Isn't this essentially what the Brave browser does?
Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
71–80 of 194 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#72An idea I had recently that relates to this - sites use some of your compute power to mine crypto in your browser and credit your wallet some rate, other sites like news sites draw from your wallet when you browse
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#73For reference, there's Web Monetization [1] which tries to solve exactly that. As others have noted it all boils down to user agent support. Otherwise most publishers probably won't consider giving up ad or subscription financed models. Also, forcing users into subscriptions allows for better demographics data/statistics. [1] https://webmonetization.org/docs/explainer/
https://webmonetization.org/ lists Coil (flat $5/mo) as the first Web Monetization provider: https://coil.com/
Web Monetization builds upon ILP (Interledger Protocol), which is designed to work with any type of ledger; though it's probably not possible for any traditional ledger to beat the <1¢ transaction fee that only pre-mined coins have been able to achieve.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#74Here's some older explanations: Clay Shirky: http://web.archive.org/web/20060214180624/http://www.openp2p... Andrew Odlyzko: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/case.against.micropaymen... Nick Szabo: http://web.archive.org/web/20080514172459/http://szabo.best....
I still think Shirky is pretty much spot-on after a couple of decades. Even when it seemed as if "midi-payments" might be getting some traction in music and apps, they've now mostly turned into either subscriptions, ad-supported, or "free to play." And arguably a bunch of midi-subscriptions (e.g. $1/month) is even worse because enough of those and they add up to a real money leak. For subscriptions, I'd much rather have a $5-15/month that is a sufficient line item that I'll spend the time to consider whether I really want this or not.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#75Processing a credit card costs $0.02 per card, plus interchange of up to 3%. Debit processing is $0.22 cents plus 0.05%. Both of these are the baseline cost, your merchant processor often won't be able to even get these rates for their own wholesale rates. Now try and build a micropayments ecosystem ontop of this infrastructure that is very expensive to interact with (in the context of $0.01 charges). Amazon can do i…
The answer to this, which I am a little surprised no one has tried to implement (maybe someone has tried?), is to charge the end customer in some larger amount - say $5 or $10, and then draw down the micro transaction amount as you go. So if you could pay $5 a month (or at a time) but gain access to every article, site, video, piece of content etc, and it auto deducts from your balance then you don't have the transac…
I must be misremembering, but isn’t that what paypal did long ago?
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#76As sometime who has worked full time on this for over 5 years now, I have found a few aspects of your answer:
The technical challenges of doing it with credit cards are overwhelming (in CC parlance, a "microtransaction" is anything under $10) due to fee structure.
You can simplify this by using a different payment rail (in my case, Lightning over Bitcoin), but now you have a different problem: nobody has Bitcoin.
You also need to add the lack of convincing incentive: since microtransactions don't yet exist, there's no proof that that's a market for them. That leap of faith is a significant barrier.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#77An idea I had recently that relates to this - sites use some of your compute power to mine crypto in your browser and credit your wallet some rate, other sites like news sites draw from your wallet when you browse
Wouldn't it be more efficient to just send money directly?
I mean, the user will still end up paying someone. But with the mining strategy, instead of directly paying sites, the user will pay the electric company.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#78Is the Brave browser a pseudo-solution to this problem? It can hold a crypto coin balance and either collect more of it through advertisements or pay it out to publishers like news sites.
Why pseudo-solution?
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#79There was (is?) a website that charges you a couple of cents per article. They offer content from many different magazines. I got some free credit during the early phase. Even though I wasn't even spending my own money, seeing the amount go down after every article made me realize that none of the articles I read were worth any money.
On the other hand, I am willing to spend $80 on a book if it contains really valuable information.
One idea I like is spending $x flat each month and then consume as much as I like knowing that the amount gets shared equally among all the creators whose contents I have consumed. There probably are businesses with such a mode out there but I am not aware of any.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#80Taxes are a big reason. Consider a site in the US with customers in the US. Quite a few states require you to collect sales tax on sales to customers in those states. Most have thresholds and you only have to collect taxes if you exceed those thresholds, but unfortunately most of those thresholds are of the form sales of at least $D dollars or at least T transactions. $D is usually reasonably high, like $100k or $200…
You only have to collect state sales tax if you have a taxable nexus in that state (basically, six figure revenue from that state alone in a fiscal year or a physical presence in that state)
I doubt many non-US companies meet this condition in more than a few states. Hell, I doubt many US companies even meet this requirement (nb, that's why a lot of smaller ecommerce stores don't collect tax). That would be a minimum of $5,000,000 in yearly revenue from the US alone - more than enough to assume that they have at least one accountant on payroll to deal with this.