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// in the late 90's ... // Yeah, it was well known even in the early days of the internet that this would be a problem. The pioneers were not entirely unsucces

by rhelz 3y ago

// in the late 90's ... // Yeah, it was well known even in the early days of the internet that this would be a problem. The pioneers were not entirely unsuccessful in developing methods for which people could get paid---we know who Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are because of PayPal. It was far short of their original goals, but at least they were trying to solve the right problem.

wkat4242 3y ago
PayPal was not about micropayments though. And its transaction costs are higher than banks (at least European banks, not sure about US). They were never the solution. I have to admit I use them a lot now but it's mainly because my own bank has a really retarded SecureCode implementation that I need to use their ridiculously horrible app for. So I tend to ignore it and just use PayPal where I can simply use my Yubikey for auth.
- rhelz 3y ago
  yeah, as I said, they weren't entirely unsuccessful....which also means they were mostly unsuccessful, alas. This does, however, mean that the opportunity still exists for anybody who want to try it. The problem is there's just too much of a "bump" in inconvenience going from charging nothing to charging even fractions of a cent. In fact, the amount of pain necessary (dealing with banks, regulators, taxes, 50 individual states with different sales tax, not to mention every country earth, etc) is pretty much the same whether you are charging a thousandth of a cent or a thousand dollars. What can't be done individually, retail, can sometimes be done collectively, wholesale. The government could just collect a tax-per-megabyte of data sucked from the web, and distribute the receipts according to how much each provider of that data sent the data. Or it could be a progressive tax, just factored into your income tax. Even though that could be implemented with very low marginal overhead (we already have an IRS, which is already set up to take money from people, and distribute money to people as refunds), the political difficulties in such a scheme are obvious. This leaves either ads (which incentivizes "news" sources to print florid opinions instead of fact) or pay for no adds (like YouTube premium) which incentiizes spamming so many adds that the users will pay to stop the pain. But yeah, the need is still out there. Someday some financial genius will figure out a way to do it and will be as rich as Rockafellers.

by rhelz 3y ago

wkat4242 3y ago

PayPal was not about micropayments though. And its transaction costs are higher than banks (at least European banks, not sure about US). They were never the solution. I have to admit I use them a lot now but it's mainly because my own bank has a really retarded SecureCode implementation that I need to use their ridiculously horrible app for. So I tend to ignore it and just use PayPal where I can simply use my Yubikey for auth.

rhelz 3y ago
yeah, as I said, they weren't entirely unsuccessful....which also means they were mostly unsuccessful, alas. This does, however, mean that the opportunity still exists for anybody who want to try it. The problem is there's just too much of a "bump" in inconvenience going from charging nothing to charging even fractions of a cent. In fact, the amount of pain necessary (dealing with banks, regulators, taxes, 50 individual states with different sales tax, not to mention every country earth, etc) is pretty much the same whether you are charging a thousandth of a cent or a thousand dollars. What can't be done individually, retail, can sometimes be done collectively, wholesale. The government could just collect a tax-per-megabyte of data sucked from the web, and distribute the receipts according to how much each provider of that data sent the data. Or it could be a progressive tax, just factored into your income tax. Even though that could be implemented with very low marginal overhead (we already have an IRS, which is already set up to take money from people, and distribute money to people as refunds), the political difficulties in such a scheme are obvious. This leaves either ads (which incentivizes "news" sources to print florid opinions instead of fact) or pay for no adds (like YouTube premium) which incentiizes spamming so many adds that the users will pay to stop the pain. But yeah, the need is still out there. Someday some financial genius will figure out a way to do it and will be as rich as Rockafellers.