X402, a static blog monetization excercise

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.

(coinbase.com and www.coinbase.com are similarly affected.)

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/

> 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.

Check it tronbrowser has x402 supported natively

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.

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.

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.