I wish there was an easy way to handle subscriptions with crypto. Like if MetaMask or other wallet apps agreed on a "pull-based" billing system. That would probably never happen, but I can dream.
As an operator, I'd also want a smart contract that collects payments from a list of tokens/altcoins and immediately converts it to USDC.
You can do that by making a smart contract that the payee can only pull X amount from on certain block intervals, and the payer can deposit and withdraw from a often as they like. It would essentially be a checking account.
Also re: auto converting tokens - you can jusr make a service to do that, it doesn't have to be a smart contract. A smart contract probably could be used with a DEX though, but I think that may be needlessly complex.
> You can do that by making a smart contract that the payee can only pull X amount from on certain block intervals, and the payer can deposit and withdraw from a often as they like. It would essentially be a checking account.
Honestly it's pretty trivial. I haven't tested it (it does at least compile), but I had GPT-4 write a contract for this[0]. Obviously don't use this for anything meaningful, just meant to convey the idea. More features could be added to do things like allow the account creator to add / remove more payees with their own withdrawl rates, allow them to directly transfer to someone besides themselves (analogous to paying with a debit card).
Literally no artist anywhere has ever received an actual payment from an actual customer with this method (I'm not counting the artist themselves making a test payment).
No, if Gumroad bans you, you can't just set up your own crypto smart contracts and make money that way. This is some academic crypto anarchist fantasy.
You can look at the code. It's like 50 lines. It is logically trivial. I was replying to a comment that called it "super interesting", which is why I pointed out how trivial it is.
> No, if Gumroad bans you, you can't just set up your own crypto smart contracts and make money that way.
I don't see why not though? One of the benefits of a decentralized currency is that it is not subject to censorship by any central authority who disagrees with the content you are purchasing. That is exactly the problem these guys are having. Granted, they'll have to pay a lot of transaction fees/gas, and the volatility still makes it hard to fix prices, but for one-off transactions, you can ignore day-to-day volatility as long as the minute-to-minite volatility is bearable.
Well, that's your opinion. I believe I highlighted the main issues with your suggestion, and added exactly the same helpfulness to the discussion as an assertion that artists should rely on patrons to send them cryptocurrency to support themselves.
It highlights the issue that the suggested solution is a theoretic or academic solution which we theorize might work out some day, but is not currently a realistic solution for the need to provide food for artists to eat so that they could remain alive.
The fact that you disagree with the explanation due to ideological purity reasons is not grounds for downvoting it.
Modern blockchain payment systems (see Base) have transaction fees that are an order of magnitude cheaper than any trad processors; they don’t discriminate based on moral grounds; transactions settle in seconds rather than days; they are not bound to only certain countries; funds are not custodially held by a single centralized tech company; the list goes on.
Much of the rationale for anti-crypto among communities that would most benefit from it (eg: NSFW art) is ill conceived and held together by an almost religious zeal.
There’s a lot of bad blood in the artistic community (on all fronts, production, distribution and consumption) to anything crypto due to the whole NFT thing… I don’t think you’re going to see anyone trying to do something that’s art + crypto for quite some time.
As an operator, I'd also want a smart contract that collects payments from a list of tokens/altcoins and immediately converts it to USDC.