Forem: Dave Foderick

GFTW Hackathon submission: Money Chat

Dave Foderick — Mon, 25 May 2020 18:22:08 +0000

What I built

Money Chat. A monetized chat application.

Submission Category:

An Experiment. Users can earn money when chatting. Or they can chat to group and just pay to the platform.

Demo

https://dfoderick.github.io/money-chat/

Link to Code

dfoderick / money-chat

Web Monetization chat app

money-chat

Web Monetization with a Chat application.

Click here for live Demo

How to use it

You should already have a Coil Account with the Coil browser extention installed.

Log into app with any name. Payment pointer is optional but recommended if you want to earn money.

If there are no other users online then you can open the chat in a separate browser to simulate multiple users.

⚠️ All messages are sent to all users of the app. Only use the app for testing and demostration purposes.

When you connect to chat with another user then you are sending payments to them. When some else connects to you then they are sending you payments.

Other Projects

This project uses https://github.com/guidovizoso/react-monetize

TODO

Show Offer/Answer popups

View on GitHub

How I built it

It is a react web app. Messages are exchanged through a back end server. User logs in with a name and (optional) payment pointer.

There are 2 operating modes:

Group Chat
By default when chatting to everyone logged in, you are paying the platform and your payment pointer is not used.
Peer chat
When someone else connects to you then they pay you using your payment pointer. When you connect to someone else then you pay them. UI shows where payments are going (i.e. platform, user A, user B, etc).

Things I learned

Basic monetization to platform with group chat can be enabled. Peer chat is somewhat of a different animal and additional considerations have to be taken into account.

Additional Resources/Info

Uses https://github.com/guidovizoso/react-monetize

DEV is monetized

Dave Foderick — Sat, 23 May 2020 15:04:03 +0000

Has anyone noticed anything different about dev.to today?

I did. It is monetized.

DEV is going to be a platform for monetizing your posts.

Web Monetization - What it is, What it ain't

Dave Foderick — Fri, 15 May 2020 01:20:35 +0000

Web Monetization (WM) is not for shopping carts!

WM is not for traditional e-commerce checkout methods. For shopping carts there is a completely different spec called Payment Request/Payment Handler.

The Web Monetization spec seems very preliminary, like a early work in progress. Yet I am grateful to get such an early look at what it might become. It holds a vast amount of promise. There are many, many open questions that I will get to as I learn more. I have to take it as it is. Final analysis will come later.

The current design of Web Monetization is easy to implement. However, as currently implemented, it seems to lack the ability to control what is happening in the back ground. The monetization experience is almost invisible. Probably a primary design goal. Laudable. But also frustrating for control freaks not to see and control the payment stream. For example, there doesn't seem to be a way to specify an amount to send to a web site. I suspect there are a bunch of things going on under the covers and I just don't see them yet. Coil (my monetization provider) seems to be controlling what the web site gets from me and at what rate.

Anyway, I see two primary use cases for Web Monetization, as proposed.

1) Adjust user experience according to the user's desire and ability to pay.

As a web site owner, you will want to detect and respond to the user's payment stream. If user is streaming payments to you then you better do something, otherwise why would they pay you? Shut down ads for paying customers. Provide paywalls for premium content. This is all basic user interface design in the monetization world. All web site owners will need to make basic considerations for monetized users.

2) Charge for Streaming content.

Streaming content is where this Web Monetization spec holds the most interest for me. Streaming videos, movies, group chats. The frustrating part of this is that I don't see how to control all the details yet.

Also, I should break it down this way.

A) If you have your own web site then you have control over the monetization policies. You have the monetizationprogress event as a place to enforce your policies. That's good. But if your policies get complex then there will be a lot of code to write.

B) If you are a content creator and you can't afford your own web site and custom programming to set up your own monetization policies then you are going to be stuck with whatever your platform provider policies are.

It is all about policies and control. Basically, for the consumer, its my wallet, my money. I want control over my wallet.

For content creators, they want control over their content and to set those policies for content delivery.

In other words, Web Monetization as currently implemented, is not the ideal peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

Its going to get interesting as we work through this. All thoughts and opinions are subject to change.

Web Monetization - The Ecosystem

Dave Foderick — Wed, 13 May 2020 20:08:02 +0000

Greetings, everyone. This post begins a series on Web Monetization and serves to document my learning process.

Background: I have been involved in crypto currencies for a couple years and I am a developer. I have always been interested in paid content using micro-transactions but have not looked at the efforts of the W3C until recently.

First, the motivation for Web Monetization is important. We know the advertising model is broken and how web tracking affects our privacy. We can do better with a paid model instead of a so-called "free" model. "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product", said someone. If you think about it for a moment, you realize that if you pay for a subscription then you own the subscription. We can use web monetization technology and cryptographic principles to work in our favor instead of against our interests.

So lets get right to it by listing a few things you will need to know. The following assumes you are a developer who wants to learn how to experience web monetization for yourself.

Caveat: I am still learning about the ecosystem so please correct me if I am wrong about any of these details.

Web Monetization is "A JavaScript browser API which allows the creation of a payment stream from the user agent to the website". Yes, that means you pay for things over the web. You need a web wallet that holds your funds to pay the web site for content. Many business models are possible but simplistically you pay for stuff instead of getting tracked and having ads thrown at you. Since it is not yet a standard you will also need to download an extension for your browser (called Coil).

Summary: You will need a wallet with funds in it to pay the web site and you will need to visit a web site that has implemented the Web Monetization API in order to spend your funds. Details at bottom of this post.

Interledger is the group that seems to be backing everything in this endeavor. It is a payment system that facilitates the transfer of funds and conversion between denominations. It likes the XRP token but will apparently do atomic swaps between crypto tokens and fiat. Not to be confused with an exchange.

Summary: When you want to get sophisticated then go read up on the Interledger documentation to build back end payment systems. Depending on what you are doing, you may be able to do everything you need with just the Web Monetization API and not have to deal with Interledger.

Coil.com is a friendly consumer facing site that makes it easy to get started experiencing web monetization. It will guide you through the steps of creating and funding a wallet and finding sites that are monetization enabled.

Before developing you should probably experience things from a user perspective so I leave you with these short steps to get started.

1) Create an account at coil.com and become a member.
2) Enter your credit card info and start a monthly subscription for $5 per month. There are things called a faucet that will probably give you some free XRP tokens but I have not used any XRP faucets yet so I cannot recommend any. Faucets could be a topic for another post.
3) Make sure to install the Coil extension.
4) Explore! There are some web sites available for you to spend the funds from your wallet. Blogs, Videos and Games. As you visit the sites and you authorize their use, the site will become Apps in your Coil Settings.

That's it for now. Later.