You just experienced a simulated "paywall fraud"
attack.
You paid USDC on Sepolia testnet (it's not real money) to
access premium content, and did not receive the content you were expecting.
This is a problem because it will discourage people from trusting
x402
micropayments or make client implementations only trust a limited
number of
facilitators.
Individual facilitators will need to implement their own fraud prevention
solutions to protect users from fraud. As facilitators compete to offer the
most secure solutions, the most effective anti-fraud facilitators will gain
dominant market positions, forming a natural centralization of the x402
protocol. This centralization will grant a few facilitators the
majority of market share. Over time, these select few facilitators will be
able to determine the direction of the protocol and limit access for
others. This centralization has already started to happen with the
currently registered
facilitators forming a Pareto distribution of
supported facilitators.
Preventing paywall fraud should be solved in a standardized way:
View x402 Issue #508
All transactions are published onchain publicly by default.
Your wallet address and x402 payments to registered recipients can be
tracked. When you pay for content, your wallet address becomes linked to
that content through public transaction data visible on blockchain
explorers. For example, you can view all payments for this page on the
Base Sepolia Explorer.
Onchain transactions linked to a wallet address can be used to build economic profiles based on content the owner is willing to pay for. Now everyone can see that edgy site you visited, not just Google. Additionally, scammers can identify visitors to known scam sites as potential targets and airdrop advertisement NFTs to their wallet to trick them into visiting more scam sites.
We need to solve this problem by adding privacy by default to the x402 payment protocol:
View x402 Issue #406You wanted premium video content... here it is: