101–110 of 190 posts
From an economic point of view, wasting people's time in exchange for a free service is worse than either charging them what the market can bear, or providing a free service. If you charged them, you would benefit. If you didn't charge, the users would benefit. But if you make a demand on their time which doesn't have any benefit for you, both of you are worse off.
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In Portugal ATM systems are like tiny Internet, so some websites generate a one time ID number that you can use for an ATM transfer. Basically you get the ID, then either make use of online banking or go to the next ATM machine around the corner and make the transfer.
So we've gone from filling out a form to either switching to a new tab and logging in to online banking to make the transfer, or even worse, leaving the building to go to an ATM?
Online banking and mobile phone app are still an option as well.
Also we don't charge for ATM operations, so they are available on almost every street, at least on major cities.
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> I used to argue for Bitcoin, but at $6K that's crazy. Well, Bitcoin may not be good for micropayments, but that's not the reason; you don't have to have integer numbers of bitcoin, you can have 0.00016666 bitcoins (~$1 at $6k/BTC).
Lightning Network, coming soon to a blockchain near you.
From an economic point of view, wasting people's time in exchange for a free service is worse than either charging them what the market can bear, or providing a free service. If you charged them, you would benefit. If you didn't charge, the users would benefit. But if you make a demand on their time which doesn't have any benefit for you, both of you are worse off.
This, to me, seems like a strange way of thinking. They're not 'wasting people's time,' they're making a request of them in exchange for a service. Instead of turning them away entirely as a full paywall may have, they got some information or at least amusement out of them, and the user still gets their service. Users benefit either way; the question is whether they have to pay in exchange for it or answer a question…
Bitcoin wastes a lot of energy. Does it technically get used? Sure, it does, it's used to verify transactions. Is that still a waste of energy? Yes, because there are way better things we could do with that energy, like verifying transactions using coins that aren't obsolete i.e. aren't bitcoin.
Similarly, they're wasting the user's time here because while yes, the user is doing something by writing an apology, it's still much less valuable than what that user could be doing.
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This is exactly the problem, and it's a difficult one to solve. I've seen research suggesting that the cognitive cost of filling out payment forms and giving out credit card information makes it easier to pay $10 than $1, since it doesn't feel "worth" all that effort to pay only one dollar. Unfortunately this is part of what reinforces the market dominance of mega-retailers like Amazon, because if you already have an…
> cognitive cost of filling out payment forms, etc. That's exactly the case for me. I spend physical cash with much less hesitation than for online purchases. I'd probably spend way more freely online if I didn't have to keep track of the purchase just in case something goes wrong, like getting mis-charged, double-billed, a continuing subscription I wasn't expecting, or just to remember why that $1 debit appears on m…
Though PayPal doesn't feel like that, I guess being in the browser is off-putting in terms of spending because of added risk.
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Online micropayments is still a woefully untouched market, it was supposed to be the wave of the future some years ago, but never went anywhere. I won't pay 10 dollars a month (each) to the NYT (LAT, WaPo, et al) for a subscription I might quite happily pay 5 to 20 cents for an article though. I can see a service that functions a lot like EZPass, you load your account with 5-10 bucks, you agree to pay by clicking a p…
I think it is untouched market, since there were many attempts and it didn't work. I call it a "micropayments dream"... publishers dream about it, but it is not going to happen. I personally would not pay 5 cent per article, since I don't want the burden in the back of my mind to evaluate, if that particular article was "worth" 5 cents. Also, if there is a commentary which goes against my opinions, I might want to re…
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> Anyone can afford a dollar At the moment I'm unemployed and I'm literally living day to day just waiting for some kind of break. It's easy to say "anyone can afford a dollar" while you sit in your $4,000 apartment sipping a late` that was just brought to you in less than five minutes by any of fifty different food delivery services available to you. But consider that there are plenty of people who have a basic comp…
That's a pretty rude comment. I'm sure cpncrunch understands that, literally, not everyone on the planet can afford to pay a dollar. Please adjust your tone. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/24ca461fd6d32f17a5ac07b91a...
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>> don't think it's worth paying $1 Key word there is paying . A buck is fine with me, but I don't have a good way to offer it. I'm not giving you my credit card number, email or phone number; I'm not going to spend even 10 seconds filling out a form just for your site; I don't use PayPal; I don't currently authorize you to ever take any more than the buck I want to give you right now; I want a refund if the function…
This is exactly the problem, and it's a difficult one to solve. I've seen research suggesting that the cognitive cost of filling out payment forms and giving out credit card information makes it easier to pay $10 than $1, since it doesn't feel "worth" all that effort to pay only one dollar. Unfortunately this is part of what reinforces the market dominance of mega-retailers like Amazon, because if you already have an…
Example: you're presented with the meme of your choice with the watermark and for X coin value you can remove the watermark, you send X to the requested endpoint (maybe sign up for an account or you're given a location where the new meme will appear once payment is confirmed) and you get your un-watermarked meme. You leave happy, they've received value for their services.
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That's not going to work given that it is still CC on the back end -- per-tx fees will eat you alive at the $1/tx level.
I'd guess it'd eat $0.50 of a $1.00 transaction, maybe a bit less if you're lucky. That's bad, but it's workable if you have low operating costs - it certainly isn't a loss. Most people seem to think $5.00 is when credit transactions start making more sense. Amusingly, Amazon charges me $0.14 every single month for my usage of Amazon S3. I wonder if they've got some sort of sick deal where they don't pay per-tx.
Off-topic but I had this (except I have a non-US card, so the foreign transaction fee was larger than the S3 bill). I contacted Amazon and asked if I could prepay $50 and they added a small balance to my account for free that'll cover my tiny S3 usage for the next few years