alt Hacker News> I have money and I have a URL, how do I send money to the publisher of that URL?
This question could easily be “I have money and I have a person’s name and address, how do I send money to them?”
The only way to do this consistently would be to mail them physical cash, since there’s no way to consistently send money electronically across the world (and you’d have a currency conversion problem too - if someone mailed me US$0.23, it’s not worth exchanging it).
Building micropayments infrastructure requires building broader financial infrastructure, not just adding a meta tag. This can use existing infrastructure to some extent, but it’s a pretty big challenge.
(For example, in Australia, you can send someone money if you have their email address (via PayID), so you could bootstrap that part - minus the international part.)
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> since there’s no way to consistently send money electronically across the world
In theory there'd be SWIFT, but that's too slow and expensive.
The EU has the SEPA, but few other countries actually care about joining or replicating that success.
> “I have money and I have a person’s name and address, how do I send money to them?”
Send a cheque?
Yeah but we're in the digital age and trying to make things better than they were
I think the (not clearly stated) intention is for an automated way to detect the pubisher's explicitly preferred method of compensation. Which is a sensible request, since it can allow a browser button/extension that sends you there with the click of a button, rather than having to search the page (or a video) for a mention of it.
Though in my experience, publishers and creators make it pretty easy to find that information, so the use of this tech would be very niche.