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> It would be nice to solve the real micropayments "if you liked this page tip me a few cents" problem, which is still unsolved. Absolutely ... that's the poin

• jfengel 6y ago
  There are still a few working on it, but nobody seems to be making any headway. The overhead of dealing with money is just too high. There are so many ways for it to go wrong -- theft, fraud, contested charges, hacking, connectivity failure, to name just a few. The transactions are small, but to be profitable you have to move a ton of money, and that makes you a target of every possible failure mode. I'd love for it to be as simple as a digital check: "You have my permission to take $.05 out of my account" cryptographically signed with my very private key. It would cost basically $0 to validate, and the server would move money from database A to database B. But that server has to be hyper-secure, and the app doing the signing has to be hyper-secure -- all for a nickel of money. And now I'm running a bank, so I need to actually prove to the government that I'm not going to abscond with their money and that I'm not being used for money laundering -- which means checking IDs by hand. And customers will complain, so I have to run a help desk. It's just too much hassle. You can try to piggyback it off the efforts banks are already putting in, but they still won't see it profitable for a nickel at a time, or even a dollar. I think everybody hoped that somehow cryptocurrency would solve it, but it doesn't -- security requires burning too much electricity. Maybe there's an answer out there somehow, but nobody has found it yet.