the credit system is that the user won’t like that they have to pay extra for the good stuff, the feeling of watching worse stuff to save money etc.
Given the marginal cost of distributing the good stuff is the same as the bad stuff, why make the customer feel bad about watching by adding an incremental cost? Just let it rip. If you have a lot of good stuff, customers will be willing to pay more for the bundle. Once they’re in the bundle, let them watch exactly what they want.
The "cost" I was referring to is the cost to produce the content you are paying for. Not the cost to distribute it. Of course the cost to distribute it digitally is negligible (hell, lets assume it's $0), but the cost to produce it isn't even remotely close to that.
> The only “anti abuse” you need is to enforce that the user only streams one thing at a time.
We're talking about a flat fee you pay that gives you "access to content on the internet".
Oh yeah? How does one "stream" an article? Does playing a video at 2x make it 1/2 price? what about 1000x?
Ok, ok, Lets steelman this argument and assume we come up with resonable common sense answers to all these questions. "an article counts as x minutes". "limit playback to max of 2x and figure out some reasnonable formula to pay the creator", etc
Congratulations, you've invited a credit system with extra steps. The "flat fee" is actually the fee for (602430) * 2 minutes a month. One could "Donate Minutes" left on their account at the end of the month to their favorite creator. well, instead of trading them to your favorite creator, why don't you trade them in for $$
> Given the marginal cost of distributing the good stuff is the same as the bad stuff, why make the customer feel bad about watching by adding an incremental cost? Just let it rip. If you have a lot of good stuff, customers will be willing to pay more for the bundle. Once they’re in the bundle, let them watch exactly what they want.
The model works for YouTube because of the centralized nature of YouTube. I think that model can work for other centralized systems too like cloudflare.
Hell, maybe that was cloudflare endgame all along. If a good chunk of the internet is running behind cloudflare proxies, then cloudflare could do brave's BAT idea but actually sanely with like a normal payment and subscription etc.
When it's all grown up though, I'd hope for more transparency into where the money is going. Suppose a journalist has risked life and limb to expose some important information and two news outlets publish stories about it. I don't want to pay the news outlets under the assumption that they'll then pay the journalist. Instead I want to decide which story to read based on whichever one triggers my client to compensate the journalist the most (because I care more about the investigative work than the writing, though other users might configure their clients differently).
> I disagree, bundling is the problem. That strategy created the fragmented landscape that we now see in streaming video, which is pretty much universally hated.
> The ideal solution would involve a flat rate which I pay monthly, and at the end of the month that money goes towards the content that I consumed during that month. If I only read a single blog, they get all of it.
You just described bundling - that’s how YouTube Premium works. I’m not sure what the distinction you are drawing is here. Is it the existence of multiple separate bundling services? If so, I agree that creates friction, but the solution is more bundling, ie. everything should be in the same bundle.
Btw I don’t hate the fragmentation of streaming that much. The value proposition for TV/movie consumption is the best it’s ever been. For what it used to cost to buy a single season of a TV show on DVD, I now get access to watch hundreds of shows on-demand. It would be even better if all the streaming services merged together, but antitrust law will probably prevent that.
I think what most people hate more is when the specific thing they want isn’t in the bundle - ie. paying $4 to watch one movie.
Yeah, everything in the same bundle is what I'm going for. Except it's not a bundle that is offered and gatekept by some platform, but rather one that emerges from the participation of users while they interact with each other or with artists.
Whether I received the content via a browser, over bittorrent, or on a USB stick should have no bearing on whether I'm able to
- reward its creators
- assess the content's trustworthiness based on whether I trust those creators
> the problem is the human cost of a transaction. The mental overhead of deciding whether I want to make a purchase to consume every piece of content […]
> When someone on the internet tries to sell you something for a dollar, how often do you really take them up on it?
It depends on how micro they are. Your example of $1 is quite big. It should be cents or even less.
Several examples. When using chatgpt api, do you really worry how much a short q&a session will cost you? Do you stress whether to turn on the light in your room or not (electricity cost is also micro-transaction if you think about it)?
$1 is not a micro-transaction, it's just a regular transaction. It's not micro until it's only several cents at most.
I'm not the parent, but when I use the OpenAI API (not ChatGPT API, that stuff is very cheap in comparison), I do keep an eye on my spend. For the more variable models like o3, o3-pro, GPT-4.5, expenditure can quickly exceed what you decided to spend. I'm glad you can set spending limits if you choose to do so.
For the examples you gave, there is a lot of marginal cost to provide more of the product. ChatGPT and your utility would be bankrupt if they gave infinite usage. Although ChatGPT’s consumer product is flat rate (users greatly prefer that model), rumor is that they lose money if you use the big models a lot, and they do cap usage.
While I agree with most of your comment, there is a pitfall - bundling is often used as an extractive pricing strategy, where you force the consumers to buy goods they do not want to access the one they want.
This is problematic when the seller is a monopoly, and has a strong market power that prevents the consumer to seek alternatives.
The whole point of bundling is that you combine many things together because the marginal cost is zero. If you pay for YouTube premium, you are also paying for all of the videos on YouTube that don’t interest you. That’s irrelevant as long is there is enough content you want. The fact that the bundle includes a music app you don’t care to use is the same way, it doesn’t detract from the value proposition.
Well in my case the value is not there at their price which includes YouTube music as a separate service that must be maintained and I assume separate licensing as well. I’m not interested in paying for access to that side of the service. I have little doubt that the access to YouTube music adds to the sticker price of their bundle. They are not simply passing along bundled costs, they are also targeting what they think consumers are willing to pay. I think they’ve miscalculated in this case.
I normally would subscribe to Apple Music, but I switched to Youtube Premium because I get Youtube Music with the added benefit of no ads on regular Youtube. It seems like their bundling trick worked on me as they expected.
I wonder if that makes up for the money they are losing as I continue to abuse their service with ad blockers and sideloading modified ad free clients.
Of course, but are you aware that there are already cross-country agreements that allow these systems to work, for example, UPI is accepted in Singapore?
There are also alternatives like WePay, AliPay, LINE Pay and other wallet providers that are generally accepted across Asia.
The use of the Visa and MC networks is primarily a US/EU/APAC environment, where the alliance of bank issuers has controlled that market for decades.
This is essentially a "legacy" network, with a lot of issues related to the interchange and other fees, as well as any number of 3rd parties, hidden from the consumer, that "clip the ticket" of each transaction.
But why exactly does it have to be on an append-only ledger where transactions are processed/validated for a fee? Why can’t it be a more conventional transaction processor like VISA on top of the banking system?
Because conventional transaction processors can be compelled to shut off payments to publishers whose content offends the powerful. Just look at what happened to wikileaks.
Seriously. Conventional transaction processors are the problem, not the solution. They can pick favorites and shut off payments for non-favorites, change their TOS, hit you with surprise transaction fees, randomly suspend your account, insert middlemen, etc. etc.
Crypto is not going to save you there. If some country like India wants to ban content from some publishers, they can do so by just asking their ISPs to ban all traffic to said publishers. Whether the publisher accepts micropayments on crypto rails or conventional rails is immaterial. They are not going to be able to distribute their content anymore and hence not get paid either.
You just need a middleman that aggregates micropayments into large enough amounts to work with non-micropayment systems.
Some might object to having to get middlemen involved, but the thing is that even with cryptocurrency payments you are going to need middlemen because the web is international.
If your website is directly charging crawlers to crawl and you get crawled and paid by any crawler from another country, congratulations! You are now engaged directly in international trade and have a whole slew of regulations to deal with, probably from both your country and the country the crawler is from.
If you go through a middleman you can structure things so it is the middleman that is buying crawler access from you. Pick a middleman in your country (or anywhere in the EU of you are in the EU) and most of your regulatory headaches go away.
A middleman is not strictly required for cryptocurrencies. Regulations around them and how international transactions are taxed will depend on each country, just like anything else. These matters can be handled by lawyers and accountants as usual.
While I agree that cryptocurrencies are not strictly required for this, the infrastructure already exists to support micropayments, and is well understood and trusted. What infrastructure could support the same use cases for fiat micropayments? Would it be as low friction to setup and use as cryptocurrencies are today? Would it be decentralized and not depend on a single company?
I'm as tired as anyone else about the cryptocurrency hype and the charlatans and scammers it has enabled. But I also think it's silly to completely ignore the technology and refuse to acknowledge that it has genuine use cases that no other system is well suited for. Micropayments and powering novel business models on the web is one clear example of that.
> Regulations around them and how international transactions are taxed will depend on each country, just like anything else. These matters can be handled by lawyers and accountants as usual.
One of my points is that quite a lot of sites don't currently do any international transactions with site visitors. They make their money selling ad space. Their transactions are with a small number of ad networks, probably in the same country.
The site's lawyers and accountants are most likely just trained in dealing with in-country transactions.
If the site start directly charging international crawlers it is then adding international transactions and will need accountants and lawyers who can deal with that.
Big sites with a lot of revenue can probably handle this fine. Smaller sites are much less likely to be able to deal with it.
There is also political risk handling it yourself because some counties are viewing AI development similarly to how they view weapon development, and I would not be surprised to find that some countries will view selling AI crawling access to certain other countries as violating sanctions.
Thus for most sites that aren't already engaged in international commerce they are probably going to want to go through a middleman to sell crawler access even if cryptocurrencies are used for the payment system.
Even if advertising were to disappear over night, why do you think that would stop the spread of propaganda, corruption of democratic processes, and social unrest? I don't really see a connection between the two?
If the architecture of the web changes to one where people only see content that they've asked to see, and that kills advertising, it would also put a significant damper on anyone else whose business involves injecting unwanted content into a viewer's consciousness. Propagandists are the first to come to mind.
If it can become prohibitively expensive to sway an election by tampering with people's information, then the alternative (policies that actually benefit the people) will become more popular, leading to reduced unrest.
Democracy is having a bad time lately because its enemies have new weapons for use against it. If we break those weapons, it starts working again.
Where did I say that all of those things would stop?
What I said is that adtech systems are also used for it. So if they were to disappear overnight, a _proportion_ of those activities, and a pretty large one I reckon, would also disappear.
The connection is that those wishing to influence public opinion can do so by running ad campaigns that target precisely the demographic they wish to manipulate. Adtech doesn't care whether you're promoting products or ideas. This connection should be obvious after the Cambridge Analytica leak.
Social media and any media platform also enables the spreading of propaganda, but it's not as systematic as the tools built for advertising.
Basically, adtech is the backbone of the attention economy where more clicks = more revenue. So the incentives are to always say the most inflammatory clickbait you can, to incentivize profits. Sensible and boring stable takes and agreement will always be stifled to promote outrage, beefs, and clickbait to maximize revenue. To generalize; stability in any general field like politics or journalism gets turned into obnoxious grandstanding to be more like reality tv to get more attention. In software, people who monetize off advertising are incentivized to build dark patterns maximized on attention grabbing. Whereas without advertising as the main source of revenue, people stop building dark these patterns to steal your attention, as you are paying them directly for a service, so you are the customer instead of the product.
So what you are saying is: "incentives are to always say the most inflammatory clickbait you can, to incentivize profits"
Therefore in this new setup where people pay sites and not other companies, if I want the most micro-payments coming to my site, I need to say the most inflammatory clickbait things I can? All this does is shift the who pays, and then of course because I want the most money for my site, I will also take a company's ad money and do tiers with the micro payments now. At no point does that change the content people want. Sure, maybe I won't get your micro payment, but that okay because now I have a new scheme that gives me advertisers money and readers money. Now if I find a way to exploit the FOMO of this new gated setup, I win even more and my content doesn't change.
These takes always find ways to blame providers and never hold to account the responsibility of consumers. Maybe we focus on the people and why they want the clickbait so bad? I don't have an answer to that, but that's probably because the "solutions" all want to focus on companies giving people exactly what they want instead of helping people become aware of addictive clickbait rage behaviour and patterns.
Fox tv station is not the only one that is broadcast into peoples homes, PBS is an option too. And on cable for news, my grandmother had C-SPAN on tv non-stop. Talk about some boring stable tv. (Which I am sure is still an option if thats what people want)
> This should be the standard business model on the web, instead of the advertising middlemen that have corrupted all our media, and the adtech that exploits our data in perpetuity.
People with content will still want to maximize their money. You'll get all the same bullshit dark patterns on sites supported by microtransactions as you will ad supported. Stories will be split up into multiple individual pages, each requiring a microtransaction. Even getting past a landing page will require multiple click throughs each with another transaction. There will also be nothing preventing sites from bait and switch schemes where the link exposed to crawlers doesn't contain the expected content.
Without extensive support for micro-refunds and micro-customer service and micro-consumer protections, microtransactions on the web will most likely lead to more abusive bullshit. Automated integrations with browsers will be exploited.
Maybe. But at least transactions could be performed directly between consumers and publishers, and there wouldn't be incentives for companies to violate privacy laws and exploit user data.
Of course, we would need to figure out solutions to a bunch of problems adtech companies have had decades to do, but micropayments would be the first step in the right direction. A larger hurdle would be educating users into paying for content, and what "free" has meant thus far, so that they could make an informed decision. And even then I expect that many people would prefer paying with their attention and data instead. But giving the option for currency payment with _zero_ ads is something that can be forced by regulation, which I hope happens one day.
Except I don't want to use crypto, I don't want to accept crypto for content, I don't want to pay middlemen for using crypto.
Micro payments using crypto is just a way for folks to prop up crypto currencies. It also is a dead concept, because how do we all agree on _which_ crypto to use? If I'm browsing the internet, and each site only accepts a particular shit coin, is that ok? Does everyone just use a single stablecoin? Now everything is locked to a single currency?
The cloudflare approach is honestly ideal, because it charges people profiting from your content, not humans looking to read your content. It also doesn't use crypto.
I don't think it would even be remotely as technically feasible or viable if it was crypto based. I don't want crypto either, but as far as I can tell, crypto is much much much less ergonomic and inconvenient than just having a tab that you pay off monthly in a normal way with a single transaction.
This is a mistake by Cloudflare. They restrict data access for big players and it would hurt net neutrality as well. I am surprised this gets any positive feedback.
Maybe I'm wrong, I hope I am, but it feels like the boats out for micro payments. To me at least, it feels like for this system to work you want to have something like what PAYG phones have with top-ups. You "put a tenner on your internet", and sites use that in the form of micro payments. Had that been the case since the start, it could've worked great, but now the amount of infrastructure and buy-in required to make that work, it just feels like we missed the chance.
This is really interesting. Assuming I understood it correctly, I wonder why the protocol does not allow immediate return when it gave an address and payment amount. Subsequent attempts should be blocked until some kind of checksum of amount and wallet address is returned. This checksum should be verified by a third-party. This would save each server from implementing the verification logic.
Two missing pieces that would really help build a proper digital economy are:
1. If the content could be consumed by only the requesting party, and not copied and stored for future,
2. if there is some kind of rating on the content, ideally issued by a human.
Maybe some kind of DRM or Homomorphic Encryption could solve the first problem and the second could be solved by human raters forming DAO based rating agencies for different domains. Their expertise could be gauged by blockchain-based evidences and they will have to stake some kind of expensive cryptocurrency to join such a DAO akin to license. Content and Raters could be discovered via like BitTorrent Indexes, thus eliminating advertisers.
I say these as missing pieces because it will allow humans to remain an important part of digital economy by supplying their expertise, while eliminating the middle man. Humans should not be simply cogs in digital economy whose value are extracted and then discarded but should be the reason for its value.
By solving double-spending problem on content we ensure that humans are paid each time. This will encourage them to keep on building new expertise in offline ways - thus advancing civilization.
For example when we want a good book to read or movie to watch, we look at Amazon ratings or Goodreads review. The people who provide these ratings have little skin in the game. If they have to obtain license and are paid, then when they rate an authorship - just like bonds are rated by Rating agencies - the work can be more valuable. Everyone will have reputation to preserve.
As someone who has actually built working micro payments systems, this was of interest. Worth noting though that it's really just "document-ware" -- there's no code there[1], and their proposed protocol doesn't look like it was thought through to the point where it has all the pieces that would be needed.
> Worth noting though that it's really just "document-ware" -- there's no code there
That's not true. That project is a monorepo, with reference client and middleware implementations in TypeScript, Python, Java, and Go. See their respective subdirectories. There's also a 3rd-party Rust implementation[1].
You can also try out their demo at [2]. So it's a fully working project.
> As someone who has actually built working micro payments systems
The Github repo clearly has Python and Typescript examples of both client and server (and in multiple frameworks), along with Go and Java reference implementations.
Maybe check the whole repo before calling something vaporware?
