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There's a very simple reason for this: Payment is complicated and adds overhead. Particularly payment that works for everyone internationally. Every form of pa
by hannob 7y ago
There's a very simple reason for this: Payment is complicated and adds overhead. Particularly payment that works for everyone internationally.
Every form of payment, no matter in which direction, needs to provide enough benefit to justify the costs of the complexity added by it.
- tzone 7y agoThis. If international micro payments, with close to zero transaction fees, really were an option, lot more things would have variable pricing or payouts.
- lalaland1125 7y agoI just also want to note that people shouldn't ignore the psychological cost of paying. Making a decision on whether or not to spend money requires mental effort that doesn't scale down well with price.
- kccqzy 7y agoCorrect. I once pointed out to my friends who earns a five-digit salary every month (by no means impressive in the Bay Area) that he spent 20 minutes agonizing over a $2 payment. Before I pointed it out he didn't even realize it was irrational.
- lonelappde 7y agoSpending is a repeated game. If you don't agonize, you have to pick either $0 or $2 *N for unknown N.
- e_y_ 7y agoAlso frugal habits learned from agonizing over $100 and $10,000 spending sometimes trickle down to those $2 decisions. It becomes an instinct even if it doesn't make sense.
- onetimemanytime 7y agoyou donate $1 Million but get killed when a robber demands your wallet with $8 in it, cause you don't want to let go. It's not the money,
- elchin 7y agoExactly. Every payment has a transaction cost.
- crazygringo 7y agoAnd not just overhead for the company, but for the consumer too. Whether it's actual time spent signing up, putting in my credit card data, updating expired cards, etc. Or linking my account/PayPal/Venmo to receive tiny transactions. Or just the friction of "do I really want to pay $0.05 for this?" And I just don't want to make a choice, so I close the tab. I know a lot of people dream about microtransactions changing everything... but even if they work flawlessly technically, I just don't want the mental overhead of making 20 tiny economic decisions every time I use the internet. Ugh.
- narag 7y agoOr just the friction of "do I really want to pay $0.05 for this?" LOL, that's so obvious in retrospect: if something costs so little, it's because you probably don't need it. Minor annoyances, even the mere decision, and you won't bother.
- lonelappde 7y agoThe economy would collapse if people only bought what they needed
- zaptidizap 7y agoNot if people could aford what they need.
- konschubert 7y agono.
- ben0x539 7y agoProbably only the parts of the economy that we don't need
- jodrellblank 7y agoThey don’t dream of micro transactions where you make micro decisions to approve it, they dream of it like a direct debit leech where the amount they drip out is micro enough that you won’t bother taking the decision to stop it - like Amazon Prime, gym membership, wine magazine tasters, book club, whatever you subscribed to but forget about.
- tialaramex 7y agoThis is why Let's Encrypt is zero cost by the way. I'm certain Hanno knows that, but for everybody else: The purpose of ISRG (the not-for-profit which runs Let's Encrypt) is to drive automated issuance for Web PKI certificates. Nothing about this directly means they should be free - surely a not-for-profit could deliver this as an at-cost service, so why zero cost when that's not a core goal? Machines don't have wallets. If they charge even 1¢ for a Let's Encrypt certificate (which would certainly cover costs at current issuance rates) now there needs to be a payment flow, which the machine needs help with because it doesn't have money. At zero cost all of that goes away and leaves you only solving engineering problems to achieve your goal of automated issuance.
- zamfi 7y ago> which the machine needs help with because it doesn't have money How long does it take to mine 1¢ worth of bitcoin? Or, is there anything else a machine can do in a relatively short timeframe that’s worth 1¢ to someone else? t2.micro instances on AWS rent for about 1¢/h...
- jodrellblank 7y agoLike what? If you have anything my computer can do to generate 1c/10seconds with no input from me, that’s $3.60/hour income running twenty four seven; I’ll buy a few and retire right now.
- chillwaves 7y agoComputers have costs associated with running them. electricity, infrastructure for them to run. The cost is not zero.
- sudosysgen 7y agoEven at the height of the crypto boom my computer with a very fast graphics card at the time made like ten bucks a day.
- hyperpallium 7y agoTransaction costs. But note they mean zero price, not zero cost.