I don't want to implement P2P payments. I don't even know what this means. Does it just mean "sending someone money?" Why would I want that to be built into a browser? I'm a bit confused why this is being pushed.

It means there's an easy way to "pay" for "premium" content in very small forms. Like "here's 15 cents for letting me read this article." No ads, no subscription and sending all your personal info, no email spam. I think if it works, it will change everything.

Here's an interesting article from 2003 about microtransactions that argues the main issue is actually mental burden of paying for hundreds of tiny things every day, ie. "mental transaction costs". https://web.archive.org/web/20031202032448/http://www.shirky...

The concept seems to first appear in Nick Szabo's paper in 1999:

https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-...

Things like Brave's Basic Attention Token seem to solve this problem in the sense that it's completely automatic based on the amount of time spent on each site. But then you have to use Brave, and you have to use BAT...

In my case, most of the money would go to YouTube, Reddit and HN. (I think Brave actually has a way to send the money to individual creators on a site rather than to the site itself. But I haven't used it personally.)

There is no reason for that to be baked into the browser. That can absolutely be a cross-browser/platform layer that won't need to worry about dying as a walled garden with no visitors.

Lightning Network and Bitcoin are inherently interoperable.

Just because one browser bakes it in, it doesn't mean the resources created are limited to being accessed through that browser.

I agree with you for the end product, but it seems like a fine idea to push integration as far as you can in the alpha phase to see what's necessary.

The cost for the average Bitcoin transaction is a lot higher than 15 cents. And likely to go higher as transaction fees make a higher and higher portion of miners' reward. The power use involved in mining "coin" does not simply pay for itself.

Lightning mitigates high transaction fees by pooling.

I agree with long term concerns as block rewards decrease, though, which is why I prefer Monero’s tail emission to Bitcoin’s model.

Part of the brilliance of block rewards is it actually does pay for itself. Miners are rewarded for their efforts, and the reward amount varies based on the needs of the network.

At least that’s been true for the past decade, prior to getting towards the supply cap. It’ll be extremely interesting to see how miners behave as the rewards decrease in reality vs in theory. My personal belief is that the lack of tail emission and resultant price increase will keep bitcoin alive indefinitely, but make it more and more static overtime, even with stuff like lightning, and turn it into a kind of reserve note. This is not a novel theory and is what many are seeing happening.

I’m most bullish on Monero long term/think it’s extremely under-appreciated as a viable means for the mind of decentralized uncensorable micro-transactions people in the space all fantasize about.

no not for lightning network. fees right now are 1 Satoshi or about $0.04 USD.

1 Satoshi today is well under $0.01 USD. Maybe you meant $0.004 USD?

it’s actually worth $0.0004 USD or 0.04 cents

whoops, yes sorry, percent conversion error. 0.04 cents

I feel like this is overly idealistic, it will be $1.99 with ads and personal info harvesting and spam. Why wouldn’t you?

I'm sure some will want to do that, sure. Especially the marketing driven blogs/sites.

But they'll be competing against people that don't do that, so unless their content is really really good and unique, they'll lose in the market and either adapt or die. Maybe some mega celebrities could pull that off, but it would be pretty rare.

I mean, they could easily be doing that right now. $1.99 is high enough that the problem of micro payments isn't really a problem at that price. But they don't because it would be a terrible strategy...

> But they'll be competing against people that don't do that,

That's already the case, yet there is no way to escape. We need to go back to browsers that don't take over our computer (harvest personal info etc).

> That's already the case

How is anybody accepting micro payments currently? What technology do they use?

The closest thing to micropayments deployed at scale right now seems to be youtube superchats, which use traditional banking stuff.

I believe there are people creating micropayment superchat like systems for crypto, but its difficult when its not integrated into the browser/not integrated into content as well as it is with youtube.

Brave has a pretty cool tipping feature that I’ve used a handful of times, but it’s not integrated into the user experience in a way that people actually use/very few people seem to know about it or use it.

I don't mean micropayments, I mean we have an ad infested surveillance web competing with an informative web, but because of how browsers work, the mere presence of informative sites doesn't much help escaping from the ads and surveillance. The problem is browsers enabling the surveillance and we should back away from that. Gemini had the right motivation, but made what I'd call newbie errors. I'd rather have something about like HTML3.

Aperture[1] is an http 402 reverse proxy that implements the LSAT[2] protocol. It’s already used in production but not yet well known.

I’m curious to know how it could be more widely adopted. Maybe a Flask integration? Other ideas?

1: https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture

2: https://lsat.tech

uhm, to pay for things without using your credit card?

I remember when web3 used to mean opposing the de facto requirement to pay for the information. This goes against my principles.

I totally disagree. When you visit a website, you're imposing a cost on the website owner because they have to pay for bandwidth and servers to process your request. In my view, crypto has always been about incentive alignment. Filecoin doesn't really work, but their idea was that when requesting a file a small fee to you pay the person who serves it to you. Overall this makes more sense to me than having some guy pay to host the file himself and hope that he decides to keep doing that until the end of time.

Who creates/curates the information? They gotta eat...

Not everything has to be commercial. And in fact, most of the good stuff — e.g. HN comments — are not commercial.

I don’t mind paying for certain things, but the crypto trend is very much pay to play.

> Not everything has to be commercial.

HN comments aren't free to host though. There is compute involved. How are they paying for that compute?

If it is out of boredom and good will, that's cool. But I very much am keeping that in mind when I comment here. I don't expect a hobby site to stay up long term because they'll just shut it down when it stops being fun.

If HN is paying for this from advertisements and job postings, well there is your answer. It is commercial.

Any way you want to stretch it, HN is not pay-to-play.

I am not against commerce; I am against a pay-to-play internet.

You can’t get around the fact that HN is pay to play too though. that is my point.

You aren’t paying a fraction of a cent to post comments, but you’re paying in other ways. You just prefer the business model of HN, but i find the fraction of a cent model to be more straightforward and clear.

You can't win this argument, hackernews isn't "pay to play". You are currently playing with it and you didn't pay even a microtransaction. Why do you keep saying it is pay to play? For whatever reason HN providers are doing it as a free service and you aren't paying anything.

HN sells me as their audience to advertisers right?

Would you say that Youtube is “free” as well?

Many people would simply prefer a more transparent / straight forward business model and I don’t think they are wrong for having that preference.

You either don't know what "pay to play" means, or you're being disingenuous.

Have you heard the phrase “time is money”?

I would say that Youtube is pay to play as well. You’re just paying with your attention to their advertisers.

I don’t think this logic is misplaced. HN has the same business model as all “free” tech platforms, doesn’t it?

http 402: payment required

You shouldn’t necessarily want it built into the browser but you might want it built into the internet so that you can avoid the layers of fees, commissions and surveillance capitalism.

For better or worse, for most people the browser is the internet right now.

> Would there be a better way to implement P2P payments without a cryptocurrency?

Yes: to not implement them at all.

Can you elaborate?

Personally, I don't understand why a browser needs payment functionality at all, P2P or not.

I like Apple Pay support in Safari, and use it wherever it's available.

I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies by any measure, but I can understand why people would like that.

Care to explain what does it mean to have payment support in the browser. Not entirely sure what apple pay is

I see a "Pay with Apple" button (doesn't appear if you're not using Safari, I guess). I click it, and Safari pops up an OS-level dialog, prompting for TouchID / FaceID / Apple Watch / password authorisation. I authorise the payment, the goods are paid. Works on Mac, iOS, etc. The card is the same one I use to pay for stuff in a shop, so basically buying groceries and buying things online are like the same thing, one click/tap away. It's pretty neat, if you don't mind Apple being a middle man.

Not OP but why do I want payment implemented inside the browser?

I don’t know about you but I hate ads and like to pay for my content, I also don’t see why I’d want to give money to intermediaries every time I pay for something.

Why would I be against payments being built into browsers in a standardised and open source, open standards way if it might eventually solve those problems?

> I don’t know about you but I hate ads and like to pay for my content

Since when has paying for content meant no ads?

I pay for a newspaper - ads, I pay for cable tv - ads, I pay for the internet - ads, I pay road tax - ads, I go to the cinema - ads, I buy a ticket to a sporting event - ads.

That is before we get to the influencer product placement world.

You can get ad-free content. Things like substack, YouTube premium, Netflix, some newspapers, lots of patreon clients, etc.

That ads still exist in other places where you've ostensibly paid for the content doesn't invalidate the op's preferences.

The ads still exist in the places you have paid for them, in litterally every example you gave. Netflix shows are giant ads. YouTube content has litteral ad reads in them. Newspapers - lol.

You can get ad packed content free, you can get ad-free content, you can get paid content that has ads, or paid content that is ad-free.

The "I paid for it" input has zero weight when it comes to determining if the content has ads is sponsored, infuenced or otherwise paid for.

Hating ads and liking to pay for the content are two separate things. I can do both…

1. As long as they’re paying a reasonable amount, paying customers should be more motivating to the company than whoever’s buying ads (because they provide more revenue), which means they are hopefully trying to keep me happy with their service.

2. I hate ads because I don’t want to see them, much less be distracted, or worse, influenced by them.

So I pay for content and run browser and DNS level ad blockers aggressively on all devices, as well as using reader mode wherever possible.

If I can’t avoid the ads I’ll usually go without. You’ll never find me watching broadcast TV.

For this and sibling comment asking basically the same question, I typed an answer here that I hope is helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30969911

Why is it suddenly a requirement the browser also handle P2P payments in the first place?

It's not a "requirement" but monetizing content is a really hard problem that hasn't been solved real well. The most common strategy is ads, but everybody involved (by that I mean the producer and the consumer of the content, not an unnecessary third part like ad sellers) hate that solution. There are some attempts like Medium and their subscription model and Brave's BAT. These solve the problem of "micro payments" but they still require a third party and they have significant limitations (especially that content providers don't have any say on "price"). Direct payments so far suffer from the "micro payments" issue in that small payments aren't feasible since credit card companies and other third parties take a non-trivial portion.

So yeah, if a browser can fix this problem with P2P payments, that would be huge.

Paying content creators is a very valid problem, however using proof of work in place of CC processor fees is just moving the problem around - and arguably, making it worse: you're essentially taking on environmental debt, which all of us will eventually have to pay down.

What "monetizing content via a crypto browser" really means is "voluntarily submitting yourself to this 'decentralized' control structure we have set up." Which, in the case of Bitcoin, is "controlled" by 5 mining pools at any given time, who are all, one way or another, going to have to submit to government control at some point in the future. Meanwhile the whole thing about "decentralized identifiers" is people using the system will be connecting to central data centers.

As far as 'micropayments,' that is begging for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. I'll give you an example. Netflix users watch about 100 hours of their service a month, for $15.59. So 15 cents an hour. There is no scenario in which Netflix benefits from creating a virtual currency in their system pegged at 15 cents an hour (think Flix-Bux), people are already pushing back hard on these internal 'currencies.' The irony is not lost on me the amount of energy used by smart dudes to create a browser that is proposing virtual currency which has been utilize to nickle and dime gamers from adolescence to adulthood (robux, vbucks, the plethroa of 'money sellers' on many platforms).

Nothing about this is about freedom, this is all about changing one central control structure for another, with little crumbs of implication that it's better for users and sellers alike.

The nice property that well designed cryptocurrency protocols have is that they are censorship resistant - they align incentives and telemetry such that operators shouldn't want to censor transactions, but even if they do they cant differentiate between the transactions they like and the ones they don't. Bitcoin itself doesn't really have this property but there are other ones out there that do.

I suspect a cabal controls exactly what goes on despite bitcoin community claims. They are slowly selling off their positions over time and converting to real world assets for that point when they pull the rug out and it all crashes down around all the other investors ears when the curtain falls and the wizard(s) are exposed.

> It's not a "requirement" but monetizing content is a really hard problem that hasn't been solved real well.

It’s not a “really hard problem” - cryptocurrency is a solution looking for a problem that doesn’t exist.

> It’s not a “really hard problem”

Then what's the solution?

There are a lot of really hard problems and as big as fixing any such really hard problem would be the question is why this needs to be handled by the browser itself not why this would be a good problem to have solved.

Well sure, it could be implemented without the browser, just like FTP and other things were back in the day before they got implemented in the browser (which made browsing an FTP server accessible to tons of people who didn't know how/why to use an FTP client), but it's a lot less user friendly. Instead of configuring your preferences or clicking an "approve" button or whatever, you have to provision yourself a wallet, click an "I want to pay $0.15 for this article", get the receiver's wallet address, copy it over to your wallet. Copy over a transaction ID, click send, wait for an email confirmation that includes the access code, copy paste that into the original article, and you're golden. Or all of that can just happen seamlessly in the background if the browser knows how to do it. Also, I don't see an average user ever going through those hurdles, so probably the idea dies on the vine and we'll end up stuck with ads or centralized subscription models for eternity.

AFAIK they aren't advocating for the banning of other browsers (like Chrome), so if you don't want to use a browser that has support for that protocol, you can choose one that doesn't.

It's not a matter of requirement, it's a matter that they want to. It's their project. Since they want to, I think crypto is the best technology available for that today.

I might be wrong, but no one responded to my question with an answer of a better solution than crypto. All they say is: "should not do it". Well, the question was not whether they should do it or not. They already did.

"Don't do it" can be an acceptable answer to "what's a better solution" depending if, from your viewpoint, doing nothing is better than doing the proposed. E.g. Q: "what's a better solution for schizophrenia than lobotomy" A: "Not lobotomy, that's sketchy as can be".

You think crypto is on the net positive side of nothing. A great number of HN do not see it as such they see it as a constant source of scams, funding hype source, fraud, speculation, laundering, and so on with little to actually show in the way of being the world changer it is always promised. The point of that isn't to bring up a debate about if crypto is or isn't so, that conversation has been rehashed a thousand times here and nobody really wants to touch it with a 10 foot pole plus much better resources on the topic exist than comments, it's mentioned as why that portion is wary of a product which puts a lot of spotlight on crypto payments being a core part of why it exists instead of just focusing on the initial crypto based revolution it is already promising: a p2p decentralized browsing experience. Combine the two and you've got something that for many is squarely in the "I'm not going to touch this until it is shown to not be like the other stories and wish it wasn't about payments" camp.

I'm going to tell you a short story. Have patience please.

I consider my industry to be Media. I wanted to be a Journalist(TM) when I grew up. Won a contest...went to a major paper in Boston as part of a group of "those that will one day be Woodward and Bernstein." Then Youtube happened. I pooh-poohed it because I couldn't wrap my head around why anyone, in my thoughts at the time, "would want to watch a bunch of amateurs do x."

Fast forward to today. I watch more YouTube than Netflix and Prime Video combined. These are the only two services we still pay for...we used to also have HBO and Acorn, but they are both one trick ponies and are not adding enough compelling content quickly enough. Also after HBO ruined ASOIF, they landed on my no-go list forevermore. Acorn is simply too expensive for what it offers. It might become for compelling if it were to expand to the Scandies...

I currently maintain a folder on my desktop (one of hundreds) called The Olsen Meter. And in the folder I save every article I come across about industry people-in this case finance industry folks-who I feel are making the same mistake I did all those years ago by pooh poohing crypto. The problems will get worked out...they always do. The energy issue is a sideshow. And mainly bandied about by those who (I feel) are reacting out of nervousness about the future and the unknowns. Crypto is constantly maligned because of the hacks and thefts, but the most stolen currency in the World is/was/always will be the US $100 bill. To the tune of Trillions. Crypto and is multi-billions have quite aways to go before it even comes close.

As to whether or not this will solve the micropayments problem, maybe not but I like the idea of it as a stopgap. Until someone builds something newer and better. And if it keeps journalists from selling their souls to corporations via ads, then the Devil I know and like will always be a better deal.

Last thing I'd like you to consider: How does Dr. Beverly Crusher pay for fabric on TNG in Episode 1? Now before you dismiss the question, realize that she has never been on this planet before, this is the first time they (the crew) have met the Bandi and she procures a whole bolt of beautiful fabric with one sentence? How does the vendor know whether or not she's good for it?

What's the big deal? It does a lot more things these days than just "show the web". You are free not to use the feature. Clearly if no one uses it they'll remove it from the code. It doesn't really affect you at all if you never use it. If some people got their way we'd still be using lynx.

> Would there be a better way to implement P2P payments without a cryptocurrency?

There's tons of cool P2P web stuff to do that isn't payments. And I don't want my browser to have a payment mechanism baked in anyway.

Along a different line of criticism, my bet is P2P payments in the long run is a nonstarter because once legislation catches up (which it will) every peer will need to be as compliant with financial regulations as a bank which is no fun to run as a peer so things centralize and we're back where we started.

And Bitcoin is absolutely not a positive. It's incredibly destructive to the environment (and in some cases, national economies and power grids) to the extent even diehard cryptocurrency advocates are warning everyone away from Proof-of-Work in favor of alternative schemes like Proof-of-Stake. Bitcoin is notable for being the one that popularized the tech, but there have been massive improvements on the core idea since then.