Proposal: a Payment Pointer for CiviCRM to collect passive Web Monetization income
For over a year I've been exploring Web Monetization, which is a newish protocol to stream money from user's browsers to the websites they visit. It's a W3C community draft and currently is only in use by Coil.com, which has $5/month subscriptions and pays out at $0.36/hour. It works by adding a meta tag into the receiving website with a 'payment pointer' and a browser plugin on the paying user agent side that streams to payment pointers it finds. (Disclaimer: I've been funded in the past by their grant foundation Grant for the Web for this project, but am not being paid to write this - I just like the idea of passive microdonations to fund the open web as your browse).
For this year's Mozilla Festival, which finishes today, Coil has run an experiment where every attendee gets 6 months free subscription plus $10 to give in tips to any site they visit. As a result I've pulled together and shared all the videos I've made over the years around CiviCRM, added a Payment Pointer and have started to collect money with 100% of anything raised given to CiviCRM LLC (tho in reality so far it's <$5).
This issue is to check a few things:
-
that there's no community pushback against me doing this with the videos (ie our do-ocracy depends on people knowing what's being done!) -
to invite anyone else to add <meta name="monetization" content="$ilp.uphold.com/3FY2pBy6RFxF">
to their website header - anything streamed to this address goes into a CiviCRM specific account which will be given to the LLC as soon as it passes $10. -
adding this wallet address to the public list of Social Benefit Payment Pointers to encourage others to start collecting money for CiviCRM on their website. The list at present include orgs like archive.org and Mozilla Foundation. -
to propose adding this to the header tags of civicrm.org (and docs/lab/chat) so it -
to propose CiviCRM has it's own payment pointer instead of using one I control. This third point is more about good governance.. as it may only be a few dollars a month in income at most for now, it may not be worth Josh's time to setup for now.
FAQ: Can Web Monetization breach privacy?
Privacy is central to the design of the protocol. Payment streams are anonymous so the identity of who streamed the money isn't available to the recipient. Frustratingly this also means if you add a pointer to your website you won't know which web page the money came from, as this could potentially be traced back to an IP address or user-agent - and as a user you can't see a list of websites you've donated to unless you install an extra browser plugin.
FAQ: Is this a blockchain?
No, not according to Coil.com or WebMonetization.org.
However, there are only two places to get a Payment Pointer at present: Uphold and Gatehub, and both of these are used for currency exchange, including cryptocurrency. So if you visit either site to get your own Payment Pointer it does feel crypto-ish.
In adition Web Monetizaiton is based on Interledger, which is a new payment processing protocol which aims to lower/remove payment processsing fees especially in countries not covered by Paypal/Stripe. This also isn't a blockchain, but it was funded by Ripple which is a digital currency using a blockchain, but is what's known as a permissioned blockchain, which have been around since 1990. With permissioned blockchains, there's no mining and only a small group of trusted people can process transactions, so it's more like a federated database, and the energy use is relatively small (higher than credit cards but lower than cash). Permissionless blockchains arrived with Bitcoin in 2008 and have the huge energy & resource footprint because of mining and vast effort to try and limit a permissionless structure being corrupted/attacked (Cory Doctorow wrote a good thread about the difference). Anyway, the project doesn't use Ripple, or any blockchain, it's just funded by Ripple. Wanted to be clear on that because there's quite a lot of concerns and hype around cryptocurrencies.