webmonetization VS tigerbeetle

From https://webmonetization.org/ :

> Web Monetization provides an open, native, efficient, and automatic way to compensate creators, pay for content, and support crucial web infrastructure.

> Why Now?: Until recently, there hasn't been an open, neutral and cost-efficient protocol for transferring money. Interledger provides a simple, interoperable, and currency-agnostic method for the transfer of small amounts of money.

> Web Monetization is being proposed as a W3C standard at the Web Platform Incubator Community Group.

W3C Interledger Protocol works with any type of ledger.

From "Anatomy of an ACH transaction" (2023)

Coil tried to do that for a couple of years.

https://www.coil.com/

There's even a micro payments api in the works.

https://webmonetization.org/

W3C Web Monetization: https://webmonetization.org/ :

> The Web Monetization API allows websites to automatically and passively receive payments from Web Monetization-enabled visitors.

From https://interledger.org/faq/ :

> Web Monetization is being proposed as a W3C standard. Using the Interledger Protocol, the Web Monetization proposed standard aims to make it easier for web creators to generate income from their work without relying on advertising, site-by-site subscriptions or tracking models.

Interledger was contributed to W3C and has undergone significant major revision. FWIU, W3C Interledger Protocol is a W3C spec but by producing IETF-style numbered RFCs, their process differs slightyl from the W3C WG Working Group model (with a page, a mailing list; and one or more git Repositories with Issues: github,com/orgname, github,com/orgname/readme, github,com/orgname/orgname.github.io ).

It's been a couple years since Dev.to hosted the Grant for the Web hackathon, a month-long sprint to develop innovative projects with Web Monetization. Web Monetization is a proposed JavaScript API that allows browsers to create payment streams directly to websites, allowing for micropayments and unlocking exclusive content on a pay-per-use basis. It's still being incubated at the Web Incubator Community Group, but it's an active project and an exciting technology.

To support the open content creators there could be a sister site where authors can post or list the link to their openly-licensed content listed with donations or web monetization to give to Wiki. I put an offer on the Reward board in line with Safe Harbor#2_important_topics) paid-article policies. The upcoming grants of the 2030 Movement Strategy go toward sustainability, accessibility, and bridging content gaps. There are risks in introducing monetization. I see it as worthwhile to experiment with as there might be extensive potential benefits. What are your thoughts?

Web monetization - People can help creators by just reading their content.

To enable more developers to build open, transparent, and impactful payment systems for the world, opportunities for rapid prototyping and an enabling environment for rapid prototyping are key. That is why Coil will be a many Hackathons this year. In partnership with Major League Hacking (MLH), Coil will support developers to brainstorm and build payment solutions that connect existing and future rails so that no one is left behind, regardless of their location. Developers participating at 30+ MLH Weekend Hackathons will have an opportunity to build with Interledger, Rafiki, and Web Monetization. They will also get mentorship from developers at Coil, Interledger, and the broader Interledger, Web Monetization, and Grant for the Web communities.

Check https://webmonetization.org that's actually a perfectly fine solution. You like something and want to support people who work hard to make it? Why not pay them? Doesn't sound crazy to me.

Indeed!

I was so glad to see you cite not only the Rebello paper but also Protocol-Aware Recovery for Consensus-Based Storage. When I read your first comment, I was about to reply to mention PAR, and then saw you had saved me the trouble!

UW-Madison are truly the vanguard where consensus hits the disk.

We implemented Protocol-Aware Recovery for TigerBeetle [1], and I did a talk recently at the Recurse Center diving into PAR, talking about the intersection of global consensus protocol and local storage engine. It's called Let's Remix Distributed Database Design! [2] and owes the big ideas to UW-Madison.

[1] https://github.com/coilhq/tigerbeetle

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNmZZLant9o

> It sounds like payments might be part of the larger concept of declarative programming (DP)

Yes, exactly! The idea with TigerBeetle's state machine [1] is to expose double-entry accounting as higher level financial primitives, so that developers can think in terms of declaring transfers from one account to another. The business logic behind the scenes is detailed, but the interfaces and data structures are simple.

[1] https://github.com/coilhq/tigerbeetle/blob/main/src/state_ma...

> Maybe TigerBeetle could be generalized to support any multi-step distributed process?

That's part of the plan, that the distributed database framework of TigerBeetle can be used as a ”distributed Iron Man suit” to support any kind of state machine.

It's a pleasure. Let me know if you have any more questions about TigerBeetle. Our design doc is also here: https://github.com/coilhq/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/DESIGN....

Surprisingly, some of the most powerful distributed systems algorithms or tools are actually deterministic. They're powerful because they can "load the dice" and so make the distributed system more intuitive for humans to reason about, more resilient to real world network faults, and do all this with more performance.

For example, Barbara Liskov and James Cowling's deterministic view change [1], which isn't plagued by the latency issues of RAFT's randomized dueling leader problem. Viewstamped Replication Revisited's deterministic view change can react to a failed primary much quicker than RAFT (heartbeat timeouts don't require randomized "padding" as they do in RAFT), commence the leader election, and also ensure that the leader election succeeds without a split vote.

Determinism makes all that possible.

Deterministic testing [2][3] is also your best friend when it comes to testing distributed systems.

[1] I did a talk on VSR, including the benefits of the view change — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wii1LX_ltIs

[2] FoundationDB are pioneers of deterministic testing — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJb8A6h9jQQ

[3] TigerBeetle's deterministic simulation tests — https://github.com/coilhq/tigerbeetle#simulation-tests

This is the chasm problem, where people don't use a technology because people aren't using that technology, thus the technology has difficulty gaining adoption. I did see that Zig does have it's own killer app and startup that's using Zig: TigerBeattle.

Control flow statements should always be on their own lines, then it's easy to find all of them by visually scanning top-down, without needing to look all the way down each line.

[1]: https://github.com/coilhq/tigerbeetle/blob/main/src/vsr/repl...

> In hindsight, data logic should be in the database itself.

This is the reason we are creating TigerBeetle [1] at Coil, as an open source distributed financial accounting database, with the double entry logic and financial invariants enforced through financial primitives within the database itself.

This is all the more critical for financial data, because raw data consistency is not enough for financial transactions, you also need financial consistency, not to mention immutability.

The performance of doing it this way is also easier. For example, around a million financial transactions per second on commodity hardware, with p100 latency around 10-20ms.

[1] https://github.com/coilhq/tigerbeetle

You probably already know this — because we’ve mentioned it a few times — but Coil champions and supports open-source projects and is privacy-first, by default. Over the years, Developer Relations at Coil has championed and sponsored teams that write Open Web Documentations and projects that empower open-source developers to get paid. Coil has also incubated many open-source projects like Tigerbeetle and Rafiki.

[6] Partial logical sector reads/writes even when using O_DIRECT — https://github.com/coilhq/tigerbeetle/blob/main/src/storage....