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

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

#161

Post by herbst » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 9:51 AM UTC

37ef_ced3 wrote: post #97

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…

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 benefit of Bitcoin (or blockchains generally) is that you don't need to trust anyone. In 2009 this was considered important, but today, does anyone care?

I dont see how this is any less relevant today than it was 12 years ago.

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

#162

Post by ThePhysicist » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 9:51 AM UTC

Mozilla tries to changes this with their "Grant for the Web" (https://www.grantfortheweb.org/), we hope to participate in the second round with an open-source tool that gives people the choice to regularly pay for websites they like in exchange for zero tracking and advertisements. 1 cent for an article wouldn't work though as the numbers just don't add up for most sites, 10 cents to 1 USD/EUR are more realistic.

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

#163

Post by sli » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 9:52 AM UTC

The biggest one I know of that's meant for your example use-case is Flattr but as you can tell by needing to ask, nobody's heard of it or really cares much about it anymore. These days it seems to be a bit more similar to Patreon.

https://flattr.com/

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

#164

Post by cblconfederate » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 9:52 AM UTC

sliken wrote: post #108

0-_-0 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why pseudo -solution?

Maybe because it requires the content provider to join a new ad/payment network and most haven't.

BAT is a cryptocurrency which can be traded for another coin which can then be traded for USD or other etc etc. It's not a lock-in

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

#165

Post by herbst » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 9:53 AM UTC

willmadden wrote: post #152

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…

>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. The problem is that Lightning essentially is a subscription service. The user has to lock much more Bitcoin in a channel in order use Lightning for micro transactions, which defeats the purpose. The minimum fee to get a Bitcoin transaction confirmed in a reasonable a…

I realize the issue is even less people having it. But there are chains like Tron that have the fee issue basically solved.

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

#166

Post by herbst » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 9:56 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #145

You can give someone as little as a dollar via a service like PayPal. In the world today, that's pretty small. I think the endless discussion of a desire for "micropayments" is just another excuse for "We don't really want to pay for content and we imagine if you get it down to a penny, that's so close to zero, we think it would basically be free." I imagine if someone solved it, there would be some new complaint (li…

> You can give someone as little as a dollar via a service like PayPal. In the world today, that's pretty small.

In theorie you can with "friends and family", but you can't charge a dollar. It costs 2.9% and $0.30 for any transaction. You end up with something like 0.68 before transfer costs to your actual bank.

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

#167

Post by herbst » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 9:58 AM UTC

ericnolte wrote: post #57

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.

Its a few years ago, but when i earned something like $1500 in ads each month, brave paid calculated something around $2. I haven't looked into it since.

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

#168

Post by DoreenMichele » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 10:29 AM UTC

herbst wrote: post #166

DoreenMichele wrote: post #145

You can give someone as little as a dollar via a service like PayPal. In the world today, that's pretty small. I think the endless discussion of a desire for "micropayments" is just another excuse for "We don't really want to pay for content and we imagine if you get it down to a penny, that's so close to zero, we think it would basically be free." I imagine if someone solved it, there would be some new complaint (li…

> You can give someone as little as a dollar via a service like PayPal. In the world today, that's pretty small. In theorie you can with "friends and family", but you can't charge a dollar. It costs 2.9% and $0.30 for any transaction. You end up with something like 0.68 before transfer costs to your actual bank.

This is true. It also means the minimum you can practically give as a micropayment is 68x more money for the recipient than the piddling penny the OP claims they would like to be able to give content creators.

I'm fairly confident this means that they don't actually want to pay. They just want to believe that if we got payments as close to zero as possible and got enough people to chip in a penny, magically it would be enough to live on and stop being slave labor.

In reality, that doesn't align with how the world works. Once you get it down to a penny, then people can tell themselves that not paying at all won't really matter because it's such a tiny amount. And then we are right back where we started: with people wanting content for free while not wanting to admit this is an expectation of slave labor.

The way to pay producers mere pennies for visiting thier site without having to pay them at all is via ads and the HN uses as blockers very aggressively and while they claim this is for reasons other than money per se, if you want ad-free content and don't want to be demanding slave labor, the way to do that is pry your wallet open and kick in a few bucks via Patreon, PayPal, etc.

Based on my tendency to hit the front page here with my writing, my ongoing inability to make ends meet and the degree to which I get downvoted for talking about that late in the month when I'm stressed out because the bank account is empty and the cupboards are bare, I'm quite confident that the constant talk of how micropayments will solve this is just a BS excuse to help well-heeled people feel okay with expecting slave labor from writers and telling themselves it is not their problem that writers go hungry while journalism goes to hell, democracy suffers as a consequence, etc ad nauseum.

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

#169

Post by namrog84 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 11:03 AM UTC

I read through a ton of comments and didn't see anyone really mention twitch. On twitch you can buy with credit card bits. A bit is about 1 penny. But you usually buy $5 bits incrementally. You can watch ad for 10 bits sometimes too.

You can then give anywhere from 1 bit to whatever to the streamer. Some streamers will set minimums of 5 or 25 bits. At end of month the bits are converted back to real money minus twitch fee. And they send check to streamer.

The problem really isn't in the tech. Its solved and easy. Its getting some intermediary to be used by many. New York times can't be it for itself. It needs to be something that a user buys bits or whatever and then can use a large variety of websites.

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

#170

Post by mewpmewp2 » Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 11:17 AM UTC

Why wouldn't an aggregator service work where you pay $50 per month and it gives you access to all news sites without ads? Your money would be distributed proportionate to the views you did on each website. There could be different packages, to have different limit of articles read, this way you wouldn't have to constantly so mental calculations whether it is really worth it?