Comment by ArtTimeInvestor
1 month ago
All of these problems would go away if we had micropayments. So that the user could pay for the resources they use.
The user would know that each pageview is $0.001.
The website owner would know each pageview pays for itself.
We probably could get there with some type of crypto approach. Probably one that is already invented, but not popular yet. I don't know too much about crypto payments, but maybe the Bitcoin Lightning network or a similar technology.
Processing a micropayment takes more resources than serving a simple Web page, even if the payment fails. You would have to put in similar filters, or you would get DoSed using the micropayment service.
The incentive to send http requests is that data comes back. That's why the storm of scrapers hurts website owners. They gather the data and give nothing back.
What would be the incentive to send failing payment requests?
To break the site. But you're right that a lot fewer people will probably want to break it than to scrape it, and that stuff like CAPTCHAs is usually more about the "scraping" case. So basically a mistake on my part.
1 reply →