Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#111

Post by ksm1717 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 11:27 PM UTC

1-more wrote: post #101

ksm1717 wrote: post #72

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

when apple trademarked applecoin I had a harebrained idea that they were gonna offer an ad free internet by letting sites mine on their own ASIC on your phone subject to their terms (no other ads). So far nah. I think the basic attention token was something like this?

Basic attention token sounds like this. Would be super cool if you could just drop a webassembly component onto your site and it could run this exchange for you, maybe this is how it works

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#112

Post by 0-_-0 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 11:28 PM UTC

GekkePrutser wrote: post #39

waynesonfire wrote: post #36

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 :)

Why do you say Brave tracks you?

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#113

Post by 37ef_ced3 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 11:32 PM UTC

oarsinsync wrote: post #106

37ef_ced3 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The example given (Vultr) is equivalent to a Starbucks card. You’re prepaying a company for a service. The transaction is the prepayment. How you use that balance is now irrelevant. 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 ar…

Yes, Vultr allows you to exceed the loaded amount

The difference is due at the end of the month. If I didn't pay, they would simply charge the last credit card I used to load the account (I suppose)

Another example: Linode (https://www.linode.com/) charges my credit card at the end of each month, to cover my usage. So a $5 cloud instance isn't paid for until the month ends. The point is to aggregate a whole month of spending into a single credit card payment

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#114

Post by paxys » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 11:34 PM UTC

People are mentioning technical & payment processing hurdles, but those are all easy to figure out. Look at the gaming industry, mobile app stores, iTunes, online gambling, toll booths, tipping on various online platforms. Micropayments are most definitely already a thing, and have been for a while.

A better version of your question is – why do newspapers charge for a monthly subscription instead of a per-article fee? The simple reason is that the numbers just don't work out. They'd have to charge a lot per article and have people pay for a lot of them to break even with the current subscription or ad-supported model, and that's not going to happen. And even if it does, there would just be too much day-to-day variance in sales. The reason subscriptions are popular is that businesses like a steady, predictable stream of revenue.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#115

Post by 8note » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 11:35 PM UTC

floatingatoll wrote: post #91

People don't like paying money for things, and they especially don't like paying small amounts of money for things. People also have less money these days to spare, and an overflow of content that doesn't require them to pay.

I'm fine paying for things, but I don't like paying to receive advertisements. I refuse to subscribe to magazines and news papers and the like because if they get my address, the go open season on sending me junk mail advertisements for their other magazines

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#116

Post by tyingq » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 11:37 PM UTC

posguy wrote: post #4

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…

I suspect there are some regulatory hurdles if the held money can be spent with companies other than the one that takes the deposit. You bleed into banking rules.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#117

Post by harry8 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 11:41 PM UTC

RustyRussell wrote: post #76

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…

>due to fee structure

Why is a little bit of data exchange so expensive? (Ok because they can, so why aren't the competitors to drive that fee structure down? What's the barrier to entry?)

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#118

Post by benlivengood » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 11:52 PM UTC

Aren't micropayments on mobile platforms a big thing in India, China, and Africa?

Practically things like Spotify and Netflix are microtransactions; you just don't have to worry about the details of how much each product costs.

Unfortunately the incentives for these marketplaces are to power them with subscriptions instead of, say, a monthly bill, and so what tends to happen is fragmented markets where new players hope to capture a segment of the monthly subscriptions people are willing to maintain instead of a fraction of the market as a whole.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#119

Post by kylebenzle » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 11:54 PM UTC

RustyRussell wrote: post #76

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…

Lightning over Bitcoin? This can't be serious, can it? LN is vaporware from day one. It serves no purpose because it is essentially centralizing a decentralized service. And when it still cost $5-10 to send BTC to a LN node, you are no better off than credit card fees.

Hilariously BTC had this problem solved from day one, then Blockstream hijacked the GitHub repo, kicked out all the original devs and artificially limited the block size to try and push people onto their own "second layer" products.

Why anyone would use LN rather than just real Bitcoin (now called Bitcoin Cash) is beyond me. They have lots of trolls (Adam Back) and social engineers (Greg Maxwell) pushing a false narrative but how real people fall for it is still just bizarre.

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

#120

Post by morgandixon » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 11:56 PM UTC

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #104

The problem is the mental overhead, not the fee. If every single article click adds an extra mental overhead of "is this worth paying for? how much have i spent this month on reading?", people will simply stop clicking. Headlines are already super optimized to get you to click. The impact of a mental tax before every click would be at least -10x a good headline and seriously puts the media company at risk of bankrupt…

I agree that mental overhead is a large factor. The technical challenges to enable micropayments seem inconsequential to me.

I’d add that the very act of deciding something’s worth could cost more than the thing itself. For example, an article might be priced at $.01, but it costs me $.50 worth of my time to decide if $.01 is a reasonable price.