[mike-cardwell]

I've come across this before. In order to receive money, I should just be able to put:

  <meta name="monetization" content="bitcoin:my-bitcoin-address">

Or similar, on my website.

Doesn't work that way though. I have to sign up with somebody like coil.com and put an address they give me on my websites. This is just worse. Much much worse than it needs to be.

[ahopebailie]

That's where the idea started but that means the user has to be able to send Bitcoin. The purpose of Interledger is to abstract away that issue which is why Web Monetization is built on Interledger.

You don't have to sign up with Coil to earn. There are other wallets that are on the Interledger network such as Uphold and Gatehub that can give you a payment pointer to put into your site's HTML. If you want your earnings to be converted to BTC that's possible I think.

[mike-cardwell]

I understand that the person paying probably needs an account somewhere, so that payments can be batched together to reduce transaction fees.

However, there's no reason for me to have an account anywhere in order to receive bitcoin. All I need is a bitcoin address.

I don't want to sign up with Coil, Interledger, Uphold, Gatehub, or any other random third party, in order to receive bitcoin. And there is zero reason why I would have to.

[_vvhw]

Except that Interledger is not a "random third party", it's a protocol: https://interledger.org/

So that you can make payments to someone else regardless of whether they want to use Bitcoin or not.

I believe Interledger is the right level of abstraction for this, in the same way that you wouldn't want your email server to have to know or code against the lower protocols, e.g. Ethernet or WiFi, but only IP, TCP and SMTP. This way your email server can EHLO any email server, regardless of the network topology or underlying protocols.

Interledger does the same for payments.

[mike-cardwell]

Ok, so my bitcoin address is "bitcoin:1PQLtWnjUi1itHLG6QCQeHM3Nxua8pRsq1". What tag do I put in my HTML in order to receive payment from this system, without having to sign up anywhere?

[dflock]

You can just put that there - and then you hope that user agents implement this - or you can use interledger.

[mike-cardwell]

The documentation for Interledger appears to be for people who want to build software, not for people who want to send or receive money. And it talks about setting up accounts with xpring.io or rafiki.money.

I see no evidence that Interledger can be used for receiving money without having to set up accounts or run software. Plenty of evidence to the contrary.

As I said before, to receive bitcoin from one of these systems, there is nothing I should need to do other than advertise my bitcoin address. Anything more than that, and the system sucks.

[deweller]

This is a dream that the lightning network aims to one day fulfill.

[3395810]

What is the idea here? Open a channel with each website that I visit. Lockup the BTC that I will ever send them but only send it to them slowly each time I visit it.

[thinkmassive]

Why wouldn’t you open a single channel with a well-connected routing node, and use it for all your payments?

[deweller]

Yes. In reality, users would have a connection open with one or a small number of routing nodes.

The end result is very cheap and quick funds transfers to any node on the network. This lightning network infrastructure would make micropayments feasible.

Granted, there are still problems to solve. But this is the dream.

[Shadonototro]

bitcoin is not a currency, it's not a "money"

[mike-cardwell]

Thank you for your valuable contribution to the conversation.