[wpapper]

Thank you for the kind words! I’m a PM on the team that is building this. I’ve believed in microtransactions for over a decade and hope that we can finally bring them to life.

Proper spend delegation and permissions is a big focus of ours - it’s great to let your agent have discretion, as long as the damage from going off course is limited. Definitely want people to feel comfortable experimenting with emerging tech

Feel free to email me at (my username)@(my company) if you have any feature requests or things you’d like to see

[fizzbuzzdizz]

first video games, then phone apps, and now finally the web. the micro transactionification of everything is complete! what a wonderful world we live in. just know people will remember your role you played in this, and if you think history is going to look at you kindly you have a very very rude awakening comming

[tln]

I remember feeding arcade machines coin after coin, buying magazines and newspapers, and paying to see a movie. Those aren't all microtransactions but they are direct purchase -> consume content.

So is the rise of microtransactions mostly history repeating itself? There are nuances but web microtransactions feel a lot more like putting a quarter in to an arcade machine than the iap for phone apps.

[fizzbuzzdizz]

this isnt putting a quarter in a machine. thats what we already have today. this is making the pinball game free but now you have to pay 1 cent every time you hit paddle button.

[me-vs-cat]

> this isnt putting a quarter in a machine. thats what we already have today.

What have I missed where I can, today, feasibly pay $0.25 at a time, online, regardless of other factors such as privacy, without putting down a larger balance at a time from which $0.25 is deducted?

[throwthrowuknow]

This is an attempt to fix the currently broken payment system for the web that has caused a lot of the problems we face: clickbait, paywalls, requiring account signup, ad bloat, personal info collection, etc.

It would enable informational sites to fund themselves with small anonymous payments per article instead of squeezing ad revenue and personal data out of their customers.

Incumbents will hopefully be disrupted by this enabling more independent authors to actually make a living.

[fizzbuzzdizz]

if i made a list of the worst possible solutions the problems you just listed number one on that list is this idea. if you think for a second that this will solve even ONE of those problems i have a bridge to sell you

clickbait: the revenue per click is going to go up thus driving even more incentive to produce clickbait titles with no real content (hey they have already paid by the time they find out its not real but o well). also enter the age of AI agent clickbait designed specifically to entice them. you just made the existing problem worse and created a new one

paywalls: well yeah, it makes the paywall go away, by paying, just like you could today

not collecting personal info: yeah other than the ledger of every single article you’ve ever clicked and paid for

account signups: you think cloudflare will be the only one in the game? welcome to a world of 50 different micropayment wallets you have to maintain and keep funded or you wont be able to browse the internet

[johndough]

Do you have any plans on mitigating the privacy consequences of microtransactions? I'm fine with paying for (some) content, but I'd prefer if there weren't some companies using that information to manipulate me or the more impressionable members of our society.

[wpapper]

We plan to make it easy for both buyers and sellers to rotate addresses. Done right, everything should be pseudonymous to the outside world.

(Full privacy is a harder problem to solve, but address rotation is a good 80/20 solution for now)

[ethbr1]

Good to hear.

I think web servers monetizing any user identifiers possible should be assumed by this point in the web's evolution, and precluded to the extent possible at the protocol level.

No one is going to say "Oh, we've got micro-transaction revenue now, let's do away with ad tracking." They're going to say "Great, now we have both streams of revenue."

If Cloudflare et al. are stepping into the middle of the transactions, I'd much rather scope my identity leakage to only them than everyone running a web server.

[seany]

IMHO this is only interesting if it _truely_ breaks a KYC path. Otherwise; who cares?

[IgorPartola]

Please tell me this will be IPv6 only or at least IPv6 first! Or allow differentiated pricing so IPv4 calls can be made more expensive. CF, as much as I have issues with the constant CAPTCHAS I run into and blocking my Hurricane Electric tunnel every so often, is in a unique position to get us past having to support the legacy internet protocol.