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Would be great if the US government somehow facilitated micropayment. Either by creating their own system or removing the capital gains reporting requirements o

Would be great if the US government somehow facilitated micropayment. Either by creating their own system or removing the capital gains reporting requirements on crypto (maybe up to $10k/year).

throwaway2037 2y ago
If micropayment is such an amazing solution to these problems, why haven't we seen a working solution after more than 20 years of talking about it? Why doesn't HN have multiple competing micropayment startups? To me, the results speak for themselves. Another outcome that I could never understand: The original conversation was micropayments for traditional print media that was moving into the digital age. Why didn't they all band together to create an industry standard that defined (and possibly administered) a micropayment system? In the end, paywalls were the solution, and winner-mostly-takes-all when print moved to digital. Look at the decline in medium to small newspapers in the last 20 years in the US. It is devastating, but a few national, major newspapers are doing OK.
- mapt 2y ago
  You are talking about appreciable micropayments for appreciable amounts of entertainment from small creators. And I would argue we did get those in the form of subscriptions in Patreon, Onlyfans, Buy Me A Coffee, et al, or in the co-op world of Nebula. We didn't get them down to very low fee structures because we've designed our payment infrastructure with the intent of supporting a profitable company called Visa, Inc, to which we've offloaded a number of different functions of that a government mint / treasury / post office would normally perform. And because lots of revenue on these sites comes from whales, people with outsized income in a country with a great deal of wealth inequality. What I am talking about is TINY micropayments just for human authentication purposes. Because what we've had so far in the realm of, for example, spam email, involves sending off messages at a CPM of less than a tenth of a penny. Imposing infrastructure which pegs human authentication tasks, normally performed less than ten times a day, at a CPM of ten dollars, can eliminate most applications of automated systems and eliminate the annoyance of captcha, while costing the human less than ten cents. There are no whales in the login space.

Would be great if the US government somehow facilitated micropayment. Either by creating their own system or removing the capital gains reporting requirements on crypto (maybe up to $10k/year).

throwaway2037 2y ago

If micropayment is such an amazing solution to these problems, why haven't we seen a working solution after more than 20 years of talking about it? Why doesn't HN have multiple competing micropayment startups? To me, the results speak for themselves. Another outcome that I could never understand: The original conversation was micropayments for traditional print media that was moving into the digital age. Why didn't they all band together to create an industry standard that defined (and possibly administered) a micropayment system? In the end, paywalls were the solution, and winner-mostly-takes-all when print moved to digital. Look at the decline in medium to small newspapers in the last 20 years in the US. It is devastating, but a few national, major newspapers are doing OK.

mapt 2y ago
You are talking about appreciable micropayments for appreciable amounts of entertainment from small creators. And I would argue we did get those in the form of subscriptions in Patreon, Onlyfans, Buy Me A Coffee, et al, or in the co-op world of Nebula. We didn't get them down to very low fee structures because we've designed our payment infrastructure with the intent of supporting a profitable company called Visa, Inc, to which we've offloaded a number of different functions of that a government mint / treasury / post office would normally perform. And because lots of revenue on these sites comes from whales, people with outsized income in a country with a great deal of wealth inequality. What I am talking about is TINY micropayments just for human authentication purposes. Because what we've had so far in the realm of, for example, spam email, involves sending off messages at a CPM of less than a tenth of a penny. Imposing infrastructure which pegs human authentication tasks, normally performed less than ten times a day, at a CPM of ten dollars, can eliminate most applications of automated systems and eliminate the annoyance of captcha, while costing the human less than ten cents. There are no whales in the login space.