Bilingual

The Antiportfolio: Counter-advice for Aspiring Artists
a day ago
- The pressure to monetize every passion can drain the joy from creative work.
- Separating passion from financial stability can lead to a better balance.
- The value of an experience is not equivalent to its market value.
- Keeping creative work small and unoptimized preserves its magic.
- Hustle culture often leads to burnout and loss of joy.
- Dorm shows thrive because they are free from ROI pressures.
Truth Social will sell Wall Street quicker access to posts
12 days ago
- Truth Social is launching a paid API for Wall Street firms to access real-time posts from Donald Trump and other top accounts, aimed at monetizing market-moving content.
- Trump's posts on Truth Social have previously influenced stock, oil, and cryptocurrency markets, with algorithms using faster data for trading profits.
- This move adds to Trump Media's revenue streams amid criticism of conflicts of interest, as Trump profits from business ventures tied to his presidency.
X402, a static blog monetization excercise
23 days ago
- Cloudflare's Monetization Gateway launch revolutionizes internet monetization by lowering entry barriers and offering precise payment control, potentially making ad-based economies obsolete.
- To monetize a blog or API using x402, three components are needed: a wallet to receive funds, a worker for payment processing (e.g., Cloudflare Workers), and a paywalled resource.
- Implementation involves a middleware that checks payments and discloses prices, with examples using Hono and TypeScript, configured via a wrangler.jsonc file for Cloudflare Workers.
- The paywall returns a 402 status with a PAYMENT-REQUIRED header detailing payment options, which can be integrated into a browser UI using @x402/paywall for user-friendly payments.
- After successful payment via methods like MetaMask, the server validates the signature in the PAYMENT-SIGNATURE header and responds with the content, demonstrating a functional pay-per-use model.
- For production, networks and facilitators are switched from testnets (e.g., eip155:84532) to mainnets (e.g., eip155:8453) using services like PayAI for reliable transaction settlement.
- x402 provides a viable alternative to services like 'Buy Me a Coffee' or ads for monetizing static blogs, requiring minimal compute and being easily integrable, though lacking out-of-the-box solutions for dynamic content embedding.
Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402
a month ago
- Cloudflare announces the Monetization Gateway, enabling customers to charge for assets like web pages, datasets, APIs, or MCP tools.
- It provides a control plane for payment policies and access controls, handling verification and enforcement at the edge, with payments settling in stablecoins via the x402 protocol.
- The web's traditional ad/subscription model is breaking as AI agents become dominant users, driving need for usage-based pricing for requests, tokens, or outcomes.
- Usage-based billing has been difficult historically due to high implementation costs, but stablecoins enable low-fee, sub-second micropayments suitable for agents.
- The Monetization Gateway simplifies usage-based billing by integrating payment validation into requests, offloading metering and settlement from the origin.
- x402 is an open protocol for payments over HTTP, using the 402 status code for payment gating, allowing small, account-less transactions ideal for machine payments.
- Features include charging for specific REST verbs, variable pricing, and intercepting unauthenticated calls, managed via dashboard, API, or Terraform.
- It initially supports stablecoin payments, allowing agents to pay without signup or API keys, and can integrate with identity verification like Web Bot Auth.
- The goal is an agent-first Internet where software pays for resources automatically, monetizing currently free or underpriced API calls and tool invocations.
- A waitlist is open for Cloudflare customers to join early access for monetizing web assets with usage-based pricing.

monetization

The Antiportfolio: Counter-advice for Aspiring Artists

Truth Social will sell Wall Street quicker access to posts

X402, a static blog monetization excercise

Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402