16 ms·

402 Payment Required, and why micropayments are doomed

116 points by artpi 6y ago

nolantait 6y ago
This article focuses on micropayments for consumers for something like movies or news subscriptions. But what about micropayments for something like micro work. Platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Fiver, etc all build their own minimum wallet systems (must have $5 or more to cash out). I feel like the ability to pay small amounts to do work in parallel would be huge but remains fractured and clunky until this micropayments future matures
- arbol 6y ago
  Yeah it's not addressing the use cases for micro payments. Streaming music and video could similarly pay out micro payments to creators who could cash out when it's profitable to do so, bearing in mind tx fees.
  - PKop 6y ago
    Avoiding the situation of requiring many payment decisions is still there. Streaming music consists of a single transaction that some platform logic would then divide behind the scenes. The consumer isnt forced to make multiple payment decisions. If and when they are, it probably won't work. Even having to pick and choose what portion of some pool of funds one wants to give to which creator creates cognitive friction that I don't think we've seen solved yet.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > Even having to pick and choose what portion of some pool of funds one wants to give to which creator creates cognitive friction that I don't think we've seen solved yet. Humble Bundle would probably have good stats on that: how many people bother to alter the default proportions of the devs/charity/HumbleBundle split?
Glyptodon 6y ago
I'm not sold on the argument that US credit card swipe fees are a true floor, given that transaction fees fluctuate from country to country somewhat significantly, though I do agree there's likely a "single transaction floor." That said, I'm not in agreement overall. I think there are likely many things that can be billed in "sub-minimum-transaction-increments," it's just that they only become worth charging when they exceed the floor. So I guess in my head most of it is tracking "microdebt," and only sometimes is combining enough of the outstanding "debt" enough for it to be worth a payment. It's basically a permutation seen in every game with (much hated) in-game currency. Maybe there's dirt cheap things to buy, but you still have to exchange to IGC at a $1:n floor.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  For an actual example of a single transaction floor in a functioning financial system, the pricing of Euro TIPS transfer system (https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/target/tips/html/index.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/target/tips/html/index.en.htm...) may be relevant, where the bulk cost for transferring money between different banks in different countries is much less than a cent per transaction, €0.002. There's some overhead at the sending/receiving institution as well, but it has a similar order of magnitude (0.0005-0.005€/txn mostly depending on your scale because of the fixed costs); the total cost for a proper interbank transfer is less than a cent if you do things right. The price is mostly determined by other factors, not the cost - it can be (and often is) zero for competitiveness purposes, recouping the costs from other services, or it can be something like the same 30 cents as the original article lists if someone is willing to pay that.
  - dannyw 6y ago
    Bank transfers don't come with dispute resolution (chargebacks), or credit.
    - littlestymaar 6y ago
      Micropayments don't need to come with them either. Contactless payment don't have chargeback already and are considered as cash (at least in some countries including mine).
maehwasu 6y ago
Theoretical articles like this ("proving" that X won't work) are almost always doomed to be wrong, because you can't enumerate all possible ways that something COULD work, but won't. A shorter way to say that is that something can fail thousands of times, but only has to succeed once. If the right technical, social and business factors come together, you get working micropayments.
phh 6y ago
We already have micro-payments, and it's called ads. It is pretty transparent to the user, there is no per-transaction fixed cost (though the margin taken by Ad provider is pretty huge), and some people are living pretty nicely with it. I agree with the various points this article makes, but it doesn't mean micro-payments are a no go. Just make it as seamless as ads! The article mentions subscription, but doesn't mention the possibility of subscription-based micro-payments? That's what scroll.com, and I believe there solution has none of the issues mentioned in this article, even though it would still make sense as a 402 Payment Required! Of course you can't generalize scroll.com everywhere, for many reasons. But I believe /that/ idea is a start of making micro-payments a thing.
- jonahbenton 6y ago
  Thanks for the scroll.com ref. Had that idea several years ago, but was too early. Glad someone running it. Will check out their fraud prevention, that stuff is pretty hard. When fraud drains campaign money, who cares, kinda, but when it's taking member money- can't have that.
- e_y_ 6y ago
  Google had a short-lived experiment called Google Contributor, where you could pay a monthly subscription to hide AdSense ads. Each page view would subtract from your monthly balance and the leftovers would be refunded. I had mine set up to show cat photos instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
  - gxon 6y ago
    It's odd that it was killed suddenly without an apparent reason.
    - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
      As is tradition (with Google)
xrd 6y ago
This article assumes that things like transaction costs are fixed, and customer support is legally required. If you removed those two assumptions, micropayments make sense. Crypto currency actually can solve those problems elegantly. You can have low transaction costs. And, transactions can be anonymous and irreversible (depending on the currency). Critics will rightly point out those promises are not always kept (ethereum gas prices, for example), but they are the goals. Lower transaction fees, I would assert, are not the goals of PayPal. The problem is not technical. It's that there isn't mass adoption. If a well funded startup did a "Fresno Drop" they might be able to overcome that. That would be interesting and could be very effective. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-fresno-drop/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-fresno-drop/ Full disclosure: I'm working on such a system and have a patent pending on the process.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Crypto currency does not have "low" transaction costs: it takes a lot of energy to commit a BTC transaction to the blockchain. Crypto can only ever be viable for non-trivial (large, or unusually valuable) transactions where trust cannot be provided by common mechanisms, such as a stable government or a private escrow agent. This clearly doesn't match the typical use case for micropayments.
  - doomslice 6y ago
    Bitcoin (and other proof of work coins) are not suitable for the job. But there are cryptocurrencies out there that are almost purpose-built for it! Stellar, on which https://satoshipay.io/ https://satoshipay.io/ is built, is one of those.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >it takes a lot of energy to commit a BTC transaction to the blockchain This is a misunderstanding of how mining works. It takes virtually zero energy to create a block (ie. commit a transaction). However, it takes massive amounts of energy for your block to be considered valid. This is because each block also comes with a block subsidy (currently 6.25BTC), which many miners are competing for.
BitwiseFool 6y ago
As someone whose parents run a small business, I've found out that the average person doesn't realize how complicated it actually is for businesses to get payments from customers. All of the overhead in payment processing happens because meticulous records need to be kept for transaction to happen (Account Balances, Payer/Payee IDs, AML/KYC requirements). All of this needs to be logged and audited in case of invesitigation or a charge reversal. With cash you don't have that problem - the transaction is physcial and immediate. But I doubt any micropayment system will get approval to transact money without anti-money laundering laws and transaction reversibility.
Animats 6y ago
Yes. I've pointed out before that the enthusiasm for micropayments is from people who want to collect them, not those who want to pay them. Unlike credit cards, which, when introduced, were easy to sell to buyers but hard to sell to merchants, since the merchant pays fees. Cryptocurrencies are not a magic bullet here. The technology for preventing double-spending is incredibly inefficient and slow. Transaction costs are high. Right now, a Bitcoin transaction costs at least US$5. It's been as high as $20.
- robcohen 6y ago
  Have you seen how much a lightning transaction costs?
  - EGreg 6y ago
    Have you? Can you get to the point?
    - xur17 6y ago
      I have. For small payments, something like $0.0001 - $0.0005 is reasonable to expect.
  - lawn 6y ago
    Have you seen how much opening a lightning channel cost? And opening a second channel, if you cannot find a route to your merchant? How about refilling your channel? Or how to close it, if a malicious node wants to steal your funds? That's right, it will all cost the same as a Bitcoin transaction. And how about receiving a lightning payment? Well... The merchant need to have a balance so he can accept your payment(!) Yes, that's another Bitcoin transaction right there. Or if you're lucky you can find someone who'll give you liquidity (for a fee of course). It's debatable if micropayments will ever take off, but lightning never will.
- BubRoss 6y ago
  Every crytocurrency works well except for bitcoin, because its throughput was crippled to try to sell a centralized second layer owned by the company that weaseled their way into controlling the github and subreddit. I don't think any of them make micro payments easy right now, but throughput is not a real problem until transaction volume goes WAY up.
nottorp 6y ago
Right, I know. A subscription is less than a Starbucks coffe. Old song. Newsflash: perhaps I'd like to support more than a couple sites. Those coffees add up. Also, I don't do Starbucks coffee. It's overpriced.
- jfengel 6y ago
  I support a number of podcasts through Patreon, for a nominal five bucks a month. But that's more than I pay for Netflix and amounts to several hundred per year. I'm happy to do it. It's worth it to me to support people who are often working full time to produce quality content. But it's no surprise that only a microscopic fraction of people do. It would be nice if a higher fraction gave a tenth as much.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    The efficiency of Patreon is amazing ... creators get more than 90% of contribution amounts (for now.) It's absolutely a fork in the eye to record labels and AdSense. :)
  - nottorp 6y ago
    That's subscriptions to things that you use regularly. Would you pay $5/month indefinitely to every site that has an article linked to on HN that you read? No, didn't think so. Would you pay 5 cents per article read though? If the technical possibility to do that existed?
    - Leherenn 6y ago
      The issue I see is that based on what I've seen with sites that offer both options, it would be $1 per article to push you towards taking the subscription.
      - nottorp 6y ago
        That's a greed issue. I'll never subscribe to the new york times because I'm not even on the same continent and I don't care about their news generally. They could get some pocket change out of me when HN links to them though.
cft 6y ago
PayPal already has micropayments, 5c+5% https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/what-are-micropayments-faq664 https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/what-are-micropa... https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees#fixed-fees-micropayment https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees#fixed-fe... Without this, my bootstrapped company that employed over 15 people would not have been possible.
- owenversteeg 6y ago
  Huh, so either you have the micropayments rate on for all payments or none. Interesting! 0.05x + 0.05 = 0.029x + 0.30 : x=$11.90 Fees would be: $0.10 vs $0.33 on $1 $0.15 vs $0.36 on $2 $0.30 vs $0.45 on $5 $0.55 vs $0.59 on $10 $1.55 vs $1.17 on $30
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    I think you're describing payments, not micropayments.
    - owenversteeg 6y ago
      PayPal US micropayments rate is on the left, payments rate is on the right :)
      - redis_mlc 6y ago
        Again, I think you're describing payments, not micropayments. $1.55 is not a micropayment.
        Talanes 6y ago
        I think you're misreading the chart, as $1.55 is a fee on it. They're showing how Paypal's Microtransaction rate becomes more expensive for large transactions.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
sneak 6y ago
Micropayments won’t take off because a service to send or collect them is illegal in the US without carding every user and $1mm-per-state legal and licensing fees to be a money transmitter. This was to be my next company, and it was effectively banned. We have all of the tech to anonymously demand a real-time irreversible penny payment for a pageload, a download, or an API call. Pervasive, suspicionless financial surveillance demands of the government have made the resulting businesses mostly impossible.
- carlsborg 6y ago
  Would Uber for example need those licenses? Why not use “credits” where buyer makes a single payment and then uses those credits to make smaller transactions
  - sneak 6y ago
    I'm not really sure that the financial model of micropayments, nor the incentives of those accepting such payments, lends itself very well to middlemen, platforms, or rent-seekers. For anything that hopes to become as ubiquitous as HTTP, it needs to be standard, decentralized and distributed, and extensible, a system where anyone can stand up an endpoint without centralized approval. I think the governmental stranglehold on payments in most of the developed west is going to be a hard barrier to such a thing ever developing, and instead we'll see the continued growth of centralized chokepoint platforms like Facebook, Medium, Uber, PayPal, Square, et c. It's a real tragedy, because all of the tech is now in place for a total any-to-any model of content, APIs, and payments. It's just illegal. (And not even "a little bit" settle-your-way-out illegal like web spidering under a super strict interpretation of copyright law, but SWAT-machine-guns-in-your face, "terrorism and child porn and money laundering!" pearl-clutching dozens-of-years-in-jail mega super illegal.)
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      > terrorism and child porn and money laundering! Because that's, let's face it, is exactly what such a system would be used in a non-negligible way. Bitcoin got a lot of early adopters with Silk Road and the likes.
jpindar 6y ago
Micropayments work fine in the Open Simulator community. Gloebits are the most popular kind. https://www.gloebit.com/ https://www.gloebit.com/
mmm_grayons 6y ago
There are a few people pushing micropayments as a means to support independent content creators etc., but most are pushing them because it's well-known that people will spend more if you charge them small amounts many times. See the 99c app plus 99c more for each small thing model. That's the reason why I don't like them: because they're bad for me as a consumer.
lazyjones 6y ago
Micropayments have already taken off. They're extensively used in Steam (loot boxes, even c2c sales) and on Reddit. Implementations are simple and straightforward: pay someone who keeps your credit a larger amount and spend fractions of it with 1-2 clicks whenever you want. The confusion stems from the fact that people want to sell uninteresting stuff (and items of unknown quality, the "cat in the sack" as we say in German) on the Web and wrongly blame microtransactions.
rjmunro 6y ago
> ... every Credit Card processor charges a roughly similar rate for processing payments ... 2.9% + 30c of the fixed cost. In Europe, this is not the case. The EU introduced a cap of 0.2% of the transaction value for consumer debit cards, and 0.3% for credit cards for the amount that banks can charge each other. So as a retailer, you can get 1.6% or better rates here, with no 30c minimum. People use credit cards every day to get bus tickets worth around $1-2 - that would be like 25% of revenue if there was a fixed 30c amount or similar.
- asciimike 6y ago
  This is also why rewards credit cards in Europe are much less common, yes? I feel like most "mid to high end" US cards are in the 1-3% range (or up to 5% in rotating categories), which are effectively funded by the merchant fees--so having a cap on them means no (or much lower) fees. Curious how US folks would react to a 90% reduction in the CC rewards, even if it meant a more efficient system.
  - snuxoll 6y ago
    I think you overestimate how much an impact merchant fees have on rewards programs. Rewards programs are marketing, they exist to make people feel like they are getting something "back" on their purchases only to lose all of it the moment they are charged interest on their balance. Yes, there are people who pay in full every month and reap the rewards of the program - but don't kid yourself for a second thinking that's the majority of cardholders.
    - asciimike 6y ago
      For sure. I never carry a balance on my CC because it's quite possibly the dumbest form of debt to have, I forget that that entire revenue stream exists. As a sibling comment here mentions, rewards programs are effectively the rich getting richer and the poor getting screwed :/
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    I benefit substantially from rewards cards. But I view them as just one more way for the rich to get (a little bit) richer. If they all just went away, I believe it would be a better world (or at least, a better USA). I still can't figure out how Amazon's Prime/Chase card can give me back 5% of everything I spend at Whole Foods. It's absurd.
seph-reed 6y ago
I really enjoy the BAT system in Brave. It's often broken, or the person I want to donate to doesn't take BAT tips. It's also hard to convert USD into BAT. But I keep on wanting to use it, and assume that eventually they'll figure it out.
betimsl 6y ago
Hah, "doomed". Micro payments are just getting started mate ;)
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  They've been getting started since the 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment#History
asciimike 6y ago
Not entirely related since this is less of a peer-to-peer and more of a "how do we solve things like paying for website views", but I really liked Rivest's approach for "Electronic Lottery Tickets as Micropayments"[1], as it keeps the amount transacted high enough to avoid transaction costs being a material amount, while also meaning that customers aren't charged that much for any individual transaction. [1]: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv97b.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv97b.pdf
godot 6y ago
I was a cofounder of a micropayments paywall / subscription startup that operated for about 3.5 years, several years ago. (We shut down due to lack of growth and running out of money) We mostly tried to sell to news/magazines publishers. The points that the article author brought up are all good points; but what we kept seeing was that it wasn't the consumers who were unwilling to pay, it was the publishers who were unwilling to try a new model. Whenever a site with quality content integrated with us, the percentage of visitors who paid was more decent than you'd imagine. What we couldn't do was convincing a sizable national-level publisher to use us. We had various niche content sites and some local region newspapers integrate with us and they actually saw a pretty good payers to visitors ratio. Some niche content sites even made pretty good revenue using our paywall product.
- doctor_eval 6y ago
  I would love to hear your story as I am doing something in this space. Would you be willing to drop me a line at mark-at-commandquery.com? Hearing other's experience would really help me validate what I'm working on.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    Some advice: if you don't have a compelling brand name, make sure you have a relative, close friend or PR rep who works for a micropayments client. Large companies have absolutely no reason to partner with an unknown. Worse than NIH, is "why fund a parasite on top of our business model?"
- artpi 6y ago
  Hey, I am the author of the above tiny rant and what prompted me to write is exactly the case you are describing. I am working on monetization features for WordPress.com and Tumblr users. Micropayments are one of the cases we are considering and this post came out of our internal discussions. There is a TON of context I am omitting in that post. In particular, I think that niche sites can run micropayments because early adopters WILL use them. But the economics of it means that you need to cross the chasm to the early majority in order to break even. But the early majority will be more conscious about these tiny amounts of cost. Alternatively, I can be totally wrong, but this whole thread is an awesome discussion :)
unexaminedlife 6y ago
I think there are certain "properties" that will need to exist in a truly sustainable micro-payment system. One of which was discussed, but only to expose why the author doesn't think micro-payments will work. I think the system will need to allow a user to allocate a flat monthly total they're willing to spend on micro-payments. Then, as the user accumulates more and more people they want to pay, the total gets split evenly (or at a designated ratio) across all. Sort of like the saying "give what you can, take what you need". I think there are several opportunities here: 1) I think government needs to be involved so they can create a new "designation" so we can provide rules this new designation follows. Most obvious of which would be taxes. 2) I think as the world becomes more and more connected, there will be a real need for tooling to allow users to manage the 10's or 100's of thousands of people they're paying with micropayments. 3) Probably would be good for standards to exist, so interconnected, de-centralized systems can keep "subscribers / payers" up-to-date with the latest from all applicable platforms, with all of the people they're currently paying. Tons more, but not sure anyone will read this so won't go into too much detail...
uberneo 6y ago
Simple example of MicroPayments using Bitcoin Lightning Network - https://twitter.com/micropaylink/status/1231255048509952002?s=20 https://twitter.com/micropaylink/status/1231255048509952002?...
satvikpendem 6y ago
I would hate to have microtransactions on the web, could you imagine paying to see every webpage? It doesn't even have to be a large amount, just the psychology of free versus paid is quite powerful to compel the user to not use as much for fear of overspending. I can see it being useful for small transactions such as services but not in the general web.
- freddie_mercury 6y ago
  I imagine that, in the same way content is spread across multiple pages to increase ad-views, the same thing would happen with micropayments. Best movies of 2020 would be "pay 0.10 for #100-90 and then .10 for each #90-#80 etc". Stratechery would be "pay 0.10 for the above the fold part and then 0.10 for the rest". Authors used to get paid in micropayments (by the word or books were serialized) so we don't have to guess about the effects. Victorian authors (whose works were all published serialized) stretched things out to the point where modern readers often find them unbearably long.
  - mrkramer 6y ago
    I had the similar idea, for example you are interested in only certain chapter of a 500 pages book and you pay micropayment to access only that pages of the chapter and the book.
- mrkramer 6y ago
  "Could you imagine paying to see every webpage?" Could you imagine you being paid every time you see an ad on the web? It is called revenue sharing and it can range from fraction of a cent up to few cents, it would amount to a lot of money each month and each year.
  - satvikpendem 6y ago
    I can block ads. I can't block micro transactions. But that's not even my main objection, it's more that people will explore the internet less if it's paid per page, and in doing so, the diversity of websites is diminished and the major players become further entrenched.
jedberg 6y ago
I'm sort of shocked this isn't already solved. Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Apple could cement themselves as the "only viable browsers" by solving this. Here is how I see it: - Form a consortium (just like the competing banks did in the 50s to create Visa). - Google, Apple, and Microsoft already have expertise in collecting payments and running services, which they can lend to the consortium. - Each member creates a UI in their own browser for micropayments that is backed by the consortium. - The UI has the ability to add funds (processed by the consortium) and set budgets and have little check boxes for "ask me every time" or "automatically pay if below 1 cent" or "allow up to $5 / mo on this web page" or lots of other budget options so that you don't have to think about it every time. - When you go to a page, they can throw up a request for payment (which if you've already made a budget decision you don't even see as a user), you send a token, they pass the token to the consortium who moves the money from your account to theirs. - The consortium pays out to web pages when they have earned more than $10 (just like Adwords!) and generates a 1099 or equivalent. They take a piece of pie at this point. And now if you want an ad free experience, or want to use a site that requires micropayments, you must use one of those browsers. And the site owners can offer both. Send back a payment request, if it fails, show ads. Heck, even if Google didn't want in, Apple, Mozilla, and Microsoft could pull it off without them (they still have about 38% of the market). You can secure it using standard crypto. The browser generates a private/public key pair. The website generates a keypair. Both sends the public key to the consortium. When you make a payment, you generate a message that says "I pay foo.com 1 cent" and then sign it. Foo.com takes the message, wraps it up and says, "I want 1 cent" and signs it. The consortium verifies the signatures, makes sure the amounts add up, and then sends back an "OK" response if the user has the funds available. They key here is that if those four agree on a UI and agree to a central payment processor, they have enough pull that website owners will want to use the service. Especially if there are no per transaction fees. This also solves the onboarding problem for website owners. It pushes it to the consortium. Who can push it right into their parent companies. Google could automatically tie payment to your Google account, and so could Apple and Microsoft. It would be part of the UI. In fact it would be a good workaround for Google in the new "do not track me" world. People block ads because they are annoying, and trackers because they get no perceived benefit. But payments provide benefit to the user, so they would be more willing to make the payment, thus providing tracking data. And for Google it would help cut Facebook out of the tracking because then they could encourage blocking tracking while accepting payments!
arcticbull 6y ago
Payers don't want micropayments. They don't want them because each time you spend, you have to make a decision. This leads to decision fatigue. Nobody wants to make a million individual tiny purchasing decisions. This is why Netflix is so successful, but Apple's pay-by-the-episode model is far less engaging, even though I wager for most people it'd be much cheaper.
k__ 6y ago
Probably a right assumption. As long as you can't do payments well under $1 things are doomed. Just look at camming sites. You buy 100tokens for 10€ and can "tip" people ¢10 if you like. This works pretty well, and I think people would be happy to pay like ¢10-¢50 en masse for all kind of stuff if it was possible.
8bitsrule 6y ago
When the 'micropayment' idea first came around decades ago, I got the impression that it would let us voluntarily send a little change to individuals who'd posted something that was 'worth' looking at/hearing to us. Had that option ever arisen, I'd have 'sent' x cents directly to the account of hundreds of creators. Because it was simple and person-to-person. Now and then, I'd have 'sent' x dollars to -someone- who'd created something of extraordinary value ... to me. In my view, the rewards collected by brokers are usually not deserved, and the rewards for streamers highway robbery. A 'facilitator' at cost+ (limited) is a different ballgame. The idea - simple, direct, voluntary, user-chosen 'rewards' P2P - never became a reality. I regret that. A cent, a nickel, a dime - anyone could play - from 100,000 people in a year (or even longer-tail) amounts to a very tangible reward, and valuable feedback. I don't need anyone telling me what something is worth to me; the creator does.
- shepardrtc 6y ago
  You should check out Coil: https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/ They have a browser add-on that does streaming micropayments directly to creators as you view the content.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    No, they're a broker, just like all the others. "Direct to creators" means from your (financial institution of some type) account direct into the equivalent for the creator. No middle-men, close to zero fee, no cut, no membership.
- dannyw 6y ago
  For a while in 2018, I did exactly that using Dogecoin. Creators would post their DOGE addresses. I'd chuck in $5, pay <$0.001 in TX fees, and the recipient would receive 100% of it.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
The blurb at the end of this article about the "gravity of rates" is seriously unglobal in its scope. What can be considered a "high" rate in Bangladesh is going to be very different from Norway or Switzerland. If you're doing business globally, the question of an appropriate "rate" or "price" is vexing, and isn't solved with glib western-industrial myopia in which you limit yourself the world's 0.001%. Unless of course that is precisely what you want.
yoava 6y ago
Really enjoyed reading this one. A fresh perspective, at least for me
clarkmoody 6y ago
The LSAT protocol[0] implements the HTTP 402 code with payment performed over the Lightning Network, which has minescule fees and instant settlement. [0]: https://lsat.tech/ https://lsat.tech/
m0llusk 6y ago
Starbucks can make a huge business selling coffees for a few bucks, but it is completely impossible for anyone to do that with articles on the Internet. Sure, Mac. Sure.
mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE 6y ago
I am actually using one such micropayment system. This is the recaptcha solver that solves every recaptcha I encounter on any web page, and I pay 3 cents for that service. I refill my account with $5 once every few months. No decision is involved, in many cases I overpay, but no complains here, still worth it. So if a mechanism exists that allows to automate the decision "pay or not to pay", even if the mechanism is not perfect, it could work.

116 points by artpi 6y ago

This article focuses on micropayments for consumers for something like movies or news subscriptions. But what about micropayments for something like micro work. Platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Fiver, etc all build their own minimum wallet systems (must have $5 or more to cash out). I feel like the ability to pay small amounts to do work in parallel would be huge but remains fractured and clunky until this micropayments future matures

arbol 6y ago
Yeah it's not addressing the use cases for micro payments. Streaming music and video could similarly pay out micro payments to creators who could cash out when it's profitable to do so, bearing in mind tx fees.
- PKop 6y ago
  Avoiding the situation of requiring many payment decisions is still there. Streaming music consists of a single transaction that some platform logic would then divide behind the scenes. The consumer isnt forced to make multiple payment decisions. If and when they are, it probably won't work. Even having to pick and choose what portion of some pool of funds one wants to give to which creator creates cognitive friction that I don't think we've seen solved yet.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > Even having to pick and choose what portion of some pool of funds one wants to give to which creator creates cognitive friction that I don't think we've seen solved yet. Humble Bundle would probably have good stats on that: how many people bother to alter the default proportions of the devs/charity/HumbleBundle split?

Glyptodon 6y ago

I'm not sold on the argument that US credit card swipe fees are a true floor, given that transaction fees fluctuate from country to country somewhat significantly, though I do agree there's likely a "single transaction floor." That said, I'm not in agreement overall. I think there are likely many things that can be billed in "sub-minimum-transaction-increments," it's just that they only become worth charging when they exceed the floor. So I guess in my head most of it is tracking "microdebt," and only sometimes is combining enough of the outstanding "debt" enough for it to be worth a payment. It's basically a permutation seen in every game with (much hated) in-game currency. Maybe there's dirt cheap things to buy, but you still have to exchange to IGC at a $1:n floor.

PeterisP 6y ago
For an actual example of a single transaction floor in a functioning financial system, the pricing of Euro TIPS transfer system (https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/target/tips/html/index.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/target/tips/html/index.en.htm...) may be relevant, where the bulk cost for transferring money between different banks in different countries is much less than a cent per transaction, €0.002. There's some overhead at the sending/receiving institution as well, but it has a similar order of magnitude (0.0005-0.005€/txn mostly depending on your scale because of the fixed costs); the total cost for a proper interbank transfer is less than a cent if you do things right. The price is mostly determined by other factors, not the cost - it can be (and often is) zero for competitiveness purposes, recouping the costs from other services, or it can be something like the same 30 cents as the original article lists if someone is willing to pay that.
- dannyw 6y ago
  Bank transfers don't come with dispute resolution (chargebacks), or credit.
  - littlestymaar 6y ago
    Micropayments don't need to come with them either. Contactless payment don't have chargeback already and are considered as cash (at least in some countries including mine).

maehwasu 6y ago

Theoretical articles like this ("proving" that X won't work) are almost always doomed to be wrong, because you can't enumerate all possible ways that something COULD work, but won't. A shorter way to say that is that something can fail thousands of times, but only has to succeed once. If the right technical, social and business factors come together, you get working micropayments.

phh 6y ago

We already have micro-payments, and it's called ads. It is pretty transparent to the user, there is no per-transaction fixed cost (though the margin taken by Ad provider is pretty huge), and some people are living pretty nicely with it. I agree with the various points this article makes, but it doesn't mean micro-payments are a no go. Just make it as seamless as ads! The article mentions subscription, but doesn't mention the possibility of subscription-based micro-payments? That's what scroll.com, and I believe there solution has none of the issues mentioned in this article, even though it would still make sense as a 402 Payment Required! Of course you can't generalize scroll.com everywhere, for many reasons. But I believe /that/ idea is a start of making micro-payments a thing.

jonahbenton 6y ago
Thanks for the scroll.com ref. Had that idea several years ago, but was too early. Glad someone running it. Will check out their fraud prevention, that stuff is pretty hard. When fraud drains campaign money, who cares, kinda, but when it's taking member money- can't have that.
e_y_ 6y ago
Google had a short-lived experiment called Google Contributor, where you could pay a monthly subscription to hide AdSense ads. Each page view would subtract from your monthly balance and the leftovers would be refunded. I had mine set up to show cat photos instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
- gxon 6y ago
  It's odd that it was killed suddenly without an apparent reason.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    As is tradition (with Google)

xrd 6y ago

This article assumes that things like transaction costs are fixed, and customer support is legally required. If you removed those two assumptions, micropayments make sense. Crypto currency actually can solve those problems elegantly. You can have low transaction costs. And, transactions can be anonymous and irreversible (depending on the currency). Critics will rightly point out those promises are not always kept (ethereum gas prices, for example), but they are the goals. Lower transaction fees, I would assert, are not the goals of PayPal. The problem is not technical. It's that there isn't mass adoption. If a well funded startup did a "Fresno Drop" they might be able to overcome that. That would be interesting and could be very effective. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-fresno-drop/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-fresno-drop/ Full disclosure: I'm working on such a system and have a patent pending on the process.

zozbot234 6y ago
Crypto currency does not have "low" transaction costs: it takes a lot of energy to commit a BTC transaction to the blockchain. Crypto can only ever be viable for non-trivial (large, or unusually valuable) transactions where trust cannot be provided by common mechanisms, such as a stable government or a private escrow agent. This clearly doesn't match the typical use case for micropayments.
- doomslice 6y ago
  Bitcoin (and other proof of work coins) are not suitable for the job. But there are cryptocurrencies out there that are almost purpose-built for it! Stellar, on which https://satoshipay.io/ https://satoshipay.io/ is built, is one of those.
- gruez 6y ago
  >it takes a lot of energy to commit a BTC transaction to the blockchain This is a misunderstanding of how mining works. It takes virtually zero energy to create a block (ie. commit a transaction). However, it takes massive amounts of energy for your block to be considered valid. This is because each block also comes with a block subsidy (currently 6.25BTC), which many miners are competing for.

BitwiseFool 6y ago

As someone whose parents run a small business, I've found out that the average person doesn't realize how complicated it actually is for businesses to get payments from customers. All of the overhead in payment processing happens because meticulous records need to be kept for transaction to happen (Account Balances, Payer/Payee IDs, AML/KYC requirements). All of this needs to be logged and audited in case of invesitigation or a charge reversal. With cash you don't have that problem - the transaction is physcial and immediate. But I doubt any micropayment system will get approval to transact money without anti-money laundering laws and transaction reversibility.

Animats 6y ago

Yes. I've pointed out before that the enthusiasm for micropayments is from people who want to collect them, not those who want to pay them. Unlike credit cards, which, when introduced, were easy to sell to buyers but hard to sell to merchants, since the merchant pays fees. Cryptocurrencies are not a magic bullet here. The technology for preventing double-spending is incredibly inefficient and slow. Transaction costs are high. Right now, a Bitcoin transaction costs at least US$5. It's been as high as $20.

robcohen 6y ago
Have you seen how much a lightning transaction costs?
- EGreg 6y ago
  Have you? Can you get to the point?
  - xur17 6y ago
    I have. For small payments, something like $0.0001 - $0.0005 is reasonable to expect.
- lawn 6y ago
  Have you seen how much opening a lightning channel cost? And opening a second channel, if you cannot find a route to your merchant? How about refilling your channel? Or how to close it, if a malicious node wants to steal your funds? That's right, it will all cost the same as a Bitcoin transaction. And how about receiving a lightning payment? Well... The merchant need to have a balance so he can accept your payment(!) Yes, that's another Bitcoin transaction right there. Or if you're lucky you can find someone who'll give you liquidity (for a fee of course). It's debatable if micropayments will ever take off, but lightning never will.
BubRoss 6y ago
Every crytocurrency works well except for bitcoin, because its throughput was crippled to try to sell a centralized second layer owned by the company that weaseled their way into controlling the github and subreddit. I don't think any of them make micro payments easy right now, but throughput is not a real problem until transaction volume goes WAY up.

nottorp 6y ago

Right, I know. A subscription is less than a Starbucks coffe. Old song. Newsflash: perhaps I'd like to support more than a couple sites. Those coffees add up. Also, I don't do Starbucks coffee. It's overpriced.

jfengel 6y ago
I support a number of podcasts through Patreon, for a nominal five bucks a month. But that's more than I pay for Netflix and amounts to several hundred per year. I'm happy to do it. It's worth it to me to support people who are often working full time to produce quality content. But it's no surprise that only a microscopic fraction of people do. It would be nice if a higher fraction gave a tenth as much.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  The efficiency of Patreon is amazing ... creators get more than 90% of contribution amounts (for now.) It's absolutely a fork in the eye to record labels and AdSense. :)
- nottorp 6y ago
  That's subscriptions to things that you use regularly. Would you pay $5/month indefinitely to every site that has an article linked to on HN that you read? No, didn't think so. Would you pay 5 cents per article read though? If the technical possibility to do that existed?
  - Leherenn 6y ago
    The issue I see is that based on what I've seen with sites that offer both options, it would be $1 per article to push you towards taking the subscription.
    - nottorp 6y ago
      That's a greed issue. I'll never subscribe to the new york times because I'm not even on the same continent and I don't care about their news generally. They could get some pocket change out of me when HN links to them though.

cft 6y ago

PayPal already has micropayments, 5c+5% https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/what-are-micropayments-faq664 https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/what-are-micropa... https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees#fixed-fees-micropayment https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees#fixed-fe... Without this, my bootstrapped company that employed over 15 people would not have been possible.

owenversteeg 6y ago
Huh, so either you have the micropayments rate on for all payments or none. Interesting! 0.05x + 0.05 = 0.029x + 0.30 : x=$11.90 Fees would be: $0.10 vs $0.33 on $1 $0.15 vs $0.36 on $2 $0.30 vs $0.45 on $5 $0.55 vs $0.59 on $10 $1.55 vs $1.17 on $30
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  I think you're describing payments, not micropayments.
  - owenversteeg 6y ago
    PayPal US micropayments rate is on the left, payments rate is on the right :)
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      Again, I think you're describing payments, not micropayments. $1.55 is not a micropayment.
      - Talanes 6y ago
        I think you're misreading the chart, as $1.55 is a fee on it. They're showing how Paypal's Microtransaction rate becomes more expensive for large transactions.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

sneak 6y ago

Micropayments won’t take off because a service to send or collect them is illegal in the US without carding every user and $1mm-per-state legal and licensing fees to be a money transmitter. This was to be my next company, and it was effectively banned. We have all of the tech to anonymously demand a real-time irreversible penny payment for a pageload, a download, or an API call. Pervasive, suspicionless financial surveillance demands of the government have made the resulting businesses mostly impossible.

carlsborg 6y ago
Would Uber for example need those licenses? Why not use “credits” where buyer makes a single payment and then uses those credits to make smaller transactions
- sneak 6y ago
  I'm not really sure that the financial model of micropayments, nor the incentives of those accepting such payments, lends itself very well to middlemen, platforms, or rent-seekers. For anything that hopes to become as ubiquitous as HTTP, it needs to be standard, decentralized and distributed, and extensible, a system where anyone can stand up an endpoint without centralized approval. I think the governmental stranglehold on payments in most of the developed west is going to be a hard barrier to such a thing ever developing, and instead we'll see the continued growth of centralized chokepoint platforms like Facebook, Medium, Uber, PayPal, Square, et c. It's a real tragedy, because all of the tech is now in place for a total any-to-any model of content, APIs, and payments. It's just illegal. (And not even "a little bit" settle-your-way-out illegal like web spidering under a super strict interpretation of copyright law, but SWAT-machine-guns-in-your face, "terrorism and child porn and money laundering!" pearl-clutching dozens-of-years-in-jail mega super illegal.)
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > terrorism and child porn and money laundering! Because that's, let's face it, is exactly what such a system would be used in a non-negligible way. Bitcoin got a lot of early adopters with Silk Road and the likes.

jpindar 6y ago

Micropayments work fine in the Open Simulator community. Gloebits are the most popular kind. https://www.gloebit.com/ https://www.gloebit.com/

mmm_grayons 6y ago

There are a few people pushing micropayments as a means to support independent content creators etc., but most are pushing them because it's well-known that people will spend more if you charge them small amounts many times. See the 99c app plus 99c more for each small thing model. That's the reason why I don't like them: because they're bad for me as a consumer.

lazyjones 6y ago

Micropayments have already taken off. They're extensively used in Steam (loot boxes, even c2c sales) and on Reddit. Implementations are simple and straightforward: pay someone who keeps your credit a larger amount and spend fractions of it with 1-2 clicks whenever you want. The confusion stems from the fact that people want to sell uninteresting stuff (and items of unknown quality, the "cat in the sack" as we say in German) on the Web and wrongly blame microtransactions.

rjmunro 6y ago

> ... every Credit Card processor charges a roughly similar rate for processing payments ... 2.9% + 30c of the fixed cost. In Europe, this is not the case. The EU introduced a cap of 0.2% of the transaction value for consumer debit cards, and 0.3% for credit cards for the amount that banks can charge each other. So as a retailer, you can get 1.6% or better rates here, with no 30c minimum. People use credit cards every day to get bus tickets worth around $1-2 - that would be like 25% of revenue if there was a fixed 30c amount or similar.

asciimike 6y ago
This is also why rewards credit cards in Europe are much less common, yes? I feel like most "mid to high end" US cards are in the 1-3% range (or up to 5% in rotating categories), which are effectively funded by the merchant fees--so having a cap on them means no (or much lower) fees. Curious how US folks would react to a 90% reduction in the CC rewards, even if it meant a more efficient system.
- snuxoll 6y ago
  I think you overestimate how much an impact merchant fees have on rewards programs. Rewards programs are marketing, they exist to make people feel like they are getting something "back" on their purchases only to lose all of it the moment they are charged interest on their balance. Yes, there are people who pay in full every month and reap the rewards of the program - but don't kid yourself for a second thinking that's the majority of cardholders.
  - asciimike 6y ago
    For sure. I never carry a balance on my CC because it's quite possibly the dumbest form of debt to have, I forget that that entire revenue stream exists. As a sibling comment here mentions, rewards programs are effectively the rich getting richer and the poor getting screwed :/
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  I benefit substantially from rewards cards. But I view them as just one more way for the rich to get (a little bit) richer. If they all just went away, I believe it would be a better world (or at least, a better USA). I still can't figure out how Amazon's Prime/Chase card can give me back 5% of everything I spend at Whole Foods. It's absurd.

seph-reed 6y ago

I really enjoy the BAT system in Brave. It's often broken, or the person I want to donate to doesn't take BAT tips. It's also hard to convert USD into BAT. But I keep on wanting to use it, and assume that eventually they'll figure it out.

betimsl 6y ago

Hah, "doomed". Micro payments are just getting started mate ;)

9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
They've been getting started since the 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment#History

asciimike 6y ago

Not entirely related since this is less of a peer-to-peer and more of a "how do we solve things like paying for website views", but I really liked Rivest's approach for "Electronic Lottery Tickets as Micropayments"[1], as it keeps the amount transacted high enough to avoid transaction costs being a material amount, while also meaning that customers aren't charged that much for any individual transaction. [1]: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv97b.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv97b.pdf

godot 6y ago

I was a cofounder of a micropayments paywall / subscription startup that operated for about 3.5 years, several years ago. (We shut down due to lack of growth and running out of money) We mostly tried to sell to news/magazines publishers. The points that the article author brought up are all good points; but what we kept seeing was that it wasn't the consumers who were unwilling to pay, it was the publishers who were unwilling to try a new model. Whenever a site with quality content integrated with us, the percentage of visitors who paid was more decent than you'd imagine. What we couldn't do was convincing a sizable national-level publisher to use us. We had various niche content sites and some local region newspapers integrate with us and they actually saw a pretty good payers to visitors ratio. Some niche content sites even made pretty good revenue using our paywall product.

doctor_eval 6y ago
I would love to hear your story as I am doing something in this space. Would you be willing to drop me a line at mark-at-commandquery.com? Hearing other's experience would really help me validate what I'm working on.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Some advice: if you don't have a compelling brand name, make sure you have a relative, close friend or PR rep who works for a micropayments client. Large companies have absolutely no reason to partner with an unknown. Worse than NIH, is "why fund a parasite on top of our business model?"
artpi 6y ago
Hey, I am the author of the above tiny rant and what prompted me to write is exactly the case you are describing. I am working on monetization features for WordPress.com and Tumblr users. Micropayments are one of the cases we are considering and this post came out of our internal discussions. There is a TON of context I am omitting in that post. In particular, I think that niche sites can run micropayments because early adopters WILL use them. But the economics of it means that you need to cross the chasm to the early majority in order to break even. But the early majority will be more conscious about these tiny amounts of cost. Alternatively, I can be totally wrong, but this whole thread is an awesome discussion :)

unexaminedlife 6y ago

I think there are certain "properties" that will need to exist in a truly sustainable micro-payment system. One of which was discussed, but only to expose why the author doesn't think micro-payments will work. I think the system will need to allow a user to allocate a flat monthly total they're willing to spend on micro-payments. Then, as the user accumulates more and more people they want to pay, the total gets split evenly (or at a designated ratio) across all. Sort of like the saying "give what you can, take what you need". I think there are several opportunities here: 1) I think government needs to be involved so they can create a new "designation" so we can provide rules this new designation follows. Most obvious of which would be taxes. 2) I think as the world becomes more and more connected, there will be a real need for tooling to allow users to manage the 10's or 100's of thousands of people they're paying with micropayments. 3) Probably would be good for standards to exist, so interconnected, de-centralized systems can keep "subscribers / payers" up-to-date with the latest from all applicable platforms, with all of the people they're currently paying. Tons more, but not sure anyone will read this so won't go into too much detail...

uberneo 6y ago

Simple example of MicroPayments using Bitcoin Lightning Network - https://twitter.com/micropaylink/status/1231255048509952002?s=20 https://twitter.com/micropaylink/status/1231255048509952002?...

satvikpendem 6y ago

I would hate to have microtransactions on the web, could you imagine paying to see every webpage? It doesn't even have to be a large amount, just the psychology of free versus paid is quite powerful to compel the user to not use as much for fear of overspending. I can see it being useful for small transactions such as services but not in the general web.

freddie_mercury 6y ago
I imagine that, in the same way content is spread across multiple pages to increase ad-views, the same thing would happen with micropayments. Best movies of 2020 would be "pay 0.10 for #100-90 and then .10 for each #90-#80 etc". Stratechery would be "pay 0.10 for the above the fold part and then 0.10 for the rest". Authors used to get paid in micropayments (by the word or books were serialized) so we don't have to guess about the effects. Victorian authors (whose works were all published serialized) stretched things out to the point where modern readers often find them unbearably long.
- mrkramer 6y ago
  I had the similar idea, for example you are interested in only certain chapter of a 500 pages book and you pay micropayment to access only that pages of the chapter and the book.
mrkramer 6y ago
"Could you imagine paying to see every webpage?" Could you imagine you being paid every time you see an ad on the web? It is called revenue sharing and it can range from fraction of a cent up to few cents, it would amount to a lot of money each month and each year.
- satvikpendem 6y ago
  I can block ads. I can't block micro transactions. But that's not even my main objection, it's more that people will explore the internet less if it's paid per page, and in doing so, the diversity of websites is diminished and the major players become further entrenched.

jedberg 6y ago

I'm sort of shocked this isn't already solved. Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Apple could cement themselves as the "only viable browsers" by solving this. Here is how I see it: - Form a consortium (just like the competing banks did in the 50s to create Visa). - Google, Apple, and Microsoft already have expertise in collecting payments and running services, which they can lend to the consortium. - Each member creates a UI in their own browser for micropayments that is backed by the consortium. - The UI has the ability to add funds (processed by the consortium) and set budgets and have little check boxes for "ask me every time" or "automatically pay if below 1 cent" or "allow up to $5 / mo on this web page" or lots of other budget options so that you don't have to think about it every time. - When you go to a page, they can throw up a request for payment (which if you've already made a budget decision you don't even see as a user), you send a token, they pass the token to the consortium who moves the money from your account to theirs. - The consortium pays out to web pages when they have earned more than $10 (just like Adwords!) and generates a 1099 or equivalent. They take a piece of pie at this point. And now if you want an ad free experience, or want to use a site that requires micropayments, you must use one of those browsers. And the site owners can offer both. Send back a payment request, if it fails, show ads. Heck, even if Google didn't want in, Apple, Mozilla, and Microsoft could pull it off without them (they still have about 38% of the market). You can secure it using standard crypto. The browser generates a private/public key pair. The website generates a keypair. Both sends the public key to the consortium. When you make a payment, you generate a message that says "I pay foo.com 1 cent" and then sign it. Foo.com takes the message, wraps it up and says, "I want 1 cent" and signs it. The consortium verifies the signatures, makes sure the amounts add up, and then sends back an "OK" response if the user has the funds available. They key here is that if those four agree on a UI and agree to a central payment processor, they have enough pull that website owners will want to use the service. Especially if there are no per transaction fees. This also solves the onboarding problem for website owners. It pushes it to the consortium. Who can push it right into their parent companies. Google could automatically tie payment to your Google account, and so could Apple and Microsoft. It would be part of the UI. In fact it would be a good workaround for Google in the new "do not track me" world. People block ads because they are annoying, and trackers because they get no perceived benefit. But payments provide benefit to the user, so they would be more willing to make the payment, thus providing tracking data. And for Google it would help cut Facebook out of the tracking because then they could encourage blocking tracking while accepting payments!

arcticbull 6y ago

Payers don't want micropayments. They don't want them because each time you spend, you have to make a decision. This leads to decision fatigue. Nobody wants to make a million individual tiny purchasing decisions. This is why Netflix is so successful, but Apple's pay-by-the-episode model is far less engaging, even though I wager for most people it'd be much cheaper.

k__ 6y ago

Probably a right assumption. As long as you can't do payments well under $1 things are doomed. Just look at camming sites. You buy 100tokens for 10€ and can "tip" people ¢10 if you like. This works pretty well, and I think people would be happy to pay like ¢10-¢50 en masse for all kind of stuff if it was possible.

8bitsrule 6y ago

When the 'micropayment' idea first came around decades ago, I got the impression that it would let us voluntarily send a little change to individuals who'd posted something that was 'worth' looking at/hearing to us. Had that option ever arisen, I'd have 'sent' x cents directly to the account of hundreds of creators. Because it was simple and person-to-person. Now and then, I'd have 'sent' x dollars to -someone- who'd created something of extraordinary value ... to me. In my view, the rewards collected by brokers are usually not deserved, and the rewards for streamers highway robbery. A 'facilitator' at cost+ (limited) is a different ballgame. The idea - simple, direct, voluntary, user-chosen 'rewards' P2P - never became a reality. I regret that. A cent, a nickel, a dime - anyone could play - from 100,000 people in a year (or even longer-tail) amounts to a very tangible reward, and valuable feedback. I don't need anyone telling me what something is worth to me; the creator does.

shepardrtc 6y ago
You should check out Coil: https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/ They have a browser add-on that does streaming micropayments directly to creators as you view the content.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  No, they're a broker, just like all the others. "Direct to creators" means from your (financial institution of some type) account direct into the equivalent for the creator. No middle-men, close to zero fee, no cut, no membership.
dannyw 6y ago
For a while in 2018, I did exactly that using Dogecoin. Creators would post their DOGE addresses. I'd chuck in $5, pay <$0.001 in TX fees, and the recipient would receive 100% of it.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

The blurb at the end of this article about the "gravity of rates" is seriously unglobal in its scope. What can be considered a "high" rate in Bangladesh is going to be very different from Norway or Switzerland. If you're doing business globally, the question of an appropriate "rate" or "price" is vexing, and isn't solved with glib western-industrial myopia in which you limit yourself the world's 0.001%. Unless of course that is precisely what you want.

yoava 6y ago

Really enjoyed reading this one. A fresh perspective, at least for me

clarkmoody 6y ago

The LSAT protocol[0] implements the HTTP 402 code with payment performed over the Lightning Network, which has minescule fees and instant settlement. [0]: https://lsat.tech/ https://lsat.tech/

m0llusk 6y ago

Starbucks can make a huge business selling coffees for a few bucks, but it is completely impossible for anyone to do that with articles on the Internet. Sure, Mac. Sure.

mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE 6y ago

I am actually using one such micropayment system. This is the recaptcha solver that solves every recaptcha I encounter on any web page, and I pay 3 cents for that service. I refill my account with $5 once every few months. No decision is involved, in many cases I overpay, but no complains here, still worth it. So if a mechanism exists that allows to automate the decision "pay or not to pay", even if the mechanism is not perfect, it could work.