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Announcing the Grant For The Web Hackathon on DEV

Ben Halpern on May 07, 2020

We are so excited to announce the Grant For The Web x DEV Community hackathon. Grant for the Web is a collaboration between Mozilla, Creative Com...
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alispivak profile image
ali spivak

Hello DEV community,

my name is Ali and I'm a member of the team here at Coil working on Web Monetization. If you have any questions about Grant for the Web, Web Monetization, or Coil please let me know.

I'm pretty new to Coil (3 whole weeks!) so I'll be likely be learning some things right along with you. That said, I'll be coordinating with plenty of folks from the Coil team to ensure we're supporting the community with technical guidance as people start on their projects.

DEV is a wonderful and supportive community, and I know I can count on your patience as much as I'm anticipating your creativity. All of us at Grant for the Web & Coil are excited to see the amazing projects you are going to create!

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Rodman Swanston

Are JS libraries that facilitate the use of Web Monetization part of the Foundational Technology category?

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alispivak profile image
ali spivak

Yes, a JS libraries would count as foundational technology.

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Peter Chan

Is there any special Coil's redeem code for developers that join this hackathon?

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alispivak profile image
ali spivak • Edited

We will be providing codes for trial memberships to people/teams who submit a project.
Information is here: dev.to/devteam/free-coil-trial-for...

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Bruno Paz • Edited

Hello Ali.
Coil seems a really nice idea and as an author on Dev.to, looking forward for deep integration between the two platforms.

Not sure if it´s the best place to ask this, but a suggestion for improving the onboarding process in Coil Platform is to improve the "Select Payout option" page.

I know very few about Bitcoins and Blockchain and on that page I am requested to select a payment method. I have no idea what xrp, Gatehub, Stronghold or Payment pointers are. Any user like me can feel a little bit "intimidated" with that page.

I would choose Gatehub, just because it supports payouts in EUR and SEPA transfers but not sure if there are better options.

It would be nice to have some kind of introductory guide on the topic and provide a link that page.

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ali spivak

Hi Bruno,
Thank you for the feedback! We are currently working on improvements to our documentation and guides, so, yes, this is relevant and appreciated information.

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Phuong Tieu

Hi Ali
Are there any special Coil's redeem code for developers that join this hackathon?

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ali spivak • Edited

We will be providing codes for trial memberships to people/teams who submit a project.
Information is here: dev.to/devteam/free-coil-trial-for...

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Aditya Mitra

I have a doubt. When is the last date for the submission for this hackathon?

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ali spivak

The submission deadline has been extended to June 14.

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adityamitra profile image
Aditya Mitra

But, this post says its extended to JUNE 23?

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alispivak profile image
ali spivak

Grant for the Web's Call for Proposals (CFP) has been extended until June 22, but the DEV.to hackathon ends on June 14.

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VeeWeb Code

I am new here. Didn't get it at all. If this is a hackathon then we suppose to build stuff right? Please enlighten me..

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alispivak profile image
ali spivak

Yes, we are looking for people to build projects that utilize and/or promote the Web Monetization API in the hackathon.

Broadly, projects can include things like building new plugins or interfaces, or writing documentation and templates. It also includes projects that focus on enabling the creation, distribution, and discoverability of web monetized content.

Hope this helps!

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Jess Lee

We are so excited to be working with Grant For The Web on this Hackathon, especially just a few short days after we wrapped up the Twilio Hackathon (awarding those prizes today!!). We’re really hoping to bring these fun events to the community regularly, giving people the opportunity to build with new technologies and earn great prizes.

One of the best parts about this particular Hackathon is that the DEV team gets to build right alongside everyone as we implement our own payment pointer -- can't wait to discover our learnings together :)

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Ali Spittel

I'm so excited about this collab! Immediately thought of you all when I met Coil in Amsterdam! I think adding web monetization to DEV is the perfect fit and incentive for authors!

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Ben Halpern

Yeah we agree. We hope this could empower folks to make the most of the traffic they're generating in one small way with a lot of transparency.

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Chris Lawrence

Hi Ali, funny how all the parts connected on this thread!

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☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜

Yay — to random conversations.

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Name cannot be blank

LOL_____

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☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜ • Edited

DEV's

I'm Dees. A South African, based out in London. I've spent many a year championing the open web and standards, most notably from my time at Mozilla, the makers of Firefox. I joined Mozilla Labs in 2010 at the time of Firefox 3.8! Prior to that I've had check-ins at various dot-coms. And was even part of the very early CSS movement, taking eBay from a table-based front end.

Most recently, I co-created Grant for the Web. And I'm super thrilled to see this collaboration go live. It started as an 'all the things' conversations with Ali Spittel, @aspittel at ViewSource in Amsterdam late last year — led to coffee in NYC with PB&J. Which led to impressive virtual only co-ordination as we all entered lockdown to make this a reality within a few weeks.

The Grant for the Web team and our founding collaborators Mozilla, Creative Commons and Coil are excited to see the DEV community's creativeness with the emerging Web Monetization web standard and Interledger protocol within W3C, one which at it's core brings the creator back to the forefront and fairly rewards them for their work and effort.

We can't wait to see what this amazing community comes up with.

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Joe Pea

Hello! I'm brand new to Web Monetization, I've heard the term floating around. Can you help paint a better picture with a bullet point list of things that people might build for this hackathon, or for the grant application?

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☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜ • Edited

Check out some samples within the Web Mometization documentation

Also perhaps wander across to the Grant for the Web Community Forum. There are loads of ideas being thrown about there by many others.

And lastly to highlight @ben main post above some starter ideas and demos listed under the Example Projects header.

Happy building!

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trusktr profile image
Joe Pea • Edited

Interesting! I checked out those examples, but one thing I don't see is payment amounts. The examples only show placing or removing the <meta> tag in certain ways, and showing monetization states based on events. How do payment amounts come into play?

EDIT: Ah, ok, I see the explainer shows an event.detail.amount property.

I take this to mean that a website could show a message like "pay such and such amount and receive such and such stuff", then the user can take that action, and eventually the website would see event.detail.amount.

How would something like selling individual products work? Would we need to dynamically switch out the meta tag (or go to an entirely separate page with its own meta tag) depending on which product the user will be paying for?

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cyberdees profile image
☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜

I'm taking the below directly from @sharafian — and it's likely best that he expand...

Web Monetization doesn't allow for the requesting of specific amounts. Discrete or 'retail' payments like that are better served by a traditional checkout flow or the Web Payments API.

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trusktr profile image
Joe Pea

Interesting. So how do you know if it is worth disabling ads for someone if your business relies on ads, for example? What if they donate only 1 cent. Maybe that won't outweigh the benefit of keeping the ads. There must be a way to track amounts. and therefore, a way to list those amounts somewhere on the website for users to set as their goal, which would equate to requesting specific amounts but in a different way.

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cyberdees profile image
☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜

There are some interesting privacy related challenges here. Unless users/members explicitly opt-in of course. @sharafian likely has thoughts and ideas here.

On the member side, @wobsoriano has been working on a separate extension (they opt-in by explicitly installing something) for members showing them their spend. It's a work-in-progress for the hackathon and he is writing about it.

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Chris Lawrence

Hello DEV community, my name is Chris Lawrence. I am on the Grant for the Web program team. We are excited to be partnering with Dev on this Hackathon.

Myself and others on our team are here to answer any questions you have about the program, provide feedback on ideas, or discuss the broad themes of Grant for the Web.

We are giddy with curiosity about the tinkering, prototypes, and new ideas this community is going to come up with and we hope when you’re through, you consider applying to Grant for the Web. Let's roll!

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Robert

Hi Chris! Sent you a message.

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ste profile image
Ste

Oh man, I've never done a hackathon before, but absolutely putting some time aside for this!

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Brodan

Daaaaamn this is one of the coolest APIs I've heard of. I definitely want to do something with this, there's soooo much potential. Now I just need to think of an idea!

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Jess Lee

🙌

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Allan N Jeremy

Hyped as hell too! Got an idea to bounce off. The API coupled with documentation.
Let me know if you'd be interested

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ali spivak

Happy to hear your ideas - you can email me directly if you like.

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Allan N Jeremy • Edited

Sweet! Emailed you.

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Ben Halpern

As we work out the ways that web monetization will exist in our ecosystem for the benefit of individual authors and the free and open web in general, we'll definitely have an eye on contest submissions for interesting ideas and approaches we can adopt. I'm really excited to see what folks come up with.

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Mazen Touati

This is truly an incredible step toward the future of content monetization. Kudos to Coil for investing in this technology and being the first provider out there 🦄🦄

Regarding the Hackathon I have some question:

  • Is it allowed to participate with multiple projects? in multiple categories?
  • Could anyone clarify more this category "Creative Catalyst"?
  • A platform that helps creators to manage their monetization or get monetized in which category it will be part of?
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ali spivak

You can do more than one project but only win 1 prize.

Creative Catalyst projects, generally, would focus on ways to create, distribute, and discover web monetized content. So, for example, you could build things that enable publishing or that help users find monetized content.

A platform to help creators manage monetization or set up monetization seems like it would fit best into Foundational Technology. However, we want you to build cool projects, so don't worry too much about categorizing them, if it's a grey area we'll sort it out.

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Mazen Touati

Thanks for the reply Ali 🦄 It's an interesting technology hence there's a flood of ideas to explore. Good luck for everyone.

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emma profile image
Emma Goto 🍙

Ooh, another hackathon! Coil sounds super interesting and I'm keen to give it a try on my own personal website.

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☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜

Happy to assist with lightweight technical instructions if experimenting on your personal url, Emma. Feel free to email .

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Emma Goto 🍙

Thank you!

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_hs_ profile image
HS

I just have the 100 year old idea. Framework ! :D Like, enable by default for users to input their wallets into system. Then all payments made by looking at post of specific users could contain additional tag where website could split payments in two parts, one for the website, another for the user that wrote the content. Like YouTube, they could use this to avoid having ads on video but still pay the content creator also. They could allow users to input start and end times for ads which are part of the video, and if micro payment is made player skips ads automatically :D

Just brainstorming in comment section. I might make stupid video website which can solely rely on these things just for fun. But I doubt it so if anyone likes the idea he can make a go at it.

Oh yeah maybe something like a "nice" stackoverflow where you can ask "stupid" questions without getting shamed, but if you get a lot of + points you get micro payments, goes both for answers and questions. Viewers could be "charged" by quality of content they're looking at, so if they want "best" answer they might need to allow payment to go through.

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☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜

Ideas are great. The whackier the better. While they may not all work or be viable ultimately it's the creative experiments are going to help move the web standard forward and more so catalyse the content ecosystem. Go wild...

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HS

I might just for fon xD. I may be underestimating some of my ideas just because I don't see some actual value in it for myself but it might be fun to learn a new technology. Although I dislike frontend mainly because of design, it could be family time well spent, wife using being social media marketer with great knowledge in video and image editing could make some templates. Like instead of board games people could start doing this during lockdowns XD

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Emilie Ma

Amazing initiative, definitely plan on submitting a project :)

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Peter Kim Frank

We're thrilled about the opportunity to collaborate with Grant for the Web. They will be funding projects that help the internet become more open, independent, and fair. The long-term promise of Web Monetization may help us all move away from a system that is currently based on invasive advertising.

The DEV Hackathon is an opportunity to experiment with Web Monetization and to create projects that innovate on the technology itself, or to put forth some creative and experimental applications. There's plenty of great prizes on the line, and we can't wait to see what the community comes up with.

We're also hopeful that some participants will expand their DEV Hackathon project into a full-blown submission to the Grant for the Web CFP. That's an opportunity to earn a seriously impactful grant to continue working on your idea well after this DEV contest ends.

Have fun!

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Jethro Moller (He/Him)

This makes me so happy! Thanks DEV for again giving us something to keep busy with and working towards through these times! It really makes the days go by faster and in the best way possible - by learning!😊❤️

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Glenn Carremans

Cool that DEV is doing these Hackathons!
Is Grant For The Web a similar concept as BAT (Brave Attention Tokens)? Never heard of it before, but sounds interesting.

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ali spivak • Edited

Grant for the Web is a $100M fund to boost open, fair, and inclusive standards and innovation in Web Monetization.

Web Monetization enables secure, streaming payments to creators & publishers. The API is proposed as a W3C standard based on Interledger, an open protocol suite for sending payments across different ledgers and is not tied to a single company, blockchain, or currency.

Web Monetization is similar in concept to Brave Rewards. Brave Rewards is built on the Basic Attention Token (BAT), an Ethereum based token which was created alongside its home platform, the Brave Browser (the wallet can be funded with a currency or by earning tokens with ad views).

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Alba Silvente Fuentes
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Saugat Rai

Will love to collaborate :)

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James Turner • Edited

I'd love to know more about the server-side of things regarding Web Monetization, currently the site says "Examples on how to verify Web Monetization from the server side will come soon."

I have an idea for something though it requires effectively running a custom payment pointer - at a quick glance, I can't see much detail about that on the Web Monetization site. Also, does that (an idea built on a custom payment pointer) actually fit into the hackathon categories?

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Maya Sharafian

You're correct that server-side verification requires a custom payment pointer right now; it can be quite complex and requires peering into the Interledger network which can be hard for an individual. wouldn't recommend it as a hackathon project as peering into the Interledger network requires setting up business relationships with other Interledger network participants.

As a more developer-friendly alternative, we've been developing STREAM receipts.

STREAM receipts are signed messages that say how much a user has paid to your payment pointer. They can be verified server-side without requiring you to run your own payment pointer and without requiring you to peer your server to the Interledger network.

So far we've implemented STREAM receipts in the STREAM libraries, and the next step is for wallet providers to pull in that new version of the library and expose the receipts functionality.

I'd expect it should be available on at least one wallet provider within a couple of weeks to a month and available on all wallet providers within a month or two.

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James Turner

Thanks for replying! Basically I was thinking of some form of middle-man for the monetization system where a user (who makes the content) can manage it without knowledge of coding.

For example, if they wanted to do profit sharing off a particular page, just knowing the page URL and who they wanted to split it between would be enough. Similarly, if they wanted to donate a particular % to charity or something, they can automagically do that with some changes in an admin system.

While there are JS examples on the Web Monetization site that do a revenue sharing example, to me this is something that makes more sense as a server-side system and I figured "incepting" the actual money through its own custom payment pointer to do the processing on makes the most sense for a real implementation.

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sharafian profile image
Maya Sharafian

Gotcha, that's a cool idea! Implementing a revenue share like that is easier than writing a payment pointer which verifies payments, because it doesn't require you to hook into the Interledger network yourself.

If you want to do revenue sharing server-side you can run a server that redirects to different payment pointers, just like this example on webmonetization.org. The website that wants to use your revsharing service would embed a URL from the revshare service instead of their own payment pointer. Then the user can adjust the revenue sharing parameters on your service without having to update their page every time.

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Aleksandr Hovhannisyan

Careful! These examples hide content on the client side. A clever user could pretend to be web monetized by using the developer console. Examples on how to verify Web Monetization from the server side will come soon.

How soon? :P

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ali spivak

it's been specified in Interledger RFC 39 and included in protocol stream 2.5.0. But it's up to wallets to implement this. Currently we are working on getting wallet adoption which hopefully won't take more than a month or two.

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Gerardo Cárdenas

I am participating, just took a web page that i coded some years before. I explained which functionality only works if the browser supports Web Monetization. But I don´t include code of Web Monetization, do you thing that it will be a problem?

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ali spivak

Let me make sure i understand your question...

You have taken an existing web page & added information about Web Monetization to it, but have not monetized the page (by adding the meta tag).

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Gerardo Cárdenas

I have not added Web Monetization to it, because I don't have a payment pointer. I will use something as example of payment pointer later.

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Bernard Baker

Would anyone like to collaborate? We have two team members 😭

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Sloan, the sloth mascot
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Bernard Baker

I've sent you a collaborator invite via GitHub.

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Bernard Baker

Great!

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Sloan, the sloth mascot
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Bernard Baker

Ok

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Artem Kondratev

After reading about Web Monetization I honestly have to express my, very likely unpopular, opinion.

This is horrible. Honestly. This is 'loot boxes' mechanics brought from the worst of games and buffed to absolute. Not only services will rely on microtransactions that are harder to resist for certain people - they will become a stream, money will flow from you without any sane control of your budget.

Do I have to point out that even now many services make all and every attempt to keep you on their page? Well with WM in play - this will only get worse.

Should I mention governmental 'parent control' problem? The moment this thing becomes popular governments of many countries will start to implement all kinds of regulations that will result in more borders, control etc as a result making the internet less free and open. Net neutrality? Forget it.

This is terrible idea that does not really solve any problem at all.

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☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜ • Edited

Thanks for taking time to relay your thoughts and opinions, Artem. They are all welcome.

We are very early in this journey — and a number of folks from various organizations are involved in the discussion which includes challenging decisions and making this better and better, like any good standards process.

Perhaps you could add your voice to the various discussions starting with the WICG thread.

UPDATE: Also, @adrianhopebailie can likely point to other places for discussion.

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Peter Kim Frank • Edited

Hi @vladodev thanks for the question, we'll clarify in the original post as well.

You must be 13+ to participate in the DEV Hackathon. For the Grant for the Web CFP, the team lead who submits the project must be at least 18 (but you can still participate as part of a team).

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🦄N B🛡 • Edited

The only 2 hackathons I ever did, were both won with monetization/valuestream projects.

I don't have much time, though. If anyone wants off-the-wall-dude-are-you-****ing-with-us-again ideas, though, I'm open for business monetizeness.

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Javyer

Hello! I'm a little bit confused about the Web Monetization API.

When do you pay? How do you add funds?

It's only session based from what I read, does that means that every time I hit reload on a website with monetization I'm paying them more money?

Can I decide which websites I pay or the default configuration is just "pay everyone some money"?

I'm trying to understand how people wouldn't abuse this system if it automatically pays the website with the meta tag.

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Maya Sharafian

Hi Jayver,

The Web Monetization API pays based on time using 'streaming payments'. Rather than sending one large payment when you load the page, Web Monetization works through many tiny micropayments, sent each second that you spend on a web monetized page.

The default configuration is to pay everyone some money, but the amounts are small and based on time so a site can't just siphon off all your funds. The rate that Coil pays, for example, is $0.00001 per second. If a tab is not visible then it won't be paid, to prevent payment from occurring while the user's attention is not on the page.

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Matt Hamilton

If anyone wants to come along and support, chat, and or laugh at my attempts to code node.js then I'll be live streaming the coding of my hackathon entry at 2pm BST today: dev.to/hammertoe/live-coding-my-de...

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Lane Wagner

Why XRP... :(

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cyberdees profile image
☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜

Interledger, the protocol, is agnostic to transfer of value whether fiat or cryptocurrency. End user wallets allow the content creator to decide in what they would like to be remunerated in. Today a few wallets are available as options to creators. More wallets are coming increasing the payment options available.

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Lane Wagner

Thanks for the clarification. Hopefully some BTC wallets get in there soon.

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cyberdees profile image
☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜

With more usage of the standard and protocol — that is indeed the aim.

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cyberdees profile image
☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜

UPDATE: @wagslane

Uphold has just become the latest Interledger (ILP) enabled wallet. This introduces a whole number of Payout and Withdrawal currencies.

More information can be located within the Web Monetization documentation.

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krishna kakade

hello all i didn't so much after reading this
but I get few things we have to create app related to blocking ads or things like buy me coffee
if anyone can elaborate me this hackathon concept that will be helpful thank you

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Gabriel Leonte

Are there any special Coil's redeem code for developers that join this hackathon?

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ali spivak

We will be providing codes for trial memberships to people who submit a project. Full details coming soon!

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wobsoriano profile image
Robert

Hi Ali, messaged you!

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junopaulo

Definitely will contribute to this!

 
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Bernard Baker

Ok.

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Bernard Baker

I'll set up a repo and we'll talk on GitHub.

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Bernard Baker

Sent you an invite.

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Maninder Singh (webD)

What is the team size for this hackathon

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Peter Kim Frank

Hi Maninder, you may work in a team (of any size) but only one person should submit the project. Only one prize will be awarded to each team.

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techread

I would love to try, please share the trial account with me.

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Mario Mercado

Hey! This sounds very interesting. I'm a Jr dev. How can I learn more about this project?

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Stanislav(Stas) Katkov

I maintain a project called FbaMonthly.com it's built with jekyll. Would developing a plugin for jekyll and test driving it on my own project would be a good project for this hackathon?

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Maya Sharafian

That would be a great project! You might want to check out Hugo Web Monetization as an example of another hackathon project that built a web monetization plugin for a static site generator

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Bernard Baker

Would you like to develop something together?

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Sarthak kundra

Hi. I have a doubt if 2 people in a team create a project, will both of them be given the certificate of winning/participation? Also can we use other 3rd party APIs apart from Web Monetization?

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Bernard Baker • Edited

If anyone needs a passwordless login or other resources check out my too good to miss posts.

Really looking forward to building something for this hackathon 🤸

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Judicaël Andriamahandry

Hi
I'm searching for a team :)

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KHALID ISMAIL

Thank you Ben for sharing this with us, I think I will give this a try even though I have never participate in hackathon before