About this site

The Gazette is a working demo of subscriptions paid in Monero. There is no card form and no email signup. You pick a tier, the site gives you a payment code, and you paste that code into the Monerosubs wallet. From then on the wallet pays each cycle by itself, from your side. This site watches the chain with a view-only wallet, sees the payment, and unlocks the tier. When the payments stop, access lapses after a grace period.

The private link you get when you subscribe is the subscription and the login. There is no account to create and nothing to recover it from, so bookmark it.

Everything here runs on Monero's stagenet. The XMR is test money with no value. That is deliberate: it lets you try the whole loop, including letting a subscription lapse, without spending anything.

How it is built

Nothing here is exotic, and a publisher could put the same thing together for their own site:

• Ghost (stock, in Docker) is the publication: posts, paid tiers, the paywall and member login are all Ghost's own features. No Stripe is connected.
• A small connector (a few hundred lines of Python) sits beside it. It hands out subscription codes, keeps one subaddress per subscription, and talks to Ghost's Admin API to grant or revoke a tier.
• monero-wallet-rpc with a view-only wallet watches the chain for incoming payments. The server never holds a spend key, so there is nothing on it worth stealing.
• The subscriber's wallet does the paying. The subscription code is a standard monero-request, and the Monerosubs wallet sends each cycle's payment on schedule from the subscriber's own device.
• Login without email. Ghost normally has no passwords: you type your email address, Ghost sends a one-time sign-in link, and you click it. That means collecting an address from every subscriber and running a mail provider to deliver the links. We decided not to add anything that is not strictly necessary, so this site asks for nothing. Ghost still sends its link, but to a mail catcher on the same server that nothing can read from outside. When you press Log in on your private link, the connector picks the link up from there and sends your browser to it. Ghost is untouched; it just never gets a real address.

Caddy and Cloudflare sit in front, on a small VPS shared with other sites.

The editor is Desmond Ledger, who intends to keep checking.