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I’m still waiting for micro transactions. I won’t pay $5 a month for a newspaper I might read one article from but I would gladly pay 25 cents for that one good

I’m still waiting for micro transactions. I won’t pay $5 a month for a newspaper I might read one article from but I would gladly pay 25 cents for that one good article. How are there still minimum amounts and fees on transactions when everything is supposedly digitized and networked?

hactually 4y ago
This is probably a use-case for crypto currency I could actually support... except the gas fees make it worse than the MC/Visa rails
- mertd 4y ago
  Does proof of stake take care of this scalability issue? There are POS based coins. I'm curious why they haven't entertained this use case yet.
  - syntheticcdo 4y ago
    Transaction fees are a market-based mechanism to allocate a scarce resource (limited amount of block space on a given block chain). Moving from POW to POS will not reduce transaction fees in any appreciable amount, instead the fees previously paid to miners will instead be paid to stakeholders.
    - mertd 4y ago
      Doesn't the block generation become faster with PoS and thereby increase the supply?
      - x-complexity 4y ago
        > Doesn't the block generation become faster with PoS and thereby increase the supply? In the most technically-correct sense: No, switching out PoW with PoS does not guarantee faster block times. There can exist a PoS chain with 10 minute block times, just like there can exist PoW chains with <1 min block times. I'm guessing that this opinion came from the early days of Ethereum, where the roadmap for the transition to PoS was still unclear. Now, as ETH's switching system is being tested on its testnets & is more or less finalized, it's been made clear that the block times will only decrease from 14 seconds to 12 seconds - A ~14% decrease, which is significant, but not by much. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/#validators https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms... > Whereas under proof-of-work, the timing of blocks is determined by the mining difficulty, in proof-of-stake, the tempo is fixed. Time in proof-of-stake Ethereum is divided into slots (12 seconds) and epochs (32 slots). The truth of the matter is that an increase in block speed will compromise on either decentralization or security/finality: Increasing ETH's TPS will compromise on one of the two. As such, there's been a shift in focus from relying on ETH for everything, & instead towards allowing ETH to focus on security & decentralization, while the L2 solutions (Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync, etc.) focus on scaling the TPS, utilizing/renting ETH's security for their own benefit. This way, ETH's overall ecosystem gets to scale up, while still maintaining its security & decentralization.
  - ChadNauseam 4y ago
    Moving to PoS is a necessary but not sufficient criteria for reducing transaction fees. The Ethereum merge will reduce them slightly (as it will reduce the block time from 16 seconds to 12 seconds, or something like that) but it won't make any big difference. In the coming year, there probably will also be general ZK-rollups on Ethereum mainnet that will reduce transaction fees substantially. (You can already use ZK-rollups for some limited things like transactions, but not for arbitrary Ethereum operations.) Also, way out in the future, there will be data sharding which will reduce fees on mainnet significantly, look up "proto-danksharding".
- towaway15463 4y ago
  It wouldn’t even need crypto, you just need a company with a ledger that has some big partners in news and entertainment. Apple could do it with their existing Apple Pay system. It makes me think the real difficulty might be regulatory.
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    This suggesting is frightening. The whole point of decentralization is to stop centralized power from abusing their ledgers. Yes crypto is a record of transactions (a ledger) and yes any single company can provide the same service by “simply” recording transactions in a digital ledger, but then you end up with exactly the situation we’re in: companies devaluing balances or making them expire (air miles), companies freezing accounts to save themselves (paypal), and all sorts of other feckery. At their best, regulations stop the outright theft that companies are capable of (let’s not talk about the worst of regulations). The point is that any central authority can and will use their position to further their own profit margins at the cost of their “customers”.
- x-complexity 4y ago
  The gas fees can be mitigated by moving the process over to a rollup scaling solution like Arbitrum or Optimism, or to a sidechain like Polygon PoS: I mentioned it as a necessity for cheap transactions with ETH-level security in another child comment to GP. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31646936#31648768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31646936#31648768
- joshspankit 4y ago
  Is there a proposed solution that’s both low/no-fee (like $0.0001 for a transaction of $0.01, and <$0.01 for a transaction of $100) AND properly sustainable? That’s where I think we’ll start opening the door for all the transformative microtransactions.
slg 4y ago
I think it is an inditement of the crypto space that this obvious use case never materialized.
- social_quotient 4y ago
  Yet…
- plebianRube 4y ago
  I point the finger directly at regulations. Who has the time to track lightning transactions for IRS capital gains reporting. Hopefully we see a bill where small amounts aren't taxed.
  - slg 4y ago
    My bank sends me a 1099 when I earn $0.14 of interest on my checking account. There is no reason this hypothetical crypto company couldn't do the same.
    - plebianRube 4y ago
      Wow. HN really has no clue. 26k karma dude thinks Bitcoin is a company.
      - slg 4y ago
        Where did I mention Bitcoin?
- x-complexity 4y ago
  The micropayments use case was highlighted in the Brave Browser's whitepaper: https://basicattentiontoken.org/static-assets/documents/BasicAttentionTokenWhitePaper-4.pdf https://basicattentiontoken.org/static-assets/documents/Basi... I will admit that this venture has user-related problems, in that similar to ads on a website, it relies on an honest userbase that's willing to give/pay BAT to the creator of the website's content. The infrastructure for such a system is still not fully developed, but it is technically possible to do so right now by minting an article-exclusive NFT in response to a user's micropayment, and then using SIWE (sign-in with Ethereum) to link a session with said address that has paid for the article. In order to facilitate cheap transactions, it'll have to be performed on a rollup like Arbitrum or Optimism, or on a sidechain like Polygon PoS. It does still suffer from the archive.is problem where a cached version of the unlocked article can be shown to everyone else, but such an endeavor will have to be funded out of pocket and is orders of magnitude more expensive than current archive.is bypasses.
Barrin92 4y ago
because that kind of transaction system isn't in high demand. People already suffer from choice-fatigue and if anything people are likely looking for bundles that give them access to more papers for a flat fee rather than the opposite. It's why Spotify and Apple Music exist rather than people paying a fraction of a cent for each song.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  And yet Bandcamp seems to be doing just fine.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Plus, as with everything involving money, this would cause even more clickbait to get those 25c out of you.
  - linsomniac 4y ago
    Maybe. I surely can't be the only one that avoids otherwise interesting articles because of a clickbait title? I know if I click it, it's likely to be BS, and I'm likely to get more of them because wherever I'm reading it goes "Ah-hah!"
- javajosh 4y ago
  Isn't that the 12ft pivot? They can offer people a $10/mo subscription and then give them 100 articles or something spread across all the major publications, and forward that revenue "on demand". It's a classic pirate start: 12ft starts out life by hand subscribing to all the pubs, violating ToS by proxying 3rd party traffic through those subscriptions, demonstrating demand, and then they reach out to publications (carefully) and find out if they'd be willing to take a monthly check from 12ft that is less than they'd get if your N customers were paying the full subscription fee, but far more than the 0 you're currently getting from those customers. I think it's a good idea. Actually a great idea. The key is going to be dealing with narrow-minded execs irrationally attached to their current business model(s), and they will argue that this product removes their leverage to get more full-subscription customers. But if they can be rational and at least do the experiment, they'd get an easy OOM improvement in revenue.
paxys 4y ago
How do you know what is "one good article" and what isn't until you actually read it? There is already an increasing problem with clickbait as sites have to fight for eyeballs to get ad revenue. Making online journalism microtransaction based will completely kill whatever is left of the industry.
- eganist 4y ago
  For 25 cents, I don't think I'd care. If I get burned on five articles at 25 cents each, I'll probably stop reading their stuff though. And that might actually provide a usable metric to their editors.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    The counterpoint is that this will produce EXTREME clickbaiting
    - eganist 4y ago
      Will it, though? What's the likelihood that people stop visiting because the clickbait is both unrewarding and financially impactful? I guess that's the unanswered question. If the likelihood is zero or closer to it, then yeah, clickbait suddenly directly upticks revenue, but if the likelihood is high enough, it might actually force the tide against clickbaiting.
    - towaway15463 4y ago
      That’s not the case with other paid products. I’d argue it would reduce click bait since the whole idea of click bait was created as a solution to drive more impressions on a page regardless of the quality of the material. Impressions matter because revenue comes from ads so you don’t give a shit if someone actually reads the article, you just want them to click on it or share it based on the headline. If your main revenue source was being paid by people who wanted to read the full article then you would succeed by creating articles people wanted to read. You have to show a small preview to do this but that’s standard practice now. You could also prorate by number of pages read or number of words if you wanted to be fancy.
linsomniac 4y ago
Totally agree here, I'd pay a quarter to read most of the articles I click away from right now because they are paywalled. The pain of unsubscribing from some of these places is obscene, and a major reason I avoid subscribing to many of them. That and it's hard to pay $10 for a site I might read an article on a month, or I might read 10. Isn't the Brave browser trying to build in micropayments? I keep hoping that will get some traction. I love reporters and investigative journalism. It's worth funding and I hate seeing it die off. But I also don't have many good ways to pay for it. Though a couple days ago I did read a good investigative piece, without paywall, so I sent the place $10 via one-time payment.
ykevinator2 4y ago
realitysballs 4y ago
I like this idea, why does this not exist yet?
zblesk 4y ago
Blendle might be what you're looking for. Check it out: https://blendle.com/ https://blendle.com/ (Today, the landing page loaded in Dutch for me for some reason. No idea why, probably some 'very smart' lang detection gone wrong? Either way, it _is_ available in english, so don't be deterred if that happens to you as well. After logging in, I saw eng again.)
- ikt 4y ago
  I am also seeing it in Dutch and I'm in Australia
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Gys 4y ago
  I think internationally it never went beyond beta: https://launch.blendle.com/ https://launch.blendle.com/ They also changed the concept (in the Netherlands) from micro payments to a monthly subscription.
- towaway15463 4y ago
  How does it work? Their landing page is vague
imtemplain 4y ago
rgavuliak 4y ago
I've worked in paywall industry previously and microtransactions never work out due to the fact that for the newspaper it's not a predictable source of income that you need to manage your budget as an organization. It doesn't build loyal subscriber bases. The other issue is that this only promotes click-bait journalism. If you want investigative journalism the newspaper needs to invest and they need to invest before the revenue happens. How can you afford that without a predictable revenue stream.
sofixa 4y ago
Coil.com are doing something similar, you pay a subscription to them, and they send microtransactions to the site/user whose content you're consuming.
hackernewds 4y ago
Most publishers let members "gift" articles. But only so for members. I think the worry is that 12ft.io can "buy" the article and then have the legal claims to also distribute it as an owner through this model? I'm totally guessing

hactually 4y ago

This is probably a use-case for crypto currency I could actually support... except the gas fees make it worse than the MC/Visa rails

mertd 4y ago
Does proof of stake take care of this scalability issue? There are POS based coins. I'm curious why they haven't entertained this use case yet.
- syntheticcdo 4y ago
  Transaction fees are a market-based mechanism to allocate a scarce resource (limited amount of block space on a given block chain). Moving from POW to POS will not reduce transaction fees in any appreciable amount, instead the fees previously paid to miners will instead be paid to stakeholders.
  - mertd 4y ago
    Doesn't the block generation become faster with PoS and thereby increase the supply?
    - x-complexity 4y ago
      > Doesn't the block generation become faster with PoS and thereby increase the supply? In the most technically-correct sense: No, switching out PoW with PoS does not guarantee faster block times. There can exist a PoS chain with 10 minute block times, just like there can exist PoW chains with <1 min block times. I'm guessing that this opinion came from the early days of Ethereum, where the roadmap for the transition to PoS was still unclear. Now, as ETH's switching system is being tested on its testnets & is more or less finalized, it's been made clear that the block times will only decrease from 14 seconds to 12 seconds - A ~14% decrease, which is significant, but not by much. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/#validators https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms... > Whereas under proof-of-work, the timing of blocks is determined by the mining difficulty, in proof-of-stake, the tempo is fixed. Time in proof-of-stake Ethereum is divided into slots (12 seconds) and epochs (32 slots). The truth of the matter is that an increase in block speed will compromise on either decentralization or security/finality: Increasing ETH's TPS will compromise on one of the two. As such, there's been a shift in focus from relying on ETH for everything, & instead towards allowing ETH to focus on security & decentralization, while the L2 solutions (Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync, etc.) focus on scaling the TPS, utilizing/renting ETH's security for their own benefit. This way, ETH's overall ecosystem gets to scale up, while still maintaining its security & decentralization.
- ChadNauseam 4y ago
  Moving to PoS is a necessary but not sufficient criteria for reducing transaction fees. The Ethereum merge will reduce them slightly (as it will reduce the block time from 16 seconds to 12 seconds, or something like that) but it won't make any big difference. In the coming year, there probably will also be general ZK-rollups on Ethereum mainnet that will reduce transaction fees substantially. (You can already use ZK-rollups for some limited things like transactions, but not for arbitrary Ethereum operations.) Also, way out in the future, there will be data sharding which will reduce fees on mainnet significantly, look up "proto-danksharding".
towaway15463 4y ago
It wouldn’t even need crypto, you just need a company with a ledger that has some big partners in news and entertainment. Apple could do it with their existing Apple Pay system. It makes me think the real difficulty might be regulatory.
- joshspankit 4y ago
  This suggesting is frightening. The whole point of decentralization is to stop centralized power from abusing their ledgers. Yes crypto is a record of transactions (a ledger) and yes any single company can provide the same service by “simply” recording transactions in a digital ledger, but then you end up with exactly the situation we’re in: companies devaluing balances or making them expire (air miles), companies freezing accounts to save themselves (paypal), and all sorts of other feckery. At their best, regulations stop the outright theft that companies are capable of (let’s not talk about the worst of regulations). The point is that any central authority can and will use their position to further their own profit margins at the cost of their “customers”.
x-complexity 4y ago
The gas fees can be mitigated by moving the process over to a rollup scaling solution like Arbitrum or Optimism, or to a sidechain like Polygon PoS: I mentioned it as a necessity for cheap transactions with ETH-level security in another child comment to GP. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31646936#31648768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31646936#31648768
joshspankit 4y ago
Is there a proposed solution that’s both low/no-fee (like $0.0001 for a transaction of $0.01, and <$0.01 for a transaction of $100) AND properly sustainable? That’s where I think we’ll start opening the door for all the transformative microtransactions.

slg 4y ago

I think it is an inditement of the crypto space that this obvious use case never materialized.

social_quotient 4y ago
Yet…
plebianRube 4y ago
I point the finger directly at regulations. Who has the time to track lightning transactions for IRS capital gains reporting. Hopefully we see a bill where small amounts aren't taxed.
- slg 4y ago
  My bank sends me a 1099 when I earn $0.14 of interest on my checking account. There is no reason this hypothetical crypto company couldn't do the same.
  - plebianRube 4y ago
    Wow. HN really has no clue. 26k karma dude thinks Bitcoin is a company.
    - slg 4y ago
      Where did I mention Bitcoin?
x-complexity 4y ago
The micropayments use case was highlighted in the Brave Browser's whitepaper: https://basicattentiontoken.org/static-assets/documents/BasicAttentionTokenWhitePaper-4.pdf https://basicattentiontoken.org/static-assets/documents/Basi... I will admit that this venture has user-related problems, in that similar to ads on a website, it relies on an honest userbase that's willing to give/pay BAT to the creator of the website's content. The infrastructure for such a system is still not fully developed, but it is technically possible to do so right now by minting an article-exclusive NFT in response to a user's micropayment, and then using SIWE (sign-in with Ethereum) to link a session with said address that has paid for the article. In order to facilitate cheap transactions, it'll have to be performed on a rollup like Arbitrum or Optimism, or on a sidechain like Polygon PoS. It does still suffer from the archive.is problem where a cached version of the unlocked article can be shown to everyone else, but such an endeavor will have to be funded out of pocket and is orders of magnitude more expensive than current archive.is bypasses.

Barrin92 4y ago

because that kind of transaction system isn't in high demand. People already suffer from choice-fatigue and if anything people are likely looking for bundles that give them access to more papers for a flat fee rather than the opposite. It's why Spotify and Apple Music exist rather than people paying a fraction of a cent for each song.

yellowapple 4y ago
And yet Bandcamp seems to be doing just fine.
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Plus, as with everything involving money, this would cause even more clickbait to get those 25c out of you.
- linsomniac 4y ago
  Maybe. I surely can't be the only one that avoids otherwise interesting articles because of a clickbait title? I know if I click it, it's likely to be BS, and I'm likely to get more of them because wherever I'm reading it goes "Ah-hah!"
javajosh 4y ago
Isn't that the 12ft pivot? They can offer people a $10/mo subscription and then give them 100 articles or something spread across all the major publications, and forward that revenue "on demand". It's a classic pirate start: 12ft starts out life by hand subscribing to all the pubs, violating ToS by proxying 3rd party traffic through those subscriptions, demonstrating demand, and then they reach out to publications (carefully) and find out if they'd be willing to take a monthly check from 12ft that is less than they'd get if your N customers were paying the full subscription fee, but far more than the 0 you're currently getting from those customers. I think it's a good idea. Actually a great idea. The key is going to be dealing with narrow-minded execs irrationally attached to their current business model(s), and they will argue that this product removes their leverage to get more full-subscription customers. But if they can be rational and at least do the experiment, they'd get an easy OOM improvement in revenue.

paxys 4y ago

How do you know what is "one good article" and what isn't until you actually read it? There is already an increasing problem with clickbait as sites have to fight for eyeballs to get ad revenue. Making online journalism microtransaction based will completely kill whatever is left of the industry.

eganist 4y ago
For 25 cents, I don't think I'd care. If I get burned on five articles at 25 cents each, I'll probably stop reading their stuff though. And that might actually provide a usable metric to their editors.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  The counterpoint is that this will produce EXTREME clickbaiting
  - eganist 4y ago
    Will it, though? What's the likelihood that people stop visiting because the clickbait is both unrewarding and financially impactful? I guess that's the unanswered question. If the likelihood is zero or closer to it, then yeah, clickbait suddenly directly upticks revenue, but if the likelihood is high enough, it might actually force the tide against clickbaiting.
  - towaway15463 4y ago
    That’s not the case with other paid products. I’d argue it would reduce click bait since the whole idea of click bait was created as a solution to drive more impressions on a page regardless of the quality of the material. Impressions matter because revenue comes from ads so you don’t give a shit if someone actually reads the article, you just want them to click on it or share it based on the headline. If your main revenue source was being paid by people who wanted to read the full article then you would succeed by creating articles people wanted to read. You have to show a small preview to do this but that’s standard practice now. You could also prorate by number of pages read or number of words if you wanted to be fancy.

linsomniac 4y ago

Totally agree here, I'd pay a quarter to read most of the articles I click away from right now because they are paywalled. The pain of unsubscribing from some of these places is obscene, and a major reason I avoid subscribing to many of them. That and it's hard to pay $10 for a site I might read an article on a month, or I might read 10. Isn't the Brave browser trying to build in micropayments? I keep hoping that will get some traction. I love reporters and investigative journalism. It's worth funding and I hate seeing it die off. But I also don't have many good ways to pay for it. Though a couple days ago I did read a good investigative piece, without paywall, so I sent the place $10 via one-time payment.

ykevinator2 4y ago

realitysballs 4y ago

I like this idea, why does this not exist yet?

zblesk 4y ago

Blendle might be what you're looking for. Check it out: https://blendle.com/ https://blendle.com/ (Today, the landing page loaded in Dutch for me for some reason. No idea why, probably some 'very smart' lang detection gone wrong? Either way, it _is_ available in english, so don't be deterred if that happens to you as well. After logging in, I saw eng again.)

ikt 4y ago
I am also seeing it in Dutch and I'm in Australia
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Gys 4y ago
I think internationally it never went beyond beta: https://launch.blendle.com/ https://launch.blendle.com/ They also changed the concept (in the Netherlands) from micro payments to a monthly subscription.
towaway15463 4y ago
How does it work? Their landing page is vague

imtemplain 4y ago

rgavuliak 4y ago

I've worked in paywall industry previously and microtransactions never work out due to the fact that for the newspaper it's not a predictable source of income that you need to manage your budget as an organization. It doesn't build loyal subscriber bases. The other issue is that this only promotes click-bait journalism. If you want investigative journalism the newspaper needs to invest and they need to invest before the revenue happens. How can you afford that without a predictable revenue stream.

sofixa 4y ago

Coil.com are doing something similar, you pay a subscription to them, and they send microtransactions to the site/user whose content you're consuming.

hackernewds 4y ago

Most publishers let members "gift" articles. But only so for members. I think the worry is that 12ft.io can "buy" the article and then have the legal claims to also distribute it as an owner through this model? I'm totally guessing