X402, a static blog monetization excercise

I'm curious about the legal implications of this. For example:

- In the EU, a consumer has 14 days to withdraw from a contract that you have concluded online, unless the consumer explicitly waives this right during the purchase (so your payment required page will need an explicit statement about this).

- I'm pretty sure in the EU, and probably most countries, you must receive an invoice, even if it's for a 1 cent purchase.

- You might also have to pay VAT on these transactions, which will need to also be included in the invoice. This is especially important for B2B purchases, because companies can claim back VAT.

- What happens if I complete the purchase, but there is an error in the response returned by the website? I.e. between the events of my purchase being confirmed and the server returning the response, the server dies. What recourse do I have?

Quite apart from whether the concept can succeed after having failed a number of well-funded and well-publicised times—

I open https://shtein.me/api/joke in a normal-enough browser (Firefox Nightly with Enhanced Tracking Protection and uBlock Origin). After loading its 2.3MB response (no useful HTML, just a huge inlined JS blob, and served without transfer compression), it asks me to select a wallet. There are two choices.

I select “Injected” and press “Connect wallet” (ugh, why did it require me to click three times instead of just one!?). Nothing discernible happens. No errors or network activity in the dev tools.

I select “Coinbase Wallet” and press “Connect wallet”. It opens a popup window, <https://keys.coinbase.com/connect?sdkName=%40coinbase%2Fwall...>. The TLS connection fails, PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR. Operating on a hunch, I discover it’s blocked in India:

  $ curl keys.coinbase.com
  The website has been blocked as per order of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under IT Act, 2000.

Not sure quite what to make of that, given that https://www.coinbase.com/en-in/blog/coinbase-launches-in-ind... sounds (from the snippet exposed in a search engine) like Coinbase started fully operating in India five weeks ago.

Can’t say it leaves a positive impression.

Why was Cloudflare rolling their own verion of the already existing L402 protocol?

The protocol: https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l40...

An index of current use: https://l402index.com/

We are founding members of the x402 foundation and built the most popular x402 explorer, x402scan [0]

Happy to answer any questions!

[0] https://www.x402scan.com/

So do/can users get a preview of the content before being required to make payment? Or is the idea that users are likely already familiar with the site/content to which they will pay? Sorry I only skimmed the article.

> This literally can change how we use internet making advertisement economy internet runs on obsolete.

Hmm, so I will pay to see websites that have ads. This may or may not be fine and solve some other problems (like paywalling AI agents), but lets not be naive. It won't replace ads, in most cases it will just be another stream.

I did not get it how it could be used for a _static blog_.

>…the paywall fetches the content behind the scenes, and since our response is JSON rather than HTML it has nothing to render in place, so it navigates to an in-memory object URL created from the response. The protocol itself is pay per use, so every time you hit an API - you will be charged.

So it can't be used to 'unlock' a paid article forever? You can only read it once, and if you closed the tab, you need to pay again?

FWIW I had WebMonetization up on my blog since April 2020. No paywall, just available. My wallet on GateHub net worth: 0.00

So... yeah, technically it works but until anybody cares, it doesn't matter.

I didn't even re-installed my wallet for others to get some reward back last time I setup my browser.

Check it tronbrowser has x402 supported natively

I think this adds too much friction to trying to view a website and most people, upon seeing this sort of paywalling (regardless of how much or how little is being asked) will just not go to a site that's implemented this.

It took a ridiculous amount of effort, but it looks like we're starting to go somewhere with this. The complexity of crypto is, um, complex and very very not user friendly. I had money in my Phantom wallet, but that wouldn't connect. I suspect it's because my USDC was on the wrong network. So then I tried the Base wallet, from Coinbase. I couldn't send money from my Phantom wallet to my Base wallet for whatever reason, so finally I used Apple Pay to load $5 (the minimum) into my Base wallet, so that I could click the button, finally, to give you $0.01.

Except it still didn't work. When I used the mobile browser, I clicked the links and it looks like it wanted to take my money, but it returned to the site after going to base, without actually taking money. So then I used the Base app's browser to visit the site. It more convincingly tried to take money out of my wallet but the site returns Request failed: 402, which is confusing, and doesn't actually take my money.

I think x402 interest is completely misplaced

Consumers that actually spend (Americans) pay with unsecured credit, crypto ecosystem doesn't have robust unsecured credit systems. It has plenty of secured credit systems though because it is extremely optimal at collecting collateral and settlement, extremely unoptimal at rendering judgements and seizing non-possessed assets. Many applications try unsecured lending and solve nothing or gain no traction, running out of capital to unsecurely lend. This renders x402 for consumer applications dead in the water.

And if consumer applications were unlocked, the law of diminishing returns comes into play immediately as everyone tries to paywall their service, just like seen on Medium and Substack.

x402 is for agents to pay for something they need access to. The agents themselves will be speculators just like the users.

I'm fine being wrong.