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> It needs to be built into the browsers and web standards such that it’s incredibly smooth and fast. I wanna send $1 to a website, it happens instantly and ano

> It needs to be built into the browsers and web standards such that it’s incredibly smooth and fast. I wanna send $1 to a website, it happens instantly and anonymously, and the developer can do things around this. Like unlock features! For instance, stop showing ads, offer more complete downloads, unlock tutorial courses, etc. Make it easier and faster than using a credit card. Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee? Or an approach that doesn't require one company to have a monopoly over it? I'm really curious how the internet would change if there was a fast and easy way for site visitors to give something like $0.10 to unlock content or just to say thanks.

frutiger 3y ago
> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee This is anathema here in the US but the rest of the world typically does not use credit cards as the default payment method.
- gear54rus 3y ago
  But they (we) do use debit cards as one tho.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Mastercard/Visa are not only credit cards - they're used for debit card transactions as well.
- Filligree 3y ago
  Americans use credit cards as the default payment method? Why?
  - Falell 3y ago
    Credit cards have by far the best in-person UX of the options that I am presented, tap my card or phone and leave and they're accepted everywhere in practice (my debit card is not). The 'cardholder can always reverse any charge' behavior is also nice once every few years.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Fraud protections are, by law, much stronger in favor of consumers for credit card transactions in the US. If you have good credit, you can also get 2-4% in credit card cash back on everything via rewards programs.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
    Fraud protection, mostly. If someone steals your debit card and spends all your money, you might very well be fucked. But (in America) if someone steals your credit card and spends a bunch of money, they technically stole money from the bank, so it's the bank that might be fucked, not you. All you have to say is "yeah that wasn't me" and the bank reverses the transaction. If you're blatantly abusing this the bank will end their relationship with you and cancel your card, but that's pretty much worst case scenario, and you won't be on the hook for anything. And they obviously make enough money off of people who carry a balance and pay interest that they still come out way ahead.
  - troyvit 3y ago
    I use it because if I used a debit card and it gets compromised then I lose whatever's in my bank account. Maybe I can get it back if I can prove it's fraud? If I use a credit card and it gets compromised then my cash is still secure. If I have to fight a credit card company for 6 months to get the payments reversed I still have cash to live off of. If I don't win then hell I don't pay. Maybe I go to collections and credit gets dinged but my real assets are still mine.
  - simne 3y ago
    To boost credit rating. When you have none credits, your credit rating is ZERO, and it is considered bad. So you could pay for example 10$ (yes, small amount) from zero percent credit, and regularly pay it and this will effectively raise credit rating.
sofixa 3y ago
> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee One option is to have regulations about card fees, which is the case in the EU (0.2% for debit, 0.3% for credit). Another is to use an alternative payment method, like India's UPI or Eurozone's SEPA which are free and instantaneous.
- Tijdreiziger 3y ago
  The UX around card and SEPA payments sucks, though. I hear UPI is nicer.
  - captn3m0 3y ago
    But the UPI requirements of forcing mobile apps makes the monetisation usecase UX pretty terrible (think App Intents to and fro on mobile browsers) and scanning QRs on desktop. I’d rather like Taler.
- throwaway11460 3y ago
  It's actually 2%+fixed amount fee (see e.g. Stripe.com and choose an EU country), 0.2 is just the interbank fee IIRC.
- jacobn 3y ago
  SEPA via Stripe takes on average 5 days, max 14 according to their docs - instantaneous would be a game changer?! https://stripe.com/docs/payments/sepa-debit https://stripe.com/docs/payments/sepa-debit
  - calmoo 3y ago
    Instant free SEPA transfers are becoming more common in the EU, but as an easy payment method it’s still annoying from a UX perspective.
- Jommi 3y ago
  Where did you read that SEPA is free? Thats not true.
zilti 3y ago
GNU Taler
internetter 3y ago
Frankly, this is probably just going to manifest as a digital currency. Add 10$ to your wallet. At the end of the month that's distributed or something
- stevekemp 3y ago
  Flattr tried to do something similar, but yes I agree. It's unfortunate that bitcoin became a hoarding/speculation thing, rather than a useful thing. Decentralized micro-transactions would have been cool had they been used with a decent friendly UI and been integrated into a browser or two as an extension.
  - internetter 3y ago
    > Decentralized micro-transactions would have been cool had they been used with a decent friendly UI and been integrated into a browser or two as an extension. My position on cryptocurrency as well. I think that the ability to send money in this decentralized manner is fascinating. It's too bad it went far, far beyond that. Cryptocurrency should have never tried to replace normal currency, or any of that NFT bs.
    - johannes1234321 3y ago
      Blockchain isn't really the solution there, though. I don't want a public ledger with all my payments, which tells not only what I consume, but also how much I am able/willing to spend. And as soon as you are in massmarket you need ways for humans to intervene, for handling complaints, mistakes, whatever or dealing with the unavoidable case that individuals lose their secret keys. Or even cases like medical restriction or inheritance requiring others to take over the funds. All those things Blockchain purposely and inherently prevents.
      - pants2 3y ago
        You can just send a transaction from your exchange. Like, let's say I want to send you $0.10 right now. I would just go into Robinhood and send 0.1 USDC to you on Polygon or Solana, that would arrive in your wallet instantly from a Robinhood-owned address, you would have no idea who I am or my previous transaction history. Robinhood also owns the private keys and account recovery process here - it's just using blockchain as the payment rail. Go ahead and post your address and I'll send you $0.10.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
soco 3y ago
I had for a while Coil installed in the browser and nobody cared about it, so I uninstalled it half a year later. I honestly couldn't care less if there's a blockchain behind it or whatever, but as long no sites (useful to me) implement it... Under the line I paid Coil some money for nothing, so maybe for them it was a business success.
- armchairhacker 3y ago
  I had Coil too. They shut down. https://www.coil.com/#:~:text=On%20March%2015%2C%202023%2C%20we,get%20paid%20on%20the%20Web https://www.coil.com/#:~:text=On%20March%2015%2C%202023%2C%2....
Mistletoe 3y ago
Of course there is, there are tons of cryptocurrencies that can do this but everyone here hates crypto and throws the baby out with the bathwater and won’t stop parroting “SCAM!” every time they hear the word. It’s too expensive to use on-chain transactions on things like Bitcoin or Ethereum but there are other coins. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth-xrp-xmr-doge-etc-ltc-bch-bsv.html#log&3m https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth... You could also use Lightning Network on Bitcoin or any of the Layer 2s on Ethereum like Arbitrum or Optimism. Fees are in the cents range. https://l2fees.info/ https://l2fees.info/
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  Pointing to my comment elsewhere on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39279246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39279246
  - Mistletoe 3y ago
    Some blockchains have private transactions and very good at it indeed. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-xmr.html#log&3m https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-xmr... Monero has fees of six cents it looks like and a novel and private way of performing transactions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature
  - wbobeirne 3y ago
    Layer 2s such as Bitcoin's lightning network do not use a public ledger for their transactions. The only thing public is the transaction that opens a payment channel, everything after that happens as peer to peer messaging across the network.
pelorat 3y ago
Good luck getting something like that past Eu regulators.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Why? It seems like the sort of privacy-supporting thing they’d like.
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    They also like taxes, and this seems like a nightmare for VAT.
Analemma_ 3y ago
> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee? Or an approach that doesn't require one company to have a monopoly over it? The short answer is, no. For the long answer, I really recommend people read a blog like Bits About Money or some Matt Levine columns to start learning about the actual plumbing of finance and payment processors, to see why such a thing is actually difficult or impossible to build. Something that seems like a simple transaction to us, like sending $0.10 to a webiste, actually involves many parties, all of whom are a) hedging against counterparty risk, b) required by law to do KYC/AML and c) required by law to have safeguards against leaving customers in the lurch. Providing a, b and c is expensive in both money and time. There are a lot of layers of abstraction in this system to make sure that you, the end user, don't usually have to think about all the complexity, and so to you it just looks like "I sent money from A to B", but the complexity is nonetheless there and it's a real impediment to getting the kinds of fast, cheap microtxns you want.
CaptainFever 3y ago
This is literally the use case for cryptocurrencies -- digital cash, not investments. In the more... questionably legal parts of the web, Monero is pretty common since you can't use regular banking anyway. The fees are pretty low, at around USD0.001 IIRC. There's also Nano (feeless) but it doesn't seem to be very popular, unfortunately.
- jjcm 3y ago
  Please correct me if I'm wrong here (I've been out of the crypto game for a couple years), but I don't think crypto holds up here. The nature of transaction fees with crypto is they scale exponentially with demand. Monero fees are low because volume is low. Bitcoin fees are high ($9.97 was the average transaction fee yesterday!) because volume is high. Any fully decentralized crypto at the scale of use that the Web Monetization API would need would have enormous tx prices. There are ways to scale this, ie the lightning network, but those are essentially centralized solutions to scale.
  - ptsd_dalmatian 3y ago
    this is the point of lightning network for btc, way lower costsand nearly instantaneous transactions. I haven’t tried it so far.
    - epolanski 3y ago
      Because it's still theory 7 years after announcement it has been proven again and again to not be a real alternative.
      - madacol 3y ago
        Lightning has had lots of problems, but most of those are fixable through software or gets better and better with adoption (at least in theory). The reason adoption has been so low is that with current hardware you cannot run a full node in a phone, so you either get a server to run a full node or you trade-off some control/security of your coins There are still other theoretical problems, mostly things like denial-of-services, but adoption has been what has stagnated it. The hardware/control tradeoff is a real PITA, we need a phone with like 50x more battery or efficient to be able to run lightning in a completely self-custodial manner And there are still some people advocating for blocksize increase, which will make the problems of lightning even worse
config_yml 3y ago
This already works with Crypto, something like Hedera is dirt cheap (1/100 of a cent) and fast and scales really well. Wallets are easy to connect, but the disconnect to regular $$$ is still a bit too big for the regular surfin' user.
uncletammy 3y ago
You've just described the value proposition for bitcoin, a peer to peer electronic cash system. Sadly, bitcoin has been captured by banks and is now only useful for gambling and parasitic investment scams.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  :/ Distributed ledger technology ever being a viable solution for small, high-frequency transactions seems like a pipe dream. I'm aware that tremendous effort has been and is being invested in that. But I have yet to be convinced efforts in that direction won't all boil down to "trading decentralization for efficiency." In which case, why not use a centralized, much more efficient solution?
  - Wazako 3y ago
    How do you centralize without having a government requiring KYC?
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      I'd ask how you decentralize without having a government requiring KYC? Anonymity of nodes? If avoiding KYC / government-control is the primary motivation, then more centralized ledger systems look a lot like current payment networks... just with anonymous operators. (Oof)
    - epolanski 3y ago
      Why is that even a real need? All crypto cultists I know don't give a damn to give all of their info to any provider, out there, be tracked everywhere "they already know everything" and yet there is a problem for a 1$ donation on some random website when they using their real dollars online for literally everything. Also, there's literally 0 ways other than bartering to get bitcoins really anonymously, and the number of people able to transact while staying anonymous is below 0. You need to take your credit card and pay for it on an exchange, so it's not anonymous. And the anonymous chains are borderline ignored, because being anonymous is really not what drags people into Bitcoin, but the hope of finding a fool paying more than they did.
jacobr1 3y ago
Looks like https://getcode.com/ https://getcode.com/ just launched to solve this problem. There have been many attempts at web3 micropayments, but this one seems slicker than most. Hat tip from USV, one of their investors.
- Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 3y ago
  > Privacy taken too far, however, can lead to bad outcomes. To mitigate the potential of Code being used for nefarious activity, Code users are limited to $250 USD per payment, up to $1000 USD per day. This is a joke. Everything seems to be designed around their proprietary app, so why bother with a blockchain and custom currency at all?
pants2 3y ago
The best way to do this today is through any crypto exchange that supports USDC. I just tested this - I went in to Robinhood and sent 0.01 USDC to a SOL address. It cost me $0.001 as a transfer fee and took about 30 seconds total. I agree the process could be a bit smoother, but it works fairly well.
Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
I'm grateful this hasn't been worked out yet. The magnitude of the shittification of the internet which will occur once this is a solved problem is almost too much to think about. If you are working on this, for the sake of humanity, please stop.
- dlbucci 3y ago
  I think a large portion of enshittification comes from sites being advertising revenue driven. This leads to them needing more users with higher engagement, so they grow beyond their scope first and then shittify everything when they need to start making money (see reddit). A large reason sites have to be ad driven is that requiring users to sign up and pay for a site is a huge blocker for most people. So I feel like having a standard easy way for users to send money to a site they use for the utility they receive would go some ways to reduce enshittification, not increase it. But maybe I'm just an optimist.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
    I'm not saying there aren't good use-cases for this. There absolutely are. What I'm saying is that this tool WILL be used well beyond those cases in ways that make the internet much worse than the ad and surveillance nonsense we currently have to deal with. As a thought experiment, consider a truly terrible group of smart and capable people. The kind of people who will exploit this new tool to extract and squeeze every cent from others to themselves without any care for what is destroyed, broken, or ruined. Imagine they do exactly this and become wildly rich. Their uncaring ruthlessness richly rewarded leading to normalization of such tactics which are then taken on by others as just the 'way things are done'. I ask you to consider just how this tool could be used for evil and then know that it will be. This tool will allow any/all action on a website to be easily monetized. This will mean that eventually EVERY action will be monetized. Oh, and the ads and surveillance? They'll be there too.
    - BlueTemplar 3y ago
      I can see the risk... yet it's only a risk, and we're already starting to see the tidal wave of SPAM that ever smarter neural networks allow. (Also, thankfully, there are still corners of the Internet that haven't been plagued by either ads or spam - because not popular enough - and are likely to remain so.)
ForHackernews 3y ago
It doesn't even need to be that fast, as long as it's secure and credible. Stock trades in the US happen "instantly" (or near enough), but actual settlement takes place two or three days later. The cryptocurrency people are hung up on the idea of "fast, irreversible payments" (that settle at the same time as the trade) because they desperately want a trustless, digital equivalent of cash for political reasons. But for merchants and mainstream users, a fair, trustworthy payment system run by known intermediaries would be much better. It can be slow, as long as merchants know they'll get their money in some reasonable timeframe. The problem is that the Visa/Mastercard duopoly makes it hard to innovate. It's possible FedNow will fix this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow
itslennysfault 3y ago
I think you need the browsers to act as a broker/escrow. Brave tried to do this, but I'm not sure what ever happened to it. The way their system worked (as I understood it) is you deposited an amount in the browser each month and it was split between the sites you visited that month weighted by how much time you spent on each site, but it only worked for sites that signed up for the Brave reward program (or whatever they called it).
- dinobones 3y ago
  Brave/BAT is a massive "crypto" grift. It's an ERC20 token that they hold like 30% of in reserves. You also need to signup for Uphold / sign up with Brave to receive payment. It's a cryptocurrency only in implementation, but the actual experience could be replicated with (GoFundMe or any other "creator platform") + A chrome extension.
  - itslennysfault 3y ago
    Thanks for the info. I never actually used it and didn't know the details. Its just the only "real" attempt at direct web monetization as an alternative to ads that I've seen. Sad to hear its a crypto thing.
EricMausler 3y ago
I'm working on something under a different use case that could fit for this, but maybe not at the scale people on this forum are looking for without additional support I wont blab about myself here, but I do feel I have relevant background and a couple solid connections to implement something that works. Cryptocurrency has failings for my use-case, based on what I've tried for designing around it so far. For strictly donating money in one direction towards a website, those failings may not be relevant though. Sadly this project is not my day job, though, but it is something I plan to use for myself with or without more widespread adoption so it's moving forward regardless. I'm honestly only working on it because I wanted to do a different project that would work way nicer if tiny transactions with users are possible.
tzs 3y ago
> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee? Or an approach that doesn't require one company to have a monopoly over it? Either one company with a monopoly or maybe a small number of companies is probably the only feasible way to do it, because efficient payment processing is only half the problem. The other half is taxes. Every time someone in a browser pays to unlock content provided by someone in a different tax jurisdiction some government is likely to view that as a taxable sale that someone has to collect sales tax or VAT for. In many places (EU, US) it is the jurisdiction where the buyer resides that is owed the tax, but the seller who is supposed to deal with collecting and paying it. Unless we can get a lot of countries to make special rules for small consumer content purchases that greatly simplify this, the most practical approach is to have a small number of content marketplaces. So say you are in the EU and want to buy an article from the New York Times. Instead of directly paying the NYT you would go to one of the market sites and buy a NYT access token from them. You can use that access token to get your article from the Times. What going through the intermediate marketplace does is make it so your monetary transaction is with them, not the NYT. Instead of each content provider having to deal with taxes in dozens of different jurisdictions it is just the marketplaces. The marketplace would pay the NYT for the access token, but that would be a business to business sale of a product for resale which most places exempt from sales tax and VAT. It's just going to be ordinary income for the content providers that they report on their own income tax. You don't want too many separate marketplaces so that content providers can reasonably offer their content in all of the marketplaces. That way consumers just need an account at one marketplace. The marketplace approach also largely solves the problem of transaction fees. Instead of each article you unlock for $0.10 being a separate charge on your card you'd preload your account at the marketplace you use. You credit card would only be charged for the initial prepay and then whenever you need to refill it. The big issue I see is keeping it from devolving to something like the current streaming movie/TV market where content providers make exclusive deals with different marketplaces.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  But why is the VAT a showstopper ? Because of extra complexity ? But the payment software itself can figure out the exact amounts. Which then can also be aggregated monthly/yearly. Not to mention that plenty of jurisdictions only require that for businesses, while non-businesses don't have to report anything about their donations/sales unless they cross a yearly threshold.
throw10920 3y ago
The obvious solution is to have users buy a proxy currency that goes in a wallet that is then spent in frictionless (and fee-less) microtransactions. Many video game companies use this model, albeit for their own scummy monetization systems, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't work here - is there a reason you're not considering it?

frutiger 3y ago

> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee This is anathema here in the US but the rest of the world typically does not use credit cards as the default payment method.

gear54rus 3y ago
But they (we) do use debit cards as one tho.
madeofpalk 3y ago
Mastercard/Visa are not only credit cards - they're used for debit card transactions as well.
Filligree 3y ago
Americans use credit cards as the default payment method? Why?
- Falell 3y ago
  Credit cards have by far the best in-person UX of the options that I am presented, tap my card or phone and leave and they're accepted everywhere in practice (my debit card is not). The 'cardholder can always reverse any charge' behavior is also nice once every few years.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Fraud protections are, by law, much stronger in favor of consumers for credit card transactions in the US. If you have good credit, you can also get 2-4% in credit card cash back on everything via rewards programs.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
  Fraud protection, mostly. If someone steals your debit card and spends all your money, you might very well be fucked. But (in America) if someone steals your credit card and spends a bunch of money, they technically stole money from the bank, so it's the bank that might be fucked, not you. All you have to say is "yeah that wasn't me" and the bank reverses the transaction. If you're blatantly abusing this the bank will end their relationship with you and cancel your card, but that's pretty much worst case scenario, and you won't be on the hook for anything. And they obviously make enough money off of people who carry a balance and pay interest that they still come out way ahead.
- troyvit 3y ago
  I use it because if I used a debit card and it gets compromised then I lose whatever's in my bank account. Maybe I can get it back if I can prove it's fraud? If I use a credit card and it gets compromised then my cash is still secure. If I have to fight a credit card company for 6 months to get the payments reversed I still have cash to live off of. If I don't win then hell I don't pay. Maybe I go to collections and credit gets dinged but my real assets are still mine.
- simne 3y ago
  To boost credit rating. When you have none credits, your credit rating is ZERO, and it is considered bad. So you could pay for example 10$ (yes, small amount) from zero percent credit, and regularly pay it and this will effectively raise credit rating.

sofixa 3y ago

> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee One option is to have regulations about card fees, which is the case in the EU (0.2% for debit, 0.3% for credit). Another is to use an alternative payment method, like India's UPI or Eurozone's SEPA which are free and instantaneous.

Tijdreiziger 3y ago
The UX around card and SEPA payments sucks, though. I hear UPI is nicer.
- captn3m0 3y ago
  But the UPI requirements of forcing mobile apps makes the monetisation usecase UX pretty terrible (think App Intents to and fro on mobile browsers) and scanning QRs on desktop. I’d rather like Taler.
throwaway11460 3y ago
It's actually 2%+fixed amount fee (see e.g. Stripe.com and choose an EU country), 0.2 is just the interbank fee IIRC.
jacobn 3y ago
SEPA via Stripe takes on average 5 days, max 14 according to their docs - instantaneous would be a game changer?! https://stripe.com/docs/payments/sepa-debit https://stripe.com/docs/payments/sepa-debit
- calmoo 3y ago
  Instant free SEPA transfers are becoming more common in the EU, but as an easy payment method it’s still annoying from a UX perspective.
Jommi 3y ago
Where did you read that SEPA is free? Thats not true.

zilti 3y ago

GNU Taler

internetter 3y ago

Frankly, this is probably just going to manifest as a digital currency. Add 10$ to your wallet. At the end of the month that's distributed or something

stevekemp 3y ago
Flattr tried to do something similar, but yes I agree. It's unfortunate that bitcoin became a hoarding/speculation thing, rather than a useful thing. Decentralized micro-transactions would have been cool had they been used with a decent friendly UI and been integrated into a browser or two as an extension.
- internetter 3y ago
  > Decentralized micro-transactions would have been cool had they been used with a decent friendly UI and been integrated into a browser or two as an extension. My position on cryptocurrency as well. I think that the ability to send money in this decentralized manner is fascinating. It's too bad it went far, far beyond that. Cryptocurrency should have never tried to replace normal currency, or any of that NFT bs.
  - johannes1234321 3y ago
    Blockchain isn't really the solution there, though. I don't want a public ledger with all my payments, which tells not only what I consume, but also how much I am able/willing to spend. And as soon as you are in massmarket you need ways for humans to intervene, for handling complaints, mistakes, whatever or dealing with the unavoidable case that individuals lose their secret keys. Or even cases like medical restriction or inheritance requiring others to take over the funds. All those things Blockchain purposely and inherently prevents.
    - pants2 3y ago
      You can just send a transaction from your exchange. Like, let's say I want to send you $0.10 right now. I would just go into Robinhood and send 0.1 USDC to you on Polygon or Solana, that would arrive in your wallet instantly from a Robinhood-owned address, you would have no idea who I am or my previous transaction history. Robinhood also owns the private keys and account recovery process here - it's just using blockchain as the payment rail. Go ahead and post your address and I'll send you $0.10.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

soco 3y ago

I had for a while Coil installed in the browser and nobody cared about it, so I uninstalled it half a year later. I honestly couldn't care less if there's a blockchain behind it or whatever, but as long no sites (useful to me) implement it... Under the line I paid Coil some money for nothing, so maybe for them it was a business success.

armchairhacker 3y ago
I had Coil too. They shut down. https://www.coil.com/#:~:text=On%20March%2015%2C%202023%2C%20we,get%20paid%20on%20the%20Web https://www.coil.com/#:~:text=On%20March%2015%2C%202023%2C%2....

Mistletoe 3y ago

Of course there is, there are tons of cryptocurrencies that can do this but everyone here hates crypto and throws the baby out with the bathwater and won’t stop parroting “SCAM!” every time they hear the word. It’s too expensive to use on-chain transactions on things like Bitcoin or Ethereum but there are other coins. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth-xrp-xmr-doge-etc-ltc-bch-bsv.html#log&3m https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth... You could also use Lightning Network on Bitcoin or any of the Layer 2s on Ethereum like Arbitrum or Optimism. Fees are in the cents range. https://l2fees.info/ https://l2fees.info/

johannes1234321 3y ago
Pointing to my comment elsewhere on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39279246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39279246
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  Some blockchains have private transactions and very good at it indeed. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-xmr.html#log&3m https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-xmr... Monero has fees of six cents it looks like and a novel and private way of performing transactions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature
- wbobeirne 3y ago
  Layer 2s such as Bitcoin's lightning network do not use a public ledger for their transactions. The only thing public is the transaction that opens a payment channel, everything after that happens as peer to peer messaging across the network.

pelorat 3y ago

Good luck getting something like that past Eu regulators.

bee_rider 3y ago
Why? It seems like the sort of privacy-supporting thing they’d like.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  They also like taxes, and this seems like a nightmare for VAT.

Analemma_ 3y ago

> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee? Or an approach that doesn't require one company to have a monopoly over it? The short answer is, no. For the long answer, I really recommend people read a blog like Bits About Money or some Matt Levine columns to start learning about the actual plumbing of finance and payment processors, to see why such a thing is actually difficult or impossible to build. Something that seems like a simple transaction to us, like sending $0.10 to a webiste, actually involves many parties, all of whom are a) hedging against counterparty risk, b) required by law to do KYC/AML and c) required by law to have safeguards against leaving customers in the lurch. Providing a, b and c is expensive in both money and time. There are a lot of layers of abstraction in this system to make sure that you, the end user, don't usually have to think about all the complexity, and so to you it just looks like "I sent money from A to B", but the complexity is nonetheless there and it's a real impediment to getting the kinds of fast, cheap microtxns you want.

CaptainFever 3y ago

This is literally the use case for cryptocurrencies -- digital cash, not investments. In the more... questionably legal parts of the web, Monero is pretty common since you can't use regular banking anyway. The fees are pretty low, at around USD0.001 IIRC. There's also Nano (feeless) but it doesn't seem to be very popular, unfortunately.

jjcm 3y ago
Please correct me if I'm wrong here (I've been out of the crypto game for a couple years), but I don't think crypto holds up here. The nature of transaction fees with crypto is they scale exponentially with demand. Monero fees are low because volume is low. Bitcoin fees are high ($9.97 was the average transaction fee yesterday!) because volume is high. Any fully decentralized crypto at the scale of use that the Web Monetization API would need would have enormous tx prices. There are ways to scale this, ie the lightning network, but those are essentially centralized solutions to scale.
- ptsd_dalmatian 3y ago
  this is the point of lightning network for btc, way lower costsand nearly instantaneous transactions. I haven’t tried it so far.
  - epolanski 3y ago
    Because it's still theory 7 years after announcement it has been proven again and again to not be a real alternative.
    - madacol 3y ago
      Lightning has had lots of problems, but most of those are fixable through software or gets better and better with adoption (at least in theory). The reason adoption has been so low is that with current hardware you cannot run a full node in a phone, so you either get a server to run a full node or you trade-off some control/security of your coins There are still other theoretical problems, mostly things like denial-of-services, but adoption has been what has stagnated it. The hardware/control tradeoff is a real PITA, we need a phone with like 50x more battery or efficient to be able to run lightning in a completely self-custodial manner And there are still some people advocating for blocksize increase, which will make the problems of lightning even worse

config_yml 3y ago

This already works with Crypto, something like Hedera is dirt cheap (1/100 of a cent) and fast and scales really well. Wallets are easy to connect, but the disconnect to regular $$$ is still a bit too big for the regular surfin' user.

uncletammy 3y ago

You've just described the value proposition for bitcoin, a peer to peer electronic cash system. Sadly, bitcoin has been captured by banks and is now only useful for gambling and parasitic investment scams.

ethbr1 3y ago
:/ Distributed ledger technology ever being a viable solution for small, high-frequency transactions seems like a pipe dream. I'm aware that tremendous effort has been and is being invested in that. But I have yet to be convinced efforts in that direction won't all boil down to "trading decentralization for efficiency." In which case, why not use a centralized, much more efficient solution?
- Wazako 3y ago
  How do you centralize without having a government requiring KYC?
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    I'd ask how you decentralize without having a government requiring KYC? Anonymity of nodes? If avoiding KYC / government-control is the primary motivation, then more centralized ledger systems look a lot like current payment networks... just with anonymous operators. (Oof)
  - epolanski 3y ago
    Why is that even a real need? All crypto cultists I know don't give a damn to give all of their info to any provider, out there, be tracked everywhere "they already know everything" and yet there is a problem for a 1$ donation on some random website when they using their real dollars online for literally everything. Also, there's literally 0 ways other than bartering to get bitcoins really anonymously, and the number of people able to transact while staying anonymous is below 0. You need to take your credit card and pay for it on an exchange, so it's not anonymous. And the anonymous chains are borderline ignored, because being anonymous is really not what drags people into Bitcoin, but the hope of finding a fool paying more than they did.

jacobr1 3y ago

Looks like https://getcode.com/ https://getcode.com/ just launched to solve this problem. There have been many attempts at web3 micropayments, but this one seems slicker than most. Hat tip from USV, one of their investors.

Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 3y ago
> Privacy taken too far, however, can lead to bad outcomes. To mitigate the potential of Code being used for nefarious activity, Code users are limited to $250 USD per payment, up to $1000 USD per day. This is a joke. Everything seems to be designed around their proprietary app, so why bother with a blockchain and custom currency at all?

pants2 3y ago

The best way to do this today is through any crypto exchange that supports USDC. I just tested this - I went in to Robinhood and sent 0.01 USDC to a SOL address. It cost me $0.001 as a transfer fee and took about 30 seconds total. I agree the process could be a bit smoother, but it works fairly well.

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago

I'm grateful this hasn't been worked out yet. The magnitude of the shittification of the internet which will occur once this is a solved problem is almost too much to think about. If you are working on this, for the sake of humanity, please stop.

dlbucci 3y ago
I think a large portion of enshittification comes from sites being advertising revenue driven. This leads to them needing more users with higher engagement, so they grow beyond their scope first and then shittify everything when they need to start making money (see reddit). A large reason sites have to be ad driven is that requiring users to sign up and pay for a site is a huge blocker for most people. So I feel like having a standard easy way for users to send money to a site they use for the utility they receive would go some ways to reduce enshittification, not increase it. But maybe I'm just an optimist.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
  I'm not saying there aren't good use-cases for this. There absolutely are. What I'm saying is that this tool WILL be used well beyond those cases in ways that make the internet much worse than the ad and surveillance nonsense we currently have to deal with. As a thought experiment, consider a truly terrible group of smart and capable people. The kind of people who will exploit this new tool to extract and squeeze every cent from others to themselves without any care for what is destroyed, broken, or ruined. Imagine they do exactly this and become wildly rich. Their uncaring ruthlessness richly rewarded leading to normalization of such tactics which are then taken on by others as just the 'way things are done'. I ask you to consider just how this tool could be used for evil and then know that it will be. This tool will allow any/all action on a website to be easily monetized. This will mean that eventually EVERY action will be monetized. Oh, and the ads and surveillance? They'll be there too.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    I can see the risk... yet it's only a risk, and we're already starting to see the tidal wave of SPAM that ever smarter neural networks allow. (Also, thankfully, there are still corners of the Internet that haven't been plagued by either ads or spam - because not popular enough - and are likely to remain so.)

ForHackernews 3y ago

It doesn't even need to be that fast, as long as it's secure and credible. Stock trades in the US happen "instantly" (or near enough), but actual settlement takes place two or three days later. The cryptocurrency people are hung up on the idea of "fast, irreversible payments" (that settle at the same time as the trade) because they desperately want a trustless, digital equivalent of cash for political reasons. But for merchants and mainstream users, a fair, trustworthy payment system run by known intermediaries would be much better. It can be slow, as long as merchants know they'll get their money in some reasonable timeframe. The problem is that the Visa/Mastercard duopoly makes it hard to innovate. It's possible FedNow will fix this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow

itslennysfault 3y ago

I think you need the browsers to act as a broker/escrow. Brave tried to do this, but I'm not sure what ever happened to it. The way their system worked (as I understood it) is you deposited an amount in the browser each month and it was split between the sites you visited that month weighted by how much time you spent on each site, but it only worked for sites that signed up for the Brave reward program (or whatever they called it).

dinobones 3y ago
Brave/BAT is a massive "crypto" grift. It's an ERC20 token that they hold like 30% of in reserves. You also need to signup for Uphold / sign up with Brave to receive payment. It's a cryptocurrency only in implementation, but the actual experience could be replicated with (GoFundMe or any other "creator platform") + A chrome extension.
- itslennysfault 3y ago
  Thanks for the info. I never actually used it and didn't know the details. Its just the only "real" attempt at direct web monetization as an alternative to ads that I've seen. Sad to hear its a crypto thing.

EricMausler 3y ago

I'm working on something under a different use case that could fit for this, but maybe not at the scale people on this forum are looking for without additional support I wont blab about myself here, but I do feel I have relevant background and a couple solid connections to implement something that works. Cryptocurrency has failings for my use-case, based on what I've tried for designing around it so far. For strictly donating money in one direction towards a website, those failings may not be relevant though. Sadly this project is not my day job, though, but it is something I plan to use for myself with or without more widespread adoption so it's moving forward regardless. I'm honestly only working on it because I wanted to do a different project that would work way nicer if tiny transactions with users are possible.

tzs 3y ago

> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee? Or an approach that doesn't require one company to have a monopoly over it? Either one company with a monopoly or maybe a small number of companies is probably the only feasible way to do it, because efficient payment processing is only half the problem. The other half is taxes. Every time someone in a browser pays to unlock content provided by someone in a different tax jurisdiction some government is likely to view that as a taxable sale that someone has to collect sales tax or VAT for. In many places (EU, US) it is the jurisdiction where the buyer resides that is owed the tax, but the seller who is supposed to deal with collecting and paying it. Unless we can get a lot of countries to make special rules for small consumer content purchases that greatly simplify this, the most practical approach is to have a small number of content marketplaces. So say you are in the EU and want to buy an article from the New York Times. Instead of directly paying the NYT you would go to one of the market sites and buy a NYT access token from them. You can use that access token to get your article from the Times. What going through the intermediate marketplace does is make it so your monetary transaction is with them, not the NYT. Instead of each content provider having to deal with taxes in dozens of different jurisdictions it is just the marketplaces. The marketplace would pay the NYT for the access token, but that would be a business to business sale of a product for resale which most places exempt from sales tax and VAT. It's just going to be ordinary income for the content providers that they report on their own income tax. You don't want too many separate marketplaces so that content providers can reasonably offer their content in all of the marketplaces. That way consumers just need an account at one marketplace. The marketplace approach also largely solves the problem of transaction fees. Instead of each article you unlock for $0.10 being a separate charge on your card you'd preload your account at the marketplace you use. You credit card would only be charged for the initial prepay and then whenever you need to refill it. The big issue I see is keeping it from devolving to something like the current streaming movie/TV market where content providers make exclusive deals with different marketplaces.

BlueTemplar 3y ago
But why is the VAT a showstopper ? Because of extra complexity ? But the payment software itself can figure out the exact amounts. Which then can also be aggregated monthly/yearly. Not to mention that plenty of jurisdictions only require that for businesses, while non-businesses don't have to report anything about their donations/sales unless they cross a yearly threshold.

throw10920 3y ago

The obvious solution is to have users buy a proxy currency that goes in a wallet that is then spent in frictionless (and fee-less) microtransactions. Many video game companies use this model, albeit for their own scummy monetization systems, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't work here - is there a reason you're not considering it?