3 ms·

It is time for micropayments integrated in the browser. Pay 5 cents to access each bug report. Not fun, it shouldn't be like this, but better than not having a

It is time for micropayments integrated in the browser. Pay 5 cents to access each bug report. Not fun, it shouldn't be like this, but better than not having a bugtracker at all.

kangalioo 2mo ago
0.05 cents even. The beautiful thing is, minuscule amounts of micropayments are already enough to fix the incentives
- comboy 2mo ago
  Not sure it works, isn't it already like that if you have the cursed javascript-only pages? It's basically proof of work to access their content (and if you are scrapping en masse you likely also need some LLM getting involved)
  - port11 2mo ago
    I suppose the cost of hardware, network usage, and electricity is still under 0.05? I mean, we know the unit economics for LLMs don't make a ton of sense, except if enterprise customers really are what keeps the lights on.
  - tarpitt 2mo ago
    With micropayments, the server owner makes 1 million requests times 0.05 cents = ~$500 The status quo with those js PoW pages doesn't really benefit the server owner at all, it's wasted energy. I mean proof of work is always wasted energy, but I figure it's better to kill two birds with one stone. CoinHive was one example of this. (I think this is a correct link? https://github.com/cazala/coin-hive https://github.com/cazala/coin-hive). Although I think ideally you would want to have some sort of browser plugin or app that runs on bare metal instead of a proof-of-work in the browser, because RandomX is designed such that it's slow when implemented in JS (https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md)
    - kangalioo 2mo ago
      $500 would amount to just 10k requests. One million requests is $50k
      - duckmysick 2mo ago
        10,000 requests times 0.05 cents (not dollars) = 500 cents = 5 dollars.
  - littlecranky67 2mo ago
    Problem is I'd rather have the 0.05cents go to however runs the website (the bugtracker in this case) than go to the electricity company.
csomar 2mo ago
How many pages does the average software developer visit everyday? 1.000? Price at 0.001 per load and it’ll be completely impractical for crawlers but super cheap for the average connected human on earth.
- pduggishetti 2mo ago
  That would gate the internet to whole lower income countries
  - bluefirebrand 2mo ago
    Aren't many of those countries basically being de-facto blocked by Cloudflare filtering out spam already anyways? Genuine question, I'm not up to date on how Cloudflare operates right now
    - tredre3 2mo ago
      The genuine answer to your question is no, they are not de-facto blocked, unless the website operator chooses to do so.
      - csomar 2mo ago
        It's the default setting and most website operators have no idea what they are doing.
  - eric__cartman 2mo ago
    Also a great way to block the access to people that do not have a payment system available. Whether it is because they are not in a country that's well integrated into an international payment system, or because they are under 18. I browsed a lot of those sites when I was a teenager and did not have a credit card or easy access to internet money.
  - csomar 2mo ago
    Only very minimally. A dollar is no longer worth that much. People who live under 1-2 dollars a day probably aren't browsing that much internet per day. - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-living-with-less-than-1-int--per-day https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-living-with-less-th...
pduggishetti 2mo ago
I think it's gonna kill off the internet not just for bots but to whole class of lower income countries, especially for younger learners
vlyan 2mo ago
and do you happen to know a zero friction payment system that works internationally like the Internet itself does? because I promise you that unless you already have a captive audience, even a minuscule amount of friction to access your service will cost you an overwhelming percentage of organic human visitors.
- tarpitt 2mo ago
  Something like Chaum's blind-signature based ecash, or GNU Taler would be ideal in terms of efficiency, but it's still centralized in distribution. Freenet currently uses something like this. Another option I was thinking of would be a pretty inflationary (or demurrage) cryptocurrency in which you have some sort of RandomX or other CPU-bound PoW. A web server could act as a mining pool and use mining shares interchangibly with micropayments. You could do this mining-share method with Monero right now, it's just that you have higher transaction size in Monero and no real analogue to Bitcoin's LN-based microtransactions. Also you would want the cryptocurrency to be more inflationary (or demurrage-based) to promote usage. Monero's FCMP++ lays some groundwork for payment channels, but it still lacks the nessisary timelocks. Also there was DLSAG which could have enabled payment channels I think, but it's no longer relevant. I also insist that you would need to change the tokenomics to favor greater inflation (maybe you could make coinbase scale linearly with hashrate?), otherwise the miner reward would be economicially insufficient.
  - littlecranky67 2mo ago
    Lightning - a fast, instant, bitcoin layer 2 network - is perfectly sufficient for micropayments. Volatility is a no-issue in this case, as you can freely trade the 5 cents in realtime into other assets and minimize holding time of BTC. You will loose the spread, ofc.
    - tarpitt 2mo ago
      the problem with lightning is: 1) it requires you to open a lightning channel. So you need some amount of initial investment (which usually means you need a credit card and an account on a bitcoin exchange), not just any computer which is the issue that using mining shares solves. The initial investment is my main grudge, as it is way too much friction for 402 Payment Required applications. Also as bitcoiners like sztorc note, this isn't feasible for most of the world's population due to bitcoin's small block size. 2) It's not private. People are going to be linking these things to their identities on crypto exchanges. So now feds can basicially track everything you do on the internet that way. LN is only private in the sense that not every transaction is broadcast to everyone else on the network, which is a very low bar. Chainalysis is possible with the right connections. To a lesser extent, 3) Centralization in the lightning routing protocol which contributes to the effect of #2.
thayne 2mo ago
Perhaps the biggest problem is 5 cents or less isn't enough to cover minimum transaction fees.
- maelito 2mo ago
  Visa fees.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
vova_hn2 2mo ago
The question is what exactly are you trying to achieve. Do you want to prevent them from gathering data or do you want to save resources? If it is the latter, then, perhaps, some p2p (torrent-like) content delivery system could help.
0x_rs 2mo ago
Cloudflare is working exactly on enabling that, like it or not. https://blog.cloudflare.com/monetization-gateway/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/monetization-gateway/
6c696e7578 2mo ago
Fine, but you have the invest in the CPU to determine if the payment was made. That's a cost on you, not the scraper. If the scraper bangs on that payment door 1000x you've spent a fair chunk of CPU looking for valid cookies, query the redis/valkey and DB to manage payment auth. You're not wrong, it is time the scraper pays, but you're going to have to fund it still. I don't claim to have a better answer. I want a perfect solution that is free, putting pages up used to be free, now it isn't.
Suppafly 2mo ago
there is a captcha type thing you can implement in javascript that forces them to do math, I never remember what it's called but it has some anime catgirl as the logo, I imagine you could modify that a bit to make them mine bitcoin or something.

It is time for micropayments integrated in the browser. Pay 5 cents to access each bug report. Not fun, it shouldn't be like this, but better than not having a bugtracker at all.

kangalioo 2mo ago

0.05 cents even. The beautiful thing is, minuscule amounts of micropayments are already enough to fix the incentives

comboy 2mo ago
Not sure it works, isn't it already like that if you have the cursed javascript-only pages? It's basically proof of work to access their content (and if you are scrapping en masse you likely also need some LLM getting involved)
- port11 2mo ago
  I suppose the cost of hardware, network usage, and electricity is still under 0.05? I mean, we know the unit economics for LLMs don't make a ton of sense, except if enterprise customers really are what keeps the lights on.
- tarpitt 2mo ago
  With micropayments, the server owner makes 1 million requests times 0.05 cents = ~$500 The status quo with those js PoW pages doesn't really benefit the server owner at all, it's wasted energy. I mean proof of work is always wasted energy, but I figure it's better to kill two birds with one stone. CoinHive was one example of this. (I think this is a correct link? https://github.com/cazala/coin-hive https://github.com/cazala/coin-hive). Although I think ideally you would want to have some sort of browser plugin or app that runs on bare metal instead of a proof-of-work in the browser, because RandomX is designed such that it's slow when implemented in JS (https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md)
  - kangalioo 2mo ago
    $500 would amount to just 10k requests. One million requests is $50k
    - duckmysick 2mo ago
      10,000 requests times 0.05 cents (not dollars) = 500 cents = 5 dollars.
- littlecranky67 2mo ago
  Problem is I'd rather have the 0.05cents go to however runs the website (the bugtracker in this case) than go to the electricity company.

csomar 2mo ago

How many pages does the average software developer visit everyday? 1.000? Price at 0.001 per load and it’ll be completely impractical for crawlers but super cheap for the average connected human on earth.

pduggishetti 2mo ago
That would gate the internet to whole lower income countries
- bluefirebrand 2mo ago
  Aren't many of those countries basically being de-facto blocked by Cloudflare filtering out spam already anyways? Genuine question, I'm not up to date on how Cloudflare operates right now
  - tredre3 2mo ago
    The genuine answer to your question is no, they are not de-facto blocked, unless the website operator chooses to do so.
    - csomar 2mo ago
      It's the default setting and most website operators have no idea what they are doing.
- eric__cartman 2mo ago
  Also a great way to block the access to people that do not have a payment system available. Whether it is because they are not in a country that's well integrated into an international payment system, or because they are under 18. I browsed a lot of those sites when I was a teenager and did not have a credit card or easy access to internet money.
- csomar 2mo ago
  Only very minimally. A dollar is no longer worth that much. People who live under 1-2 dollars a day probably aren't browsing that much internet per day. - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-living-with-less-than-1-int--per-day https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-living-with-less-th...

pduggishetti 2mo ago

I think it's gonna kill off the internet not just for bots but to whole class of lower income countries, especially for younger learners

vlyan 2mo ago

and do you happen to know a zero friction payment system that works internationally like the Internet itself does? because I promise you that unless you already have a captive audience, even a minuscule amount of friction to access your service will cost you an overwhelming percentage of organic human visitors.

tarpitt 2mo ago
Something like Chaum's blind-signature based ecash, or GNU Taler would be ideal in terms of efficiency, but it's still centralized in distribution. Freenet currently uses something like this. Another option I was thinking of would be a pretty inflationary (or demurrage) cryptocurrency in which you have some sort of RandomX or other CPU-bound PoW. A web server could act as a mining pool and use mining shares interchangibly with micropayments. You could do this mining-share method with Monero right now, it's just that you have higher transaction size in Monero and no real analogue to Bitcoin's LN-based microtransactions. Also you would want the cryptocurrency to be more inflationary (or demurrage-based) to promote usage. Monero's FCMP++ lays some groundwork for payment channels, but it still lacks the nessisary timelocks. Also there was DLSAG which could have enabled payment channels I think, but it's no longer relevant. I also insist that you would need to change the tokenomics to favor greater inflation (maybe you could make coinbase scale linearly with hashrate?), otherwise the miner reward would be economicially insufficient.
- littlecranky67 2mo ago
  Lightning - a fast, instant, bitcoin layer 2 network - is perfectly sufficient for micropayments. Volatility is a no-issue in this case, as you can freely trade the 5 cents in realtime into other assets and minimize holding time of BTC. You will loose the spread, ofc.
  - tarpitt 2mo ago
    the problem with lightning is: 1) it requires you to open a lightning channel. So you need some amount of initial investment (which usually means you need a credit card and an account on a bitcoin exchange), not just any computer which is the issue that using mining shares solves. The initial investment is my main grudge, as it is way too much friction for 402 Payment Required applications. Also as bitcoiners like sztorc note, this isn't feasible for most of the world's population due to bitcoin's small block size. 2) It's not private. People are going to be linking these things to their identities on crypto exchanges. So now feds can basicially track everything you do on the internet that way. LN is only private in the sense that not every transaction is broadcast to everyone else on the network, which is a very low bar. Chainalysis is possible with the right connections. To a lesser extent, 3) Centralization in the lightning routing protocol which contributes to the effect of #2.

thayne 2mo ago

Perhaps the biggest problem is 5 cents or less isn't enough to cover minimum transaction fees.

maelito 2mo ago
Visa fees.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

vova_hn2 2mo ago

The question is what exactly are you trying to achieve. Do you want to prevent them from gathering data or do you want to save resources? If it is the latter, then, perhaps, some p2p (torrent-like) content delivery system could help.

0x_rs 2mo ago

Cloudflare is working exactly on enabling that, like it or not. https://blog.cloudflare.com/monetization-gateway/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/monetization-gateway/

6c696e7578 2mo ago

Fine, but you have the invest in the CPU to determine if the payment was made. That's a cost on you, not the scraper. If the scraper bangs on that payment door 1000x you've spent a fair chunk of CPU looking for valid cookies, query the redis/valkey and DB to manage payment auth. You're not wrong, it is time the scraper pays, but you're going to have to fund it still. I don't claim to have a better answer. I want a perfect solution that is free, putting pages up used to be free, now it isn't.

Suppafly 2mo ago

there is a captcha type thing you can implement in javascript that forces them to do math, I never remember what it's called but it has some anime catgirl as the logo, I imagine you could modify that a bit to make them mine bitcoin or something.