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Micropayments! When will this happen? Community needs hosting costs say $1k/y for all their needs. 1000 members pay $1 a year. But that is a lot of friction!

Micropayments! When will this happen? Community needs hosting costs say $1k/y for all their needs. 1000 members pay $1 a year. But that is a lot of friction! Probably a human problem. The activation energy from $0 to $0.01 online is huge compared to the monetary difference. Suddenly you need a credit card. Whereas people would happily pay $3 instead of $1 for a drink because of convenience (convenience stores are an example!). Maybe the solution is an in browser card-free micropayments system that you load up as a browser extension. Something like web3 without the cryptocurrency or blockchain! Chicken and egg problem though.

rdbell 4y ago
> without the cryptocurrency or blockchain If only we had a way to solve this problem using a solution other than the technology that already solves this problem.
- oblio 4y ago
  That's just silly. We just need a web standard that hooks into the existing banking system. Put that into every browser. Just like in 99% of the other use cases presented for it, crypto is useless here. Absolutely no need for it.
  - freddie_mercury 4y ago
    Whose existing banking system? The Chinese one? The Japanese one? The Egyptian one? The Indian one?
    - oblio 4y ago
      The Ancient Roman one. The one most people use. SWIFT. And yeah, blah blah sanctions, Russia, Iran, like most of the world's business is happening there and like the crypto Ponzi schemers really care about the "under-banked".
      - runjake 4y ago
        The “ancient Roman one”? Enlighten me.
      - dalmo3 4y ago
        How's swift suitable for micropayments?
      - freddie_mercury 4y ago
        SWIFT isn't remotely suitable for micropayments. Most banks have to go through a correspondent bank that is going to charge at least $5 per transfer.
        oblio 4y ago
        Ok, then use anything else or get banks to come up with another one. How, pray tell, would a cryptocurrency help here? You have all the crypto disadvantages (either untested or slow or scams or boiling the planet...) plus the same issue with adoption. We already have banks and they already have bank accounts. We have SWIFT, SEPA, etc. They know how to talk to each other. Get them to modify an existing protocol or make a new one for microtransactions. It's a super hard task but with crypto you still have that super hard task (adoption) plus crypto itself (a million drawbacks). It's not scientific and it's not engineering. You solve a problem with the simplest equivalent solution, no more. Crypto is like God. It gets sprinkled over every discussion. There's a reason science doesn't go: "A equals B plus God" to prove anything.
    - arlcode 4y ago
      Different ones for different markets. A working standard could simply define "seller endpoints", "buyers bank endpoint", "supported payment protocol" and a message passing system and let the parties figure it out. Not global, but few things are in the world of finance.
    - immibis 4y ago
      Any. Every. Whatever the user has. Banks already figure this out amongst each other - the browser just needs to convey an IBAN (or other format), currency and amount to the user's bank and let it be their problem.
      - oblio 4y ago
        Exactly. I proposed SWIFT and people latched onto to it to criticize when it was just a detail. You put it better, just have any layer on top of IBANs. 0 need for crypto.
        immibis 4y ago
        However, the API should also be able to support crypto payments, by getting a crypto address and then forwarding the request to e.g. a local instance of Metamask, instead of my bank. Perhaps if the user has multiple bank accounts linked, they would have to choose one, to avoid leaking to my bank that I'm making a crypto payment. Of course, a crypto transaction has a significantly lower chance of being compatible since there's no foreign currency team working at the bank - if the website wants a payment in BitWhatsits and my primary wallet is in DOGEMONEY 20000!!!!! then it's up to the user or at least the extension to figure out the routing. Probably, the website would offer a different button to pay with each supported cryptocurrency, so the user would choose. They'll be accustomed to that, being a cryptocurrency and all.
        oblio 4y ago
        I don't mind that. People should be allowed to shoot themselves in the foot with their favorite Dogecoin.
k099 4y ago
Micropayments keep failing over and over again. I think it's because the friction of microdecisions of whether or not to pay for that individual transaction is tedious. "Should I click on that link? What if it's not what I want Hmm, better not for now." Biggest recent push was Blendle, which pivoted: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-pioneer-blendle-is-pivoting-from-micropayments/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-pio...
- bentcorner 4y ago
  They work well within ecosystems. See the any number of video games and gaming platforms that invent their own micro-currency. My kid plays roblox and every month or so asks for some of their allowance to go into their ecosystem. They spend pennies on different cosmetics with nearly no friction. That said, I don't think even "Web Points" would work for links. Maybe something like buying "Member Status" with "Web Points" for a month on a site could work.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  I think the only micropayment people are usually willing to make is watching an ad.
- saurik 4y ago
  And yet most people I know don't get microdecision fatigue every time they decide whether to turn on a light or use an appliance due to the electricity transactions. I claim that--to the extent to which this was ever an issue--this is due to the notion of "micropayment" really being too large still: the industry has often used this term to describe transactions on the order $1-$10. Instead, this discussion is about hosting fees for a chat app that will add up to almost nothing for light usage, not the $1 per article news companies keep wanting to charge. My company (Orchid) has been calling these fees for incremental hosting costs--which are on the order of $0.001-$0.10--"nanopayments".
  - philsnow 4y ago
    Look at tarsnap's pricing: https://www.tarsnap.com/ https://www.tarsnap.com/ currently it says "250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data"
oblio 4y ago
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, etc don't want a micro payment standard. Everyone dreams of not being the "dumb pipe" and wants a fat cut through their proprietary solution.
- philsnow 4y ago
  I really wish there were room for a "your margin is my opportunity" player in spaces like this, but the existing cast already executes the "dumb pipe" role too well.
  - tpxl 4y ago
    Europe seems to be doing something on this front. SEPA Instant is... instant just like credit cards. All we need is an interface that's as easy to use as credit-cards (type number, money go) and the visa/mastercard monopoly is going to either get real cheap or real non-existent.
kyrra 4y ago
This is such a hard problem. The very much not a secret secret of consumer payments is that all actions that people take are reversible. Things that are not reversible tend to not be as consumer friendly. This means things like Bitcoin and wire transfers. The problem when things are not reversible is an account can get hacked or you can be given incorrect wire instructions and lose a bunch of money and have no way to get it back. People love credit cards and similar products because there is a way to get your money back. In case you were defrauded in some way. Most systems have a chargeback mechanism of some kind. If you start building a system that supports micro payments, the cost of running such a service scales with the number of payments going through it. Such a system needs ongoing support to deal with chargebacks and fraud. And the people running a system need a way to make money. They can't just lose money on the operational support that comes with dealing with chargebacks and fraud.
- sweetbitter 4y ago
  You didn't fully read the post you responded to. They were not suggesting a non-reversible medium.
  - kyrra 4y ago
    Oh, I read it. I'm saying that building a system that supports microtransactions that are reversible is cost prohibitive due to the customer service aspect required. If someone could pull it off, it would be a game changer. I believe many people want to do this, but no one has been successful yet. I point out Bitcoin as it is non-reversible, and there is no central agency you can complain to if you get your bitcoins stolen. This prevent adoption from much of the public.
    - sweetbitter 4y ago
      That makes sense, it seems that I was the one who didn't properly read your comment.
jwr 4y ago
In the EU at least, this is impossible because of invoicing and bookkeeping/accounting requirements.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  Hmmm...Starbucks does this by charging me a lump sum in one transaction and then allowing me to spend it down over time in smaller chunks. I doubt this is viable in general though, due to the cited support issues around reversibility.
  - jwr 4y ago
    Oh, that is even worse! Only big corporations can afford to do this, as this borders on banking services and you need good legal grounding for this type of business. I should probably clarify that by "impossible" I really meant "does not make business/economic sense". You can do microtransactions with individuals, but if you're spending €2 (rough estimate) per transaction for invoicing, accounting, VAT processing, etc, it no longer makes any sense. Thus "impossible".
frxx 4y ago
Makes me remember flattr. That was great and I still miss it.
dehrmann 4y ago
I am a little frustrated that there are services I would pay $1 per month for, but the floor for monthly services is usually $10, occasionally $5.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  It's very expensive to charge someone $1. It wouldn't make much sense to charge $1 / month for a service like that; you'd want to charge $12 / year.
  - nottorp 4y ago
    Who charges 12/year? It's more like 10/month and 100/year :)
    - immibis 4y ago
      IIRC I paid $15/year upfront for Nebula+CuriosityStream. Doesn't seem a bad way to do things. (Whether $15/year is a sustainable price for N+CS is besides the point)
nottorp 4y ago
Slack is $9/user/month :)
- Jill_the_Pill 4y ago
  You know, I'm under the (possibly wrong) impression that it's $9 per workspace per month, and as a professor, if you include all the workspaces I was maintaining for my past classes, I have . . . or had . . . about 25 of them with hundreds of users. Maybe I wasn't using it the most efficient way, but I had no reason to think I needed to be strategic. And to think: I used to tell classes we were using Slack so their access would persist after they got kicked out of Canvas when they graduated! It should have been possible for Slack to start the new limitations on new workspaces only. This term, because I started the change too late, I will continue to use Slack without enthusiasm while keeping a shadow archive (possibly in piazza but they have also begun to charge for larger classes). For next semester we will find and use a different service.
  - nottorp 4y ago
    > You know, I'm under the (possibly wrong) impression that it's $9 per workspace per month It's per user sadly. Apparently $8/mo now if paying monthly. Of course if you go to their pricing page they lie and give you the price for paying yearly.

rdbell 4y ago

> without the cryptocurrency or blockchain If only we had a way to solve this problem using a solution other than the technology that already solves this problem.

oblio 4y ago
That's just silly. We just need a web standard that hooks into the existing banking system. Put that into every browser. Just like in 99% of the other use cases presented for it, crypto is useless here. Absolutely no need for it.
- freddie_mercury 4y ago
  Whose existing banking system? The Chinese one? The Japanese one? The Egyptian one? The Indian one?
  - oblio 4y ago
    The Ancient Roman one. The one most people use. SWIFT. And yeah, blah blah sanctions, Russia, Iran, like most of the world's business is happening there and like the crypto Ponzi schemers really care about the "under-banked".
    - runjake 4y ago
      The “ancient Roman one”? Enlighten me.
    - dalmo3 4y ago
      How's swift suitable for micropayments?
    - freddie_mercury 4y ago
      SWIFT isn't remotely suitable for micropayments. Most banks have to go through a correspondent bank that is going to charge at least $5 per transfer.
      - oblio 4y ago
        Ok, then use anything else or get banks to come up with another one. How, pray tell, would a cryptocurrency help here? You have all the crypto disadvantages (either untested or slow or scams or boiling the planet...) plus the same issue with adoption. We already have banks and they already have bank accounts. We have SWIFT, SEPA, etc. They know how to talk to each other. Get them to modify an existing protocol or make a new one for microtransactions. It's a super hard task but with crypto you still have that super hard task (adoption) plus crypto itself (a million drawbacks). It's not scientific and it's not engineering. You solve a problem with the simplest equivalent solution, no more. Crypto is like God. It gets sprinkled over every discussion. There's a reason science doesn't go: "A equals B plus God" to prove anything.
  - arlcode 4y ago
    Different ones for different markets. A working standard could simply define "seller endpoints", "buyers bank endpoint", "supported payment protocol" and a message passing system and let the parties figure it out. Not global, but few things are in the world of finance.
  - immibis 4y ago
    Any. Every. Whatever the user has. Banks already figure this out amongst each other - the browser just needs to convey an IBAN (or other format), currency and amount to the user's bank and let it be their problem.
    - oblio 4y ago
      Exactly. I proposed SWIFT and people latched onto to it to criticize when it was just a detail. You put it better, just have any layer on top of IBANs. 0 need for crypto.
      - immibis 4y ago
        However, the API should also be able to support crypto payments, by getting a crypto address and then forwarding the request to e.g. a local instance of Metamask, instead of my bank. Perhaps if the user has multiple bank accounts linked, they would have to choose one, to avoid leaking to my bank that I'm making a crypto payment. Of course, a crypto transaction has a significantly lower chance of being compatible since there's no foreign currency team working at the bank - if the website wants a payment in BitWhatsits and my primary wallet is in DOGEMONEY 20000!!!!! then it's up to the user or at least the extension to figure out the routing. Probably, the website would offer a different button to pay with each supported cryptocurrency, so the user would choose. They'll be accustomed to that, being a cryptocurrency and all.
        oblio 4y ago
        I don't mind that. People should be allowed to shoot themselves in the foot with their favorite Dogecoin.

k099 4y ago

Micropayments keep failing over and over again. I think it's because the friction of microdecisions of whether or not to pay for that individual transaction is tedious. "Should I click on that link? What if it's not what I want Hmm, better not for now." Biggest recent push was Blendle, which pivoted: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-pioneer-blendle-is-pivoting-from-micropayments/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-pio...

bentcorner 4y ago
They work well within ecosystems. See the any number of video games and gaming platforms that invent their own micro-currency. My kid plays roblox and every month or so asks for some of their allowance to go into their ecosystem. They spend pennies on different cosmetics with nearly no friction. That said, I don't think even "Web Points" would work for links. Maybe something like buying "Member Status" with "Web Points" for a month on a site could work.
dehrmann 4y ago
I think the only micropayment people are usually willing to make is watching an ad.
saurik 4y ago
And yet most people I know don't get microdecision fatigue every time they decide whether to turn on a light or use an appliance due to the electricity transactions. I claim that--to the extent to which this was ever an issue--this is due to the notion of "micropayment" really being too large still: the industry has often used this term to describe transactions on the order $1-$10. Instead, this discussion is about hosting fees for a chat app that will add up to almost nothing for light usage, not the $1 per article news companies keep wanting to charge. My company (Orchid) has been calling these fees for incremental hosting costs--which are on the order of $0.001-$0.10--"nanopayments".
- philsnow 4y ago
  Look at tarsnap's pricing: https://www.tarsnap.com/ https://www.tarsnap.com/ currently it says "250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data"

oblio 4y ago

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, etc don't want a micro payment standard. Everyone dreams of not being the "dumb pipe" and wants a fat cut through their proprietary solution.

philsnow 4y ago
I really wish there were room for a "your margin is my opportunity" player in spaces like this, but the existing cast already executes the "dumb pipe" role too well.
- tpxl 4y ago
  Europe seems to be doing something on this front. SEPA Instant is... instant just like credit cards. All we need is an interface that's as easy to use as credit-cards (type number, money go) and the visa/mastercard monopoly is going to either get real cheap or real non-existent.

kyrra 4y ago

This is such a hard problem. The very much not a secret secret of consumer payments is that all actions that people take are reversible. Things that are not reversible tend to not be as consumer friendly. This means things like Bitcoin and wire transfers. The problem when things are not reversible is an account can get hacked or you can be given incorrect wire instructions and lose a bunch of money and have no way to get it back. People love credit cards and similar products because there is a way to get your money back. In case you were defrauded in some way. Most systems have a chargeback mechanism of some kind. If you start building a system that supports micro payments, the cost of running such a service scales with the number of payments going through it. Such a system needs ongoing support to deal with chargebacks and fraud. And the people running a system need a way to make money. They can't just lose money on the operational support that comes with dealing with chargebacks and fraud.

sweetbitter 4y ago
You didn't fully read the post you responded to. They were not suggesting a non-reversible medium.
- kyrra 4y ago
  Oh, I read it. I'm saying that building a system that supports microtransactions that are reversible is cost prohibitive due to the customer service aspect required. If someone could pull it off, it would be a game changer. I believe many people want to do this, but no one has been successful yet. I point out Bitcoin as it is non-reversible, and there is no central agency you can complain to if you get your bitcoins stolen. This prevent adoption from much of the public.
  - sweetbitter 4y ago
    That makes sense, it seems that I was the one who didn't properly read your comment.

jwr 4y ago

In the EU at least, this is impossible because of invoicing and bookkeeping/accounting requirements.

datavirtue 4y ago
Hmmm...Starbucks does this by charging me a lump sum in one transaction and then allowing me to spend it down over time in smaller chunks. I doubt this is viable in general though, due to the cited support issues around reversibility.
- jwr 4y ago
  Oh, that is even worse! Only big corporations can afford to do this, as this borders on banking services and you need good legal grounding for this type of business. I should probably clarify that by "impossible" I really meant "does not make business/economic sense". You can do microtransactions with individuals, but if you're spending €2 (rough estimate) per transaction for invoicing, accounting, VAT processing, etc, it no longer makes any sense. Thus "impossible".

frxx 4y ago

Makes me remember flattr. That was great and I still miss it.

dehrmann 4y ago

I am a little frustrated that there are services I would pay $1 per month for, but the floor for monthly services is usually $10, occasionally $5.

thaumasiotes 4y ago
It's very expensive to charge someone $1. It wouldn't make much sense to charge $1 / month for a service like that; you'd want to charge $12 / year.
- nottorp 4y ago
  Who charges 12/year? It's more like 10/month and 100/year :)
  - immibis 4y ago
    IIRC I paid $15/year upfront for Nebula+CuriosityStream. Doesn't seem a bad way to do things. (Whether $15/year is a sustainable price for N+CS is besides the point)

nottorp 4y ago

Slack is $9/user/month :)

Jill_the_Pill 4y ago
You know, I'm under the (possibly wrong) impression that it's $9 per workspace per month, and as a professor, if you include all the workspaces I was maintaining for my past classes, I have . . . or had . . . about 25 of them with hundreds of users. Maybe I wasn't using it the most efficient way, but I had no reason to think I needed to be strategic. And to think: I used to tell classes we were using Slack so their access would persist after they got kicked out of Canvas when they graduated! It should have been possible for Slack to start the new limitations on new workspaces only. This term, because I started the change too late, I will continue to use Slack without enthusiasm while keeping a shadow archive (possibly in piazza but they have also begun to charge for larger classes). For next semester we will find and use a different service.
- nottorp 4y ago
  > You know, I'm under the (possibly wrong) impression that it's $9 per workspace per month It's per user sadly. Apparently $8/mo now if paying monthly. Of course if you go to their pricing page they lie and give you the price for paying yearly.