4 ms·
I’d even pay a respectable amount more than that, but it needs to take like 3 seconds tops with no typing. Heck, the faster it is, the more likely I’d be to imp
by nlawalker 1y ago
I’d even pay a respectable amount more than that, but it needs to take like 3 seconds tops with no typing. Heck, the faster it is, the more likely I’d be to impulse buy more content from the same place.
I’d be fine with some up front work to create an account and associate a payment method or something, but not on each individual site. PayPal pretty much fits the bill for me for most transactions, where is PayPal for microtransactions?
- SpaceNoodled 1y agoBRB gonna make Superman 3 money
- greyface- 1y agoIn addition to being frictionless, it needs to be anonymous - if the publisher ends up receiving my full name, email address, phone number, and/or postal address, then I'll continue to choose piracy.
- salawat 1y agoCongratulations. You've proposed something dead on arrival in our current regulatory regime. You can't have financial transfers like that. Only criminals want/need that. What are you, some sort of money launderer? No electronic funds transfer without that transparency of origin, says the man in Washington.
- greyface- 1y agoThat's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.
- dyauspitr 1y agoThere’s plenty of destruction going on and it doesn’t look like a brighter future.
- robocat 1y agoThe present system seems perfectly capable of destroying itself without our help.
- greyface- 1y agoI was (somewhat obliquely) quoting Arthur C. Clarke from 1969. It's been 56 years, and in that time the present system has yet to come close to destroying itself.
- robocat 1y agoYou can not say it hasn't come close yet: that is not measurable. How many brinks have there been in the last 56 years, is surely undefinable because we don't know the effects of quantum butterflies in the counterfactual timeline. We might be able to say it hasn't destroyed itself yet? And what is meant by the "present system" is unclear. Plus the present system cannot be the past system so your choice of words is kinda weird! Sorry, pedantic nitpicking can be a hobby. I don't like this comment.
- tobr 1y agoI guess you’re being sarcastic, but I think it’s perfectly fine that only the middleman handling the transaction and skimming off the top knows who the customer is. Plenty of systems like that around.
- ruined 1y agotoo bad the middleman sells that too
- salawat 1y ago>I guess you’re being sarcastic, but I think it’s perfectly fine that only the middleman handling the transaction and skimming off the top knows who the customer is. It isn't fine. Third Party Doctrine. You don't have expectation of privacy or protections from search and seizure. You waived them by using the middleman. Yes. There is some surface sarcasm, but also complete, genuine, resigned sincerity. You have to take in and appreciate a lot of non-statutory law, which no one tends to explain to the populace in a general and succinct way to inform them of how the world (in this case, the U.S. financial system) is architected. It has been hewn, unambiguously, into a tool that functions primarily to make law enforcement tractable by plugging into the end objective of the vast majority of criminal activity: financial gain. This means arbitrary middlemen, lack of KYC, non-presence of AML precludes the existence of low friction, anonymous finance. I didn't want the status quo, I don't believe it's right. I've dug into how it works, and I stepped away from what had hitherto been a productive and lucrative career because I can't support it through positive action anymore. It isn't right. Don't know what's more right, but I damn well know we shouldn't have the financial system acting as a surveillance device.
- darqis 1y agosarcasm is too complicated for the average HN viewer, obviously smh
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoSarcasm is cheap and parses as defeatism. Everybody knows the system is doing financial mass surveillance. How do we get it to stop?
- prognu 1y agohttps://taler-ops.ch/ https://taler-ops.ch/ is live in Switzerland and allows exactly this: anonymous microtransactions. What law exactly would prevent someone from doing the same in the US?
- sneak 1y agoThe Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) as amended under USA-PATRIOT. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act
- slaw 1y agoKYC is mandatory in the US. You can't send money without knowing your recipient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer
- socalgal2 1y agoCan I send money to someone else and then have them pay? Example: etsy knows who I am but maybe every individual store does not? Similarly patreon knows who I am but each person I'm supporting does not? How about only fans?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- slaw 1y agoIt's not you transferring money, it is Etsy, Patreon,.. they have to know recipient.
- PopAlongKid 1y agoUnless you are allowing 6-digit fraudulent payments, as documented in this other thread currently on page 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44377104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44377104
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
- cco 1y agoI'd love it if a wallet in my Chrome browser would let websites show me a prompt (paywall) that would charge me some small number of cents. Hold down for two seconds to pay. A dream. Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
- jdminhbg 1y ago> Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards. Nah, you can send USDC for less than a tenth of a penny now: https://tokentool.bitbond.com/gas-price/base https://tokentool.bitbond.com/gas-price/base The issue is getting people to actually get over the hump of deciding to send money to someone.
- tim333 1y agoI wouldn't mind sending 10c or some such but have never in ~30 years of internet use been offered that. It's all "sign up now for $1/month! (smallprint: after first month it's $29/mo billed annually up from and a pain to cancel)"
- janandonly 1y agoYou clearly never “zapped” a few says before via any Nostr client.
- sandspar 1y agoThis is what ads promised to be. Ads are the automatic, frictionless wallet that we all dreamed of. But the market countered them in various ways so we're back to being stuck.
- close04 1y ago> This is what ads promised to be ... But the market countered them Not at all, this assessment is either revisionist history or completely misses what OP is asking for and what ads are. When you pay for an article with money you know exactly what you're in for, you don't just click and then hope the site doesn't take too much. Ads as a form of payment are completely outside the reader's control. You have to commit to pay a price before knowing what the price is. The site can display any number of them, they come attached to a lot of tracking, they can be absolutely offensive or obnoxious, they increase data usage, and maybe worst of all they can be dangerous malware. Nobody blocked ads when they were just a few static gif banners on websites. And if money was abused today like ads are, you'd be up in arms. But instead you're defending the abusive travesty that ads turned out to be, and blaming "the market" (as in the users, not the ads industry) for rejecting them.
- horsawlarway 1y agoThis is not at all what ads are... Ads are an incentive structure that ruins content by making the true customer a company that wants to run an ad, not the person consuming the content. That's an untenable conflict of interest for the publishing party, because it means they're actually in the business of selling eyeballs and clicks to those companies, not selling media for me to choose to consume. All the incentives are wrong, and it shows in the content produced and optimized for this payment method.
- JohnFen 1y agoAnd it might have been a decent compromise had ad companies not taken a maximally hostile stance toward people in terms of spying, intrusiveness, and etc.
- Workaccount2 1y agoLet me remind people that ABP (ad block pro) the OG ad blocker, collapsed and gave rise to uBlock because ABP understood that the internet would go to shit if no one viewed ads, so they tried to strike a truce between users and ad companies. The users decided to go the "why are you negotiating with the enemy? Block everything!" route and ABP was done for.
- rebeccaskinner 1y agoSeveral years ago I (briefly) worked at a startup that was trying to do this for publishing (but has since pivoted into generic ad-tech). My impression at the time was that most publishers weren’t onboard. True or not, they seemed to think if you’d pay a penny for an article then you might but a subscription and so they want you to make an account, want your contact info so they can send you spam, etc. The other issue is that big name publishers saw micropayments as eating into their subscription revenue and weren’t interested, but without them it was hard to put together a compelling enough bundle of sites to overcome the signup friction for users. I still think it’s a good idea but I don’t see how you overcome those obstacles.
- matthewmacleod 1y agoI think the only way that will ever come about is an implementation by an existing incumbent. Like, let's say Apple added some kind of web microtransaction support – essentially every user already has payment details registered with Apple, and a tiny "pay 10¢ to read this article" banner would likely to be easy to implement result in almost zero friction for the user.
- netsharc 1y agoI guess it needs to have the YouTube Premium/Netflix model, you pay a subscription per month, and reading articles don't cost anything any more, but the provider pays the publisher some of the cents out of your subscription fee. Obviously limits need to be built, otherwise the heavy readers will drain the provider's bank account...
- majewsky 1y agoExcept it's actually 13 cents because of the Apple tax.
- BariumBlue 1y agoTrue that's a good point - if publishers were OK with micro purchases for their articles, we'd see some publishers try that out. Nothing's stopping the NYT and similar from trying a "pay as you go model". The fact that publishers haven't experimented with that implies they're not interested, which dooms any project like this from the start.