181–190 of 408 posts
Micropayments is something that I think the internet as a whole needs. However, I don't think the mental model people usually have isn't quite "micro" and frictionless enough. Imagine a world where your web browser essentially contains and controls your wallet. You pre-pay into that wallet, say, $20. I imagine we'll probably also refer to that as "credits" so internationalization isn't so tough. So let's pretend we h…
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The problems you describe are technical problems. How do you increase efficiency and avoid charge-backs due to fraud? Perhaps it is enabled by cryptocurrency (some systems like payment channels, RaiBlocks already exist for this). I would go into more detail about this but I think i've already debated you about this already. The entire field of cryptography is about developing technical solutions to previously intract…
That just moves the fraud to the other direction by making it hard for legitimate chargebacks. Say someone steals your card info, then uses it to buy some news crypto.
For example, I would say that the credit card system is essentially subsidized through other forms of payment via transaction fees/cashback (I can go into detail why I think this is the case, if you would like). This is a mechanism that benefits the credit card companies at the users of other payment mechanisms (cash, crypto, etc.). So this mechanism of the credit card payment system has the effect of strengthening it against competition.
Secondly, I am not even sure if it's a negative externality. It depends on how fraud is handled in the conventional banking system and who takes the blame. Let's say that the charge-back goes all the way to the exchange, so now the exchange that facilitated the transaction is down both X cryptocurrency and Y dollars. In order to be profitable, the exchange needs to charge more in fees and needs to spend more in surveillance to counteract fraud. So ultimately the users of the exchange would pay for fraud.
Lastly, it is important to differentiate the two sources of fraud. There is the fraud inside of the micropayments system, where I pay 0.01 cents to view a webpage and I don't receive what I want. That's a very low-risk fraud, and by gaining a fraction of a cent, they can lose like 100x that in potential business through micropayments.
Then there is the fraud that happens at the border of "hard" money (cash/precious metals/crypto) and "soft" chargeback-able money in the conventional credit card system. This is pretty much facilitated just by these hard forms of money existing and being exchangeable with soft money. I would argue the weakness lies in the insecurity of the soft money systems (specifically the outdated systems of authentication). But you could still apply some sort of limit to the amount of money a single bank account can exchange for crypto (say, $20 a day) without hurting the micropayments system, because the payments involved are so small. So the risk of fraud at the exchange could be much lower for this specific use-case of cryptocurrency.
If micropayments have a future, it's on blockchains. https://www.x402.org/ https://www.8004scan.io/networks https://www.x402scan.com/
> We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing. Paying $1.00 for an in app purchase that you thought about and decided on is not a micropayment, that's just a small payment. What makes micropayments interesting is that they can be small enough to escape notice, except in aggregate. They happen in the background, tightly coupled to the thing they're for, and not as part of an explicit purchase…
There should be a new word for the not-exactly-micro-micropayments that the author describes. I suggest "minipayments". As you, I associate the micropayment idea with truly tiny individual payments. Like paying for bandwidth by megabyte, where each payment is much less than a cent. The risk of fraud due to any individual payment not being fulfilled is low. At most you loose 0.01c of money, and the vendor loses $ of p…
I have a patent on micropayments for the Web from 1996. 30 years later, the situation hasn't changed and Clay Shirky or Andrew Odlyzko's arguments around the mental cost of microtransactions remain valid. Besides subscriptions to individual publications, the only model that would work is a Spotify-like subscription for a bundle of sites, with the revenue shared according to page views (or better, some metric that doe…
What about iTunes, and money transfer apps like Venmo and Zelle, which people use widely for microtransactions (and more)?
There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And i…
Curiously, LLMs seem to be the first successful use case for micropayments. Possibly this happened because a) the vendors only offered a micropayment model and b) the product was so popular that nobody pushed back. That said we can see LLM inference being sold on a subscription basis commonly now (e.g. Claude Code).
You could buy and sell virtual items with a real-world cost far smaller than the transaction fees of a regular card transaction.
Speaking of which - that, to my mind, is the definition of a micropayment - a payment too small to be practical to administer using existing card payment infrastructure. So-called "micropayments" in games have long since ceased to qualify under that definition - they're just "transactions" now.
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Exactly! That's why Spotify doesn't allow any noisy music or music with curse words. The mainstream public would flee from the platform.
I'd encourage you to ask a recording artist how they like the arrangement they have with Spotify. But also, yeah, I do think the streaming financial incentives affect what music gets written and produced. Just not necessarily anything to do with cuss words.
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My stance is exactly what I said: most news is priced correctly for most people at $0.00. If they value it at more than that, they will pay for it.
Then I don't understand the bitter line in the sand you've drawn between $0.00 and $0.0001. You could spend a whole lifetime paying this latter amount multiple times per day, and it would cost you about as much as a box of bandaids. If you really value the information contained in these articles at $0.00, then neither would you spend that much more valuable resource—time—in order to digest it, even if it were given t…
The rest can be worth my time, sometimes, under limited circumstances, but usually it isn’t. Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters?
If you put a financial cost on links though, people just won’t pay. And they won’t click links. We might waste less time too, but just because something got my time doesn’t mean I’m going to also give it money for having had the privilege of my time.
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That just moves the fraud to the other direction by making it hard for legitimate chargebacks. Say someone steals your card info, then uses it to buy some news crypto.
Firstly, that appears to be a negative externality. It seems to affect people who use the conventional credit card system as opposed to the new cryptocurrency/micropayments system I propose. So it has the effect of strengthening the cryptocurrency/micropayments system against competition. For example, I would say that the credit card system is essentially subsidized through other forms of payment via transaction fees…
The most obvious one that comes to mind is someone gets a script to run on your browser that loads a ton of the attackers 1 cent paywall articles. Any legitimate financial tool needs a way to roll back fraudulent transactions.
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There's a particular part in the discussion that rubs me the wrong way (which is more about micropayments as alternative to ads, rather than micropayments themselves) It tends to go something like, if not micropayments then ads, if not ads then subscriptions. And people dislike subscriptions more than ads, and ads more than micropayments so the conclusion is micropayments. But I don't like the way ads are presented a…
The irritating thing to me here is that I actually don't mind the concept of advertising. Mostly it's the implementation. Newspaper ads don't bug me one bit, because they're not physically capable of moving, animating, dancing, and trying to get my attention. They're not physically capable of tracking my habits and reporting them back to the mothership. They're just... there. Passive. Occasionally interesting, or at…
I don't think I'll ever stop using an adblocker. Even if ads would become less annoying or if it would become illegal to use an adblocker or something.