Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

But people into finance are already pretty much into money...

I still view the internet as something that should be free and any transaction pisses me off. No matter how cheap it is I will avoid having to pay unless one of the conditions are met:

- I really need the article in question

- It's something substantial that I really think is worth money (e.g. a book)

For example, if I spend 2 cent on an article that turns out to be clickbait I will be royally pissed. Which I acknowledge is totally absurd because 2 cents affects my financial situation in no way whatsoever. But this is not how it feels to me. Logically I shouldn't even think about it at all, it's not worth even thinking about. But this is not how this works.

I'm pretty sure that people dealing with stocks are generally less bothered having to deal in stuff because they are in the middle of the economic model (it makes them money as well as takes it) whereas I'm purely at the end of it, only spending.

Very nice points. People are not that averse to metered pricing. There is a strong aversion towards unpredictable charges.

There are a lot of complications to this, but I'm optimistic that eventually this will be a more common user experience.

1. Credit card vendors have flat fees that will eat up a whole transaction if it's too small. For instance, strip has a flat 30c fee. This means the only reasonable way to do this is to have a user pre-pay a large sum and reduce from that, or to batch their transactions and extend them some credit. The former dissuades people from making a payment at all, and the latter runs the risk of bounced charges or users never purchasing enough to justify the charge.

2. There is no universal payments API. Browsers are starting to work on this with the w3c web payments standard https://www.w3.org/Payments/ but this is just for user input. You still have to work with companies like Stripe or PayPal to then actually make the charge.

3. Dark patterns are more successful. You see this with a lot of game currencies. By forcing users into larger purchases, you can get them to justify spending more (e.g. bundling multiple items into one package, maybe with "discounts") and if you sell your own currency, you can make the values not add up evenly so that the user has leftover balance that they perceive as being "wasted" unless they buy more.

I work on a web extension that provides a javascript API for making payments using the Bitcoin Lightning network: https://lightningjoule.com/. I really love the possibilities that small payments open up, and have been working to smooth out the UX of having to confirm a payment every time: https://medium.com/@wbobeirne/introducing-joule-allowances-2.... However it's still a long way from any mainstream adoption.

The US already has a government-facilitated money transfer system that was specifically created to make small electronic money transfers accessible for more people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network

Nano is a cryptocurrency that is completely feeless. It's the only feeless payment system I know of. (This is not an endorsement, though the handful of transactions I've done with it over the past couple years worked as advertised.)