7 ms·

I am still waiting for a good micropayments platform to allow me to support arbitrary web sites with relatively low-friction (and high-privacy) small payments t

by bhauer 8y ago

I am still waiting for a good micropayments platform to allow me to support arbitrary web sites with relatively low-friction (and high-privacy) small payments to consume their content. I would happily pay $0.25 or thereabouts to read articles on some of the sites I consider to be good content creators. That said, I have somewhat high expectations. E.g., I would hope that such a platform doesn't take too large a cut (e.g., Apple app-store sized cut) because that's offensive to both readers and creators.

crowbahr 8y ago
It's a great use-case for Cryptocurrencies: low transaction fees to send micro-amounts of goods across the network. That seems like part of what Brave is trying to do with the BAT: Use BAT split among websites based on the amount of time you spend on each site. I'd rather see a self contained library that allows websites to easily insert a button which lets you tip 0.02c or whatever to them with a single click. No idea what you'd need to do to create something like that, but it seems like a really compelling way to get people to spend on sites they like. A tiny amount of pennies sent via crypto with the press of a single button could be a sizable stream when you've got scale to it.
- noxToken 8y ago
  Wouldn't the volatility of cryptocurrency be a reason that companies wouldn't want this as a primary method? Don't get me wrong, the value of USD, GBP, or YEN can rise and fall relatively quickly. The conversion rate of GBP to USD dropped from about 1.40 GBP/USD to 1.20 GBP/USD in the span of a year. But cryptocurrencies can cause devastating losses. BTC dropped nearly 30% from Dec 2017 to late Jan 2018, and it has been on the decline ever since. It seems that the only way for a business to confidently convert BTC into the 0.25 USD would be to do nightly-ish transactions. I'm familiar but not well versed in BTC operations. I don't know how much overhead (fees) would go into nightly transactions, and how much the fees would rise with the volume of each transaction.
  - thisisweirdok 8y ago
    >Wouldn't the volatility of cryptocurrency be a reason that companies wouldn't want this as a primary method? Correct. There are so many cryptocurrencies out there, and scams are so widely perpetrated that it's absolutely insane to keep any significant amount of money in it. In the case of MTGOX it's like the world's largest bank just blinked out of existence. A company could be insolvent overnight. At least most major governments have incentive to keep their shit together for fear of a societal collapse.
    - chrisco255 8y ago
      Mt. Gox was a Magic: The Gathering trading platform that accidentally ended up being "the largest bank in crypto". So Mt. Gox shares more in common with early, early banks, of which many did fail. At any rate, the current dominant examples like Coinbase do not seem to share the same problems as Mt. Gox and having watched a security presentation by one of their executives, I believe they have great practices to prevent hacks.
      - thisisweirdok 8y ago
        Sure, but are they backed by the FDIC or anything equivalent? (no) What happens if they are compromised? (your money is gone forever).
        chrisco255 8y ago
        Actually yeah Coinbase is an FDIC insured bank. Any USD you have on there is insured.
  - crowbahr 8y ago
    Part of why the overhead doesn't matter here is because bitcoin wouldn't be used: It'd be some other crypto, like BAT (which is what Brave uses). The goal would be to make this a ubiquitous system (which is what Brave is trying) where users would have a wallet of BAT where each "coin" represents a small easy to exchange tip. Users can buy BAT wherever, recharge their wallet and tip micro amounts to websites. Brave currently just has a BAT wallet with recharging that doles out a percentage of each token to whatever websites you visited based on amount of time spent there. If the system is ubiquitous enough, the volatility will go down as more people are seeking to purchase the coins. The coins will have a limited supply which is subject to a minimal amount of inflation as defined by the group which works on it.
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  In fact it's not a good use-case for Cryptocurrencies because as it stands today, it takes approximately 10 minutes to resolve a transaction in Bitcoin. You can explain this problem away with appeals to floating networks that ride on top of bitcoin, eth, like lightning etc...however it's unclear why those would be any better than a lower cost ACH or other debit processing system.
  - humbledrone 8y ago
    Check out IOTA. In theory (and so far in practice) it solves the problems you describe. It does not yet have as solid a theoretical foundation as blockchain currencies, though, so there's higher risk that it turns out to have some flaw that nobody's seen yet.
    - AndrewKemendo 8y ago
      Or just work out some hack around the existing transaction fee systems.
  - crowbahr 8y ago
    It's not a transaction though, it's a donation. Time to resolve is nothing here, it's fire and forget. On top of that ACH or other systems require you to put in real banking information rather than having it be a separate wallet you use to pay. It allows a more complete separation from payment processors.
  - chrisco255 8y ago
    I tire of saying this in response to people who believe that credit and debit cards are "instant" but they're not. They take up to a day or two to process and clear and for money to actually change hands. The only thing that's instant is the check to see if you have the funds to cover the transaction. In this case even BTC's on-chain processing of 10 minutes is pretty darn fast. As you said, other crypto solutions including Lightning Network, ETH, etc are faster and will be able to scale to orders of magnitude more transactions in the near future.
  - lavezzi 8y ago
subpixel 8y ago
The best form of payments ever to support journalism was classified ads. They brought in tons of cash and they were shunted to their own section of the publication so they were not obtrusive. Also, and this cannot be overstated, they were often fun.
seem_2211 8y ago
Completely disagree. Having to make a purchase decision is stressful and a cognitive nuisance. I'd much rather pay $10 a month for Netflix and not think about it, than $.20 to watch an episode.
- rchaud 8y ago
  What happens when Netflix no longer carries your favourite show, and now you're paying $X for a service you use less and less?
  - austhrow743 8y ago
    You eventually quit. That's only one purchase decision compared to many. Even if you evaluate the decision every time a show you like gets pulled, that's still less financial decision making than paying per piece of content.
- noobiemcfoob 8y ago
  Netflix would prefer you do this, too. In subscription models, you are almost guaranteed to be paying more than you're using. Only when a service is first starting and trying to attract subscribers is it likely you are paying less than you use.
  - exolymph 8y ago
    Netflix mainly has fixed costs from licenses. The marginal cost of delivering another video to a subscriber is negligible. They want you to keep watching and stay engaged.
  - 1123581321 8y ago
    How do you measure the value or cost of how much someone uses for s product like Netflix? Compared to equivalent iTunes purchases, a Netflix subscription is inexpensive. If you are referring to the bandwidth, the cost is close to zero anywhere.
    - 8y ago
athenot 8y ago
Then you might be interested in Brave (brave.com). Their cut is 5%. I really like the concept but I don't use it because it doesn't support the mac KeyChain.
nemothekid 8y ago
I'm not optimistic that this platform will ever exist in the West. Micropayments is effectively blocked by the credit card industry with their high fees and a widely used micropayments platform would essentially disrupt the credit card industry - why would anyone pay Visa 1.9% if the new platform was sending payments for a fraction of a cent? And any player large enough (e.g. Apple) to deploy such a platform would rather not piss off Visa. In China, where credit cards never existed, they already have a micropayments infrastructure. Sending payments is massively cheaper there and some businesses there, such as Podcasts are way more successful due to this model. Some podcasting subscriptions are sold for 1 yuan (15 cents)[1]. As long as Visa/Mastercard exists, I don't think we will see this come to the US. I wouldn't hold out for crypto either - it's not a technical problem. The technology has existed to make this reality for years. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-show-willingness-to-pay-for-clicks-1483555104 https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-show-willingness-to-pay...
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  What's stopping an online bank from setting up their own system?
  - rchaud 8y ago
    Comparative advantage. The amount banks could earn on their traditional products and services dwarfs whatever pennies they'd scrounge up by creating a B2C Patreon replacement.
- setr 8y ago
  I never understood credit card fees interaction with small transactions (eg shops with $10 min); if its a perfentage fee, what does it matter how small the individual transaction is? Total revenue is hit by it all the same A billion from micropayments and a billion from one payment should be equivalent..?
  - Bartweiss 8y ago
    You're right about the general case; a restaurant running two $50 payments or one $100 payment usually won't see any difference. But a thousand $1 micropayments produce more overhead (and more risk) than one $1000 payment, so below some threshold it's not worth handling them. As a result, most card processors have rules to either block that payment pattern or raise costs on it. Common approaches include: - Caps on monthly transaction counts - Caps on monthly payment amounts, with usage monthly fees - Flat costs added to percentage fees - Percentage fees with a minimum charge Similarly businesses which know they'll see numerous small payments mostly just charge enormously high fees. The Apple Store and Google Play both take 30% transaction costs, and I suspect they pay their processors noticeably more than the common ~%2 rate despite their size.
rchaud 8y ago
Sometimes brute force is what's required to get people to cough up their payment details. iTunes had people paying $1 to buy individual, DRM-ridden (since removed) tracks at a time when Limewire and BitTorrent were popular. I believe it was partially the UX that got people spending. For example, ITunes won't grab album art for the tracks in your library by default. You'll have to have an iTunes account with a registered CC number. Retrieving the art is free, but it can't happen without those payment details. I dislike looking at collections that don't have the art displayed, so I put in my CC. So now, when you're exploring the interface and come across some new music/movies you're interested in, the friction involved in purchasing is near-zero; point, click, confirm the purchase and it's yours. At some point, someone will create a CMS plugin of some kind that adds a "purchase this article for $0.50" banner and handles the payment processing and fees. The challenge will be to incentivize users to put their details in.

by bhauer 8y ago

crowbahr 8y ago

It's a great use-case for Cryptocurrencies: low transaction fees to send micro-amounts of goods across the network. That seems like part of what Brave is trying to do with the BAT: Use BAT split among websites based on the amount of time you spend on each site. I'd rather see a self contained library that allows websites to easily insert a button which lets you tip 0.02c or whatever to them with a single click. No idea what you'd need to do to create something like that, but it seems like a really compelling way to get people to spend on sites they like. A tiny amount of pennies sent via crypto with the press of a single button could be a sizable stream when you've got scale to it.

noxToken 8y ago
Wouldn't the volatility of cryptocurrency be a reason that companies wouldn't want this as a primary method? Don't get me wrong, the value of USD, GBP, or YEN can rise and fall relatively quickly. The conversion rate of GBP to USD dropped from about 1.40 GBP/USD to 1.20 GBP/USD in the span of a year. But cryptocurrencies can cause devastating losses. BTC dropped nearly 30% from Dec 2017 to late Jan 2018, and it has been on the decline ever since. It seems that the only way for a business to confidently convert BTC into the 0.25 USD would be to do nightly-ish transactions. I'm familiar but not well versed in BTC operations. I don't know how much overhead (fees) would go into nightly transactions, and how much the fees would rise with the volume of each transaction.
- thisisweirdok 8y ago
  >Wouldn't the volatility of cryptocurrency be a reason that companies wouldn't want this as a primary method? Correct. There are so many cryptocurrencies out there, and scams are so widely perpetrated that it's absolutely insane to keep any significant amount of money in it. In the case of MTGOX it's like the world's largest bank just blinked out of existence. A company could be insolvent overnight. At least most major governments have incentive to keep their shit together for fear of a societal collapse.
  - chrisco255 8y ago
    Mt. Gox was a Magic: The Gathering trading platform that accidentally ended up being "the largest bank in crypto". So Mt. Gox shares more in common with early, early banks, of which many did fail. At any rate, the current dominant examples like Coinbase do not seem to share the same problems as Mt. Gox and having watched a security presentation by one of their executives, I believe they have great practices to prevent hacks.
    - thisisweirdok 8y ago
      Sure, but are they backed by the FDIC or anything equivalent? (no) What happens if they are compromised? (your money is gone forever).
      - chrisco255 8y ago
        Actually yeah Coinbase is an FDIC insured bank. Any USD you have on there is insured.
- crowbahr 8y ago
  Part of why the overhead doesn't matter here is because bitcoin wouldn't be used: It'd be some other crypto, like BAT (which is what Brave uses). The goal would be to make this a ubiquitous system (which is what Brave is trying) where users would have a wallet of BAT where each "coin" represents a small easy to exchange tip. Users can buy BAT wherever, recharge their wallet and tip micro amounts to websites. Brave currently just has a BAT wallet with recharging that doles out a percentage of each token to whatever websites you visited based on amount of time spent there. If the system is ubiquitous enough, the volatility will go down as more people are seeking to purchase the coins. The coins will have a limited supply which is subject to a minimal amount of inflation as defined by the group which works on it.
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
In fact it's not a good use-case for Cryptocurrencies because as it stands today, it takes approximately 10 minutes to resolve a transaction in Bitcoin. You can explain this problem away with appeals to floating networks that ride on top of bitcoin, eth, like lightning etc...however it's unclear why those would be any better than a lower cost ACH or other debit processing system.
- humbledrone 8y ago
  Check out IOTA. In theory (and so far in practice) it solves the problems you describe. It does not yet have as solid a theoretical foundation as blockchain currencies, though, so there's higher risk that it turns out to have some flaw that nobody's seen yet.
  - AndrewKemendo 8y ago
    Or just work out some hack around the existing transaction fee systems.
- crowbahr 8y ago
  It's not a transaction though, it's a donation. Time to resolve is nothing here, it's fire and forget. On top of that ACH or other systems require you to put in real banking information rather than having it be a separate wallet you use to pay. It allows a more complete separation from payment processors.
- chrisco255 8y ago
  I tire of saying this in response to people who believe that credit and debit cards are "instant" but they're not. They take up to a day or two to process and clear and for money to actually change hands. The only thing that's instant is the check to see if you have the funds to cover the transaction. In this case even BTC's on-chain processing of 10 minutes is pretty darn fast. As you said, other crypto solutions including Lightning Network, ETH, etc are faster and will be able to scale to orders of magnitude more transactions in the near future.
- lavezzi 8y ago

subpixel 8y ago

The best form of payments ever to support journalism was classified ads. They brought in tons of cash and they were shunted to their own section of the publication so they were not obtrusive. Also, and this cannot be overstated, they were often fun.

seem_2211 8y ago

Completely disagree. Having to make a purchase decision is stressful and a cognitive nuisance. I'd much rather pay $10 a month for Netflix and not think about it, than $.20 to watch an episode.

rchaud 8y ago
What happens when Netflix no longer carries your favourite show, and now you're paying $X for a service you use less and less?
- austhrow743 8y ago
  You eventually quit. That's only one purchase decision compared to many. Even if you evaluate the decision every time a show you like gets pulled, that's still less financial decision making than paying per piece of content.
noobiemcfoob 8y ago
Netflix would prefer you do this, too. In subscription models, you are almost guaranteed to be paying more than you're using. Only when a service is first starting and trying to attract subscribers is it likely you are paying less than you use.
- exolymph 8y ago
  Netflix mainly has fixed costs from licenses. The marginal cost of delivering another video to a subscriber is negligible. They want you to keep watching and stay engaged.
- 1123581321 8y ago
  How do you measure the value or cost of how much someone uses for s product like Netflix? Compared to equivalent iTunes purchases, a Netflix subscription is inexpensive. If you are referring to the bandwidth, the cost is close to zero anywhere.
  - 8y ago

athenot 8y ago

Then you might be interested in Brave (brave.com). Their cut is 5%. I really like the concept but I don't use it because it doesn't support the mac KeyChain.

nemothekid 8y ago

I'm not optimistic that this platform will ever exist in the West. Micropayments is effectively blocked by the credit card industry with their high fees and a widely used micropayments platform would essentially disrupt the credit card industry - why would anyone pay Visa 1.9% if the new platform was sending payments for a fraction of a cent? And any player large enough (e.g. Apple) to deploy such a platform would rather not piss off Visa. In China, where credit cards never existed, they already have a micropayments infrastructure. Sending payments is massively cheaper there and some businesses there, such as Podcasts are way more successful due to this model. Some podcasting subscriptions are sold for 1 yuan (15 cents)[1]. As long as Visa/Mastercard exists, I don't think we will see this come to the US. I wouldn't hold out for crypto either - it's not a technical problem. The technology has existed to make this reality for years. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-show-willingness-to-pay-for-clicks-1483555104 https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-show-willingness-to-pay...

AndrewKemendo 8y ago
What's stopping an online bank from setting up their own system?
- rchaud 8y ago
  Comparative advantage. The amount banks could earn on their traditional products and services dwarfs whatever pennies they'd scrounge up by creating a B2C Patreon replacement.
setr 8y ago
I never understood credit card fees interaction with small transactions (eg shops with $10 min); if its a perfentage fee, what does it matter how small the individual transaction is? Total revenue is hit by it all the same A billion from micropayments and a billion from one payment should be equivalent..?
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  You're right about the general case; a restaurant running two $50 payments or one $100 payment usually won't see any difference. But a thousand $1 micropayments produce more overhead (and more risk) than one $1000 payment, so below some threshold it's not worth handling them. As a result, most card processors have rules to either block that payment pattern or raise costs on it. Common approaches include: - Caps on monthly transaction counts - Caps on monthly payment amounts, with usage monthly fees - Flat costs added to percentage fees - Percentage fees with a minimum charge Similarly businesses which know they'll see numerous small payments mostly just charge enormously high fees. The Apple Store and Google Play both take 30% transaction costs, and I suspect they pay their processors noticeably more than the common ~%2 rate despite their size.

rchaud 8y ago

Sometimes brute force is what's required to get people to cough up their payment details. iTunes had people paying $1 to buy individual, DRM-ridden (since removed) tracks at a time when Limewire and BitTorrent were popular. I believe it was partially the UX that got people spending. For example, ITunes won't grab album art for the tracks in your library by default. You'll have to have an iTunes account with a registered CC number. Retrieving the art is free, but it can't happen without those payment details. I dislike looking at collections that don't have the art displayed, so I put in my CC. So now, when you're exploring the interface and come across some new music/movies you're interested in, the friction involved in purchasing is near-zero; point, click, confirm the purchase and it's yours. At some point, someone will create a CMS plugin of some kind that adds a "purchase this article for $0.50" banner and handles the payment processing and fees. The challenge will be to incentivize users to put their details in.