101–110 of 194 posts
An 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
Taxes 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…
A large number of other states have followed South Dakota's lead, and went with $100k or 200 transactions for their sales tax nexus laws.
[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/south-dakota-v-w...
People don't like to do transactions. It taxes our brains and makes us make decisions constantly. We like all you can eat and watch as much as you like. Paying for things sucks even if you just pay small amounts.
Thank you. For the longest time I thought there was just something wrong with me. Rarely would you find a comment in an article about micropayments that pointed out that micropayments sound, stressful! It causes me anxiety just having to think about having to consider making payments everytime I click on an article, for example, even if it's a tiny $0.01 amount each time.
So, on such note; when you turn on the light when entering a room, do you have anxiety thinking about how that costs money? We are constantly making tiny momentary transactions without thinking about it at all: the issue is UI, not transactions.
Processing 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…
As secondary evidence for it being illegal in the US, the scheme you are proposing is pretty much exactly what WeChat and Alipay do in China. It is also exactly the problem that Paypal and Venmo were made to solve, but for some reason they chose much more convoluted and restricted solutions even though from a technical standpoint it is harder to do what they actually did rather than the absolutely trivial technical problem of the fully featured solution which just manages account balances and transfers between them, a literal CS 101 type of technical problem.
As 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…
Obviously you are aware of this, but here is a concrete example of micropayments in practice: When I use (for example) Vultr cloud compute ( https://www.vultr.com/ ), I load my Vultr account with $10 via credit card. Once the money enters the account it remains there until it is spent Then I pay 1 or 2 cents each hour for a cloud instance. At the end of each month, Vultr tells we what's due if I exceed what remains i…
Micro transactions to a range of different independent businesses requires using existing payment networks (visa / MasterCard / etc: relatively expensive; crypto: lack of widespread adoption) or building a new payment network.
> If you are willing to trust an intermediary (and most people are)
We already do. It’s called the bank. We also have regulation that helps. How many people keep real money in their personal PayPal accounts? How many people can even afford to?
EDIT: I retract my Vultr / Starbucks equivalence.
> At the end of each month, Vultr tells we what's due if I exceed what remains in the account. If necessary I load more money in
Starbucks will not let your spend exceed your deposits on your card. Your statement suggests Vultr will. Credit accounts are a whole other risk. What happens if you don’t pay off your balance after you’ve already consumed the service?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
maybe whats needed is a system that tallies up the sites you've visited and at the end of the month you can just say, allocate 5 bucks among them. Or if you've had a rough month, maybe don't give anything. Maybe you can distribute you payments once a year. Or make slight adjustments to it and not give a site any money if you feel.
There've been several projects that did exactly that. Like Brave with their BAT tokens. But it never took off. Personally I don't like them because these things don't normally opt you out of ad tracking as well. When I pay I want to be the customer and not be tracked. I also don't want to give any personal details. They know nothing about me when I buy a newspaper in the shop. It should be like this :)
Is 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?
An 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.