What interesting use cases have people come across for the L402 payment protocol that are actually used in production?
244 sats \ 1 reply \ @MerryOscar OP 11 Aug
I found this list of projects - https://github.com/Fewsats/awesome-L402
Still wondering if it's used in any significant volume in production though.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fewsats 11 Aug
Loop would probably be the one with the biggest volume but it is not "fully" leveraging the protocol features.
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167 sats \ 1 reply \ @ajonas 11 Aug
https://chat.bitcoinsearch.xyz/ uses it. I’m not aware of many others that have implemented it.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fewsats 11 Aug
Added to awesome-L402!
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882 sats \ 6 replies \ @justin_shocknet 11 Aug
I think it's a meme more than it's actually useful
For those that don't know, 402 is an HTTP status code for 'payment required' that's ancient but has never really been used because we've never had internet native money
Lightning Lab's meme'd it into a thing using their macaroon authentication for lnd (and a separate reverse proxy for for the edge)
It would seem obvious with Lightning as internet native payments to finally hermit crab itself into that old http status code... but I think it's an antiquated idea.
Anything interactive is using websockets at this point, not straight http. Even if it did use straight http, you're likely still dealing with another microservice to deliver whatever the purchase authenticated... is a re-arch of that worthwhile just to use these macaroons when you're probably achieving the same thing with a webhook/jwt etc?
Not to mention the clients, there's no native client for it in any browser or anything, so you're going to emulate a websocket in javascript in your front end anyway.
It's just not as exciting as people want it to be... Native internet payments are exciting, not http status codes...
Go unlock a video at Lightning.Video and tell me how http and macaroons would make that better for anyone?
This isn't even getting into the rabbit hole of Nostr static payment codes (soon:tm)
Am I wrong Jordi? @fewsats
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27 sats \ 2 replies \ @031ef7d322 11 Aug
You mention Lightning Labs and LND, but for completeness and to mention real production use cases:
Their L402 proxy, Aperture, has been used in front of their Loop and Pool services for years. The client for each of those managed the service-specific macaroons.
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32 sats \ 1 reply \ @justin_shocknet 11 Aug
Didn't know they used it in loop but that makes sense as that also has its own client in litd
Ironically that's not even a web service 🤣
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27 sats \ 0 replies \ @031ef7d322 11 Aug
Yeah it’s not built into any general web clients to my knowledge, so you need a custom client, but it has been used in production since 2020.
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563 sats \ 1 reply \ @fewsats 11 Aug
No no, we are serious! Check out https://L402.org
The answer is NO and that's why we are not seeing it happen.
BIG chicken and egg problem. The only way around seems to be to actually focus on a niche and let people know "this is our official client but you can build your own". Data applications (a Bloomberg like terminal that can add third party sources with a standard protocol for data, visualizations and payments) may be the killer app to start growing the ecosystem... but it still remains be seen.
You are a bit off here though. You are thinking "people who want to consume my videos can go to my platform and watch them". If you paywall them using the L402 standard, people in MY PAGE (or any other) can watch your videos while you get paid.
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263 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 11 Aug
Yea protocolization is definitely better than not... but this is where nostr (sockets) are going too...
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17 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 11 Aug
Thank you for clarifying. I had no idea what he was referring to.
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785 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 11 Aug
I know @bumi and @Alby have done a lot of work with it. @cascdr uses it.
Today at least, it seems most useful if you expect 3rd parties want programmatic access to a paywalled http resource or anticipate consumers will access the resource in a context that's L402-aware. While it still makes sense, it makes a little less sense where the application has accounts and other forms of authentication afaict.
For our paid stuff when it's paid non-custodially, we have a bespoke flow through graphql. We could use L402 for these but I prefer to build initial things to meet UX requirements rather than interoperability ones, and good UX demands a large degree of awareness/statefulness. I can imagine us moving to using L402 when we understand everything we'll accomplish with payments and want a more generic abstraction.
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241 sats \ 0 replies \ @cascdr 11 Aug
Technically we do not use L402 but we use something very akin to it in terms of spirit. Our issue has been that it can be a bit bloated for our requirements. Like @k00b we are focused on the UX first and most likely will cut over once adoption/interoperability/maturity considerations are there.
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51 sats \ 1 reply \ @MerryOscar OP 11 Aug
Interesting - would be really curious about the architecture of Stacker News non-custodial payment flow. Is it documented anywhere?
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361 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 11 Aug
It might be a bit in the weeds, but here's the latest: https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/blob/not-custodial-zaps-beta/api/paidAction/README.md
The graphql mutations return these types which contain invoices, payment state, and the results of the paywalled mutations.
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45 sats \ 0 replies \ @IamSINGLE 11 Aug
These are what I found while searching. I don't know anything by myself. I'm not a dev.
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44 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB 11 Aug
I don’t know of A single one
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fewsats 11 Aug
The L402 payment protocol has been in production use for several years at Lightning Labs.
At Fewsats, we've explored various applications of L402 like wrapping storage/compute as a service. We've found that one of the most promising areas for L402 is in providing Data APIs though.
I think the protocol shows particular promise for AI applications, especially in agent environments but it's worth noting that we're still in the early stages of exploring these use cases.
Long story short, I would say that while L402 is production-ready, there hasn't yet been a "killer app" built on it.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheMorningStar 11 Aug
@niftynei's video. Have you watched it?
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