x402 - An open protocol for internet-native payments

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Noebel said:
Complain - no. Care - yes. And I do believe many others will. Putting aside the issue of making something that used to be free paid, can you imagine how mentally taxing it would be to know that you are on a counter? Like, every single click is now accounted. Even if the price is insignificant, the constant feeling "I'm loosing my fucking money with every hyperlink" would turn off many people, prompting them to lessen their participation, or ceasing it completly. Even Zuckerberg and Adobe didn't went this far yet.
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Hypermonetization is what it's called. I share your apprehension because this will enable some seriously fucked up stuff but at least when it comes to something like kfarms and other legal websites you can just not access them?

Anyway it seems more likely you'd just pay a contract per day/week or something like that and not even think about it in terms of every click costs some amount of money.

"Making something that used to be free paid" is a bit not true. Kfarms is not free, it is just that donators and nully donating his time/passion to run it subsidize your access.

There's some other cool shit this could enable like properly working search engines once again too.

And yeah I get the whole free stuff on the internet but then again advertising and Facebook and google and Amazon have fucked everything up - I'd rather pay my fair share for websites like KF to exist than to have them disappear forever
 
neger psykolog said:
it seems more likely you'd just pay a contract per day/week or something like that and not even think about it in terms of every click costs some amount of money
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If I had to choose between the two - yes, I would utilize normal payment, like once a month. I'd likely do that even if per page would end up costing less, as long as the price is reasonable. That's human psycology.
neger psykolog said:
Kfarms is not free
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In the global picture - yes. But on a personal level you don't need to make any payments to use the site on it's full functionality.
neger psykolog said:
advertising and Facebook and google and Amazon have fucked everything up
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Yeah. That's why I use uBlock and uMatrix. And do my best to never buy shit that somehow breaks through those.
neger psykolog said:
when it comes to something like kfarms and other legal websites you can just not access them?
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Yes, that is correct. Now imagine 80% of posters just leave and don't come back. That's an average amount of non-paying players in f2p games. Thing is, people are the lifeblood of the forum. I've visited a few derelict board-type sites, with 2.5 posts per day on average. Quite a morbid sight, I must say. And that is what will happen with kf if such a system to be implemented, in my estimation.
 
I remember domains being suspended for nonpayment, that was generally funny. This x402 stuff seems like a crypto ransom waiting to happen.
I like your take on this Noebel, I always hated timers in video games and that's essentially what this would become. Arcades are a ton of fun, but when you run out of quarters, you run out of quarters.
 
neger psykolog said:
Kfarms is not free, it is just that donators and nully donating his time/passion to run it subsidize your access.
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I feel like this train of thought is awfully close to an entry fee for walking in a store. Not quite the same, but close.
I'm not very knowledgeable with web development, but perhaps it could be set up in a way so that while the site remains free, you could still click on a link to pay. I'm not sure what the benefits would be though given the available donation methods.
 
Noebel said:
that is what will happen with kf if such a system to be implemented, in my estimation
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KF's appeal isn't just being a place to gossip, but thanks to the infrastructure in place, the ONLY public site where you can call niggers niggers, kikes kikes, trannies men, and post full dox phonebooks. No other place within anglosphere internet allows that. Not funnyjunk, not 9gag, not even sharty (who has issues staying online and functional). At best, alternatives will host controversial material temporarily. Meanwhile on KF I can look up some insignificant microcelebrity's mishaps from a decade ago, unchanged.
 
The 402 status code isn't some as yet unexploited technical innovation, it is just the web server saying "pai nao" instead of "you cannot access this page". The same thing could be achieved with a header in the HTML or a bit of JS. 402 response is not important at all and is just marketing bullshit, this is simply a push by coinbase to have more people use crypto on their websites.
 
neger psykolog said:
Hypermonetization is what it's called. I share your apprehension because this will enable some seriously fucked up stuff but at least when it comes to something like kfarms and other legal websites you can just not access them?
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I don't know that I would pay for any forum on a per-page basis. That's draining, financially and psychologically, and will change how you use any site, even if you're a millionaire who doesn't care about pennies. Flat payments are always more freeing, whether on a single or monthly basis.

The big use case for this is probably replacing per-content payments on creator platforms. It would be trivial to set up a Patreon or OnlyFans clone with all the content posts behind an x402 payment. That would let you have a deplatforming-resistant income stream--very relevant for a post-Gumroad Null. Or anonymous access, possibly relevant for people who don't want to leave tracks on platforms like OnlyFans (also relevant to Null, lol).

But while this is good for the content consumers, the big money for content creators is usually from recurring payers, not one-off purchases. I'm just now digging into the docs, so I don't know how well this supports a monthly signup. There needs to be a reason to spur adoption, and I'm not sure if there's enough incentive for the producers and hosters of content. Anyone with an audience clamoring for crypto payments likely has implemented it by now.

Or maybe the people who have the niche needs above aren't in a situation to be picky.
 
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Gentle Wind said:
I feel like this train of thought is awfully close to an entry fee for walking in a store. Not quite the same, but close.
I'm not very knowledgeable with web development, but perhaps it could be set up in a way so that while the site remains free, you could still click on a link to pay. I'm not sure what the benefits would be though given the available donation methods.
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Have a $10 entry fee to view Prospering Ground threads without an account (advertised as "True & Honest anonymity")
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Oh boy, just what I wanted. A JavaScript interface to my wallet.
 
This doesn't seem useful for anything except live calls to APIs or service endpoints. For anything long-lived or permanent (like "Did I already buy access to this article"), both the client and the server would have to store the signature data for that picotransaction forever, and if either side ever loses their picotransactions then they're just gone forever. (HD crash? New phone?) Of course the server is a single point of failure on a traditional system, but now we're multiplying the points of failure.
For humans to use this you'd have to either reinvent the wheel and create an account system of some sort on top of this, tolerate a really high level of fragility, or just drink the soy and pay every goddamn time you load anything online.
 
neger psykolog said:
Both of you miss the point.
You don't need ID nor an account (in terms of email/password) for this system, that's the entire point of it.
The provider/server puts up a page and anyone can get access to it by paying $0.01 USD

It could be as granular as accessing each Kiwifarms profile page, or each page of a thread, or a subforum. The access could be once-off (i.e. you can't refresh to get a new version) or a contract for a week.

If you don't understand the doors that this can open up then you're stupid. It can really make alternatives to data heavy shit like YouTube economically viable. Instead of selling off your private data you just pay $1/day or whatever amount - and you don't even need to think about it.
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How does it identify you've paid vs someone else just browsing? IP address is a poor measure. Unless you'll permanently be putting your wallet address in every request.

Edit: Just read client/server page, apparently there's a X-Payment header in the request after the 402 response. Still, hardly reinventing the internet, its just payment via crypto. At least it cuts out the CC niggers. It's not stateless unless its a one-off payment, and even then, you'd need to pay everytime you want to visit that page. Can't wait for Web 3.0 ransomware.
 
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libRT said:
How does it identify you've paid vs someone else just browsing? IP address is a poor measure. Unless you'll permanently be putting your wallet address in every request.
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Nigger do you really think it works in a stupid way? It can just have a proof of payment through some encrypted cookie or whatever.
 
libRT said:
You need some form of ID for it to recognise that you have paid whether its an API key or cookies.
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neger psykolog said:
Both of you miss the point.
You don't need ID nor an account (in terms of email/password) for this system, that's the entire point of it.
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neger psykolog said:
Nigger do you really think it works in a stupid way? It can just have a proof of payment through some encrypted cookie or whatever.
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K lol.

Either way, if it becomes mainstream, it'll be 5 minutes before government requires every wallet holding USDC/USDT to have KYC rules. Which will make normal payment processors the cheaper and more energy efficient option (assuming payment confirmation requires computation). Also can USDC/T compete with the payment processors on transaction capacity?
 
libRT said:
How does it identify you've paid vs someone else just browsing?
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At least right now this whole thing is done "live" over a single HTTP connection. It sends you a payment request (which contains a unique ID and expiration time), and then you send back a reply to that request signed with your crypto wallet's key that contains an approval to run a smart contract transferring tokens to the server operator. They check that it's a good transaction and then if it is, they serve you your content.

And then that's it, you get your content once and the client and server forget about each other.

Supposedly "checking if you've already paid for this before" is coming in the next version.
 
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