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Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

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Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#241

Post by fruitworks »

sanswork wrote: post #172
littlecranky67 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transaction fees for bitcoin sent via the lightning network (which is a layer 2 solution) are in the "less than a cent" category and are settled in a few seconds. This is not fiction, this is i.e. how Trump made his for-the-cameras bitcoin payment during his campaign.

Lightning isn't even a good solution for most diehard bitcoin users. It's a failed project. It would take 27 years to onboard every internet user to the lightning network unless you start adding level 3 aggregators and then at that point you lose all the benefit of it being on chain at all. It would take almost 2 years just to onboard every American assuming during that time there were zero other bitcoin transactions…

The throughput is arbitrarialy limited by bitcoin's current block size, which hasn't been increased since satoshi's era.

Most cryptocurrencies have an adaptive block-size mechanism which allows the blocks to grow to a reasonable size which could facilitate such an onboarding of users. So it isn't a technical problem, it is just a question of bitcoin's current leadership, which is controlled by companies like blockstream.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#242

Post by salawat »

pzmarzly wrote: post #101
salawat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't so much hate, as it's fundamentally DoA based on the financial system architecture of the United States, which creates strict liability, and a licensing requirement for digital money transmission. You do not get to opt out of that responsibility . Micropayments are therefore a pipedream that undermines all progress at making any type of AML or KYC possible, which then in turn makes fighting any type of fi…

Decentralized or direct P2P micropayments are unlikely to work, true. But why are there so few attempts at centralized micropayments providers? The only success stories I see in the space are GitHub Sponsors and LiberaPay, where their entire thing is aggregating payments together (so you have 1 big card transaction a month per user, not 20 small ones) and doing KYC procedures with donation receivers (once GitHub, or…

That's called starting a bank, or financial services company, and lots of places do it, but the bar to do so, and remain able to do so is fairly high. The margins, however, are exquisite. The middlemen eat fat off the percent they skim off the top.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#243

Post by julianeon »

dynm wrote: post #65

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…

This is me w Google Gemini. And you're right: it does change your outlook on micropayments, which in my case, are API calls. My costs for the last few days: 3 cents, 2 cents, 46 cents. Believe it or not, every one of those calls was scrutinized and justified.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#244

Post by madars »

fruitworks wrote: post #235
RadiusTech wrote: post #232

IMO the thread is asking the wrong question ("can micropayments work?") They can, but we need to start with first principals on what's technically necessary to move value, and what can we toss out (from both traditional/card systems and crypto). You need a linearly scalable state machine and a means of orchestrating the changes in that state between actors. Everything else (kyc, fraud protections, etc.) is secondary.…

have you heard the good news about our lord and savior chaumian cash?

eCash is an answer to "can you move value privately?" (yes, with concessions). Radius is solving "can you execute a million conditional state transitions per second at sub-penny costs?" Blind signatures are still just value transfers and offer no expressivity. If your agent wants DvP with conditional logic, or trustless escrow that releases on programmatic conditions, Chaumian eCash doesn't help. LN gets you close to some forms of atomic exchange, but close-to-atomic isn't atomic, and neither gives you composability. You can move balances, but you can't orchestrate multi-step workflows that can't unwind in the middle.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#245

Post by fragmede »

jawns wrote: post #2

No, no, no! Micropayments are not the way. We already know the way. It's the cable/streaming model. You pay for a single monthly subscription and get access to substantially all of the major news content. What would need to happen for this to be possible? Cooperation between most of the major news outlets. Not cooperation in an anti-competitive sense, but willingness to participate in this sort of business model. I'm…

Right. The problem is all the cooperation required. So then what's needed is an open platform that lets people put in their $10, and then sites can choose to implement it. It's a chicken and the egg problem. It hasn't worked in the past, but times change. Instead of looking at this like 3D televisions or VR, the counter example to think about is tablets — (note: human typed emdash) the Apple Newton was a flop, but the iPad is anything but. Or electric cars. The EV1 by GM was a flop and whatever you think about Elon Musk and Tesla, they do exist now. Video calling is another one. The 90's version just didn't work, but I use Facetime almost every day.

The rails exist for micropayments with cryptocurrency, it's "just" going to take the right person and the right software to implement it for it to happen. The problem is money. LEDs that come in blue are foundational to our modern society. Without blue, we'd only have red and green. Unfortunately for him, the inventor of the blue LED, the man who poured his everything into making it, isn't ridiculously wealthy. For micropayments to happen, some one selfless and not seeking to make a profit on it, need to come along and make it a thing. So I don't know if it'll happen, because ghostty's funding model can't be replicated, but a man can dream.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#246

Post by Paracompact »

SauntSolaire wrote: post #227
Paracompact wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you explain public utilities? No one has any issue with the fact that flicking a light switch in your home is technically a micropayment, as it consumes extra electricity that comes out in your monthly bill. I would venture to say that what consumers don't like about micropayments is any combination of the following: (1) It's a pain in the ass to provide payment info most places, and comes with the looming par…

It's also the incentive structure that's different. E.g. I can choose to buy cheaper LED lights to reduce my electricity costs because the interests of lightbulb companies are mostly orthogonal to the (usage-based) interests of the utility providers. Micro-payments are more akin to a hypothetical world in which the lightbulb company gets paid via my electricity bill; now they have an incentive to sell incandescents o…

This seems like a problem of perverse incentives independent of the medium of micropayment (cash vs. ad farming), no? I suppose the only way around that particular problem would be to decouple their revenue from the number of people actually accessing their content, which as far as I can tell precludes those people being the patrons. Instead the patron would be some larger corporate or public body auditing and funding them based on merit.

Curiously, there are still perverse incentives even in the case of lightbulbs and other consumable goods or technologies: planned obsolescence, delay of technology upgrades, and deliberate backroom deals from associated resource providers.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#247

Post by dd8601fn »

jdejean wrote: post #223
bonoboTP wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would ads go away just because you pay? Print newspapers and magazines have had ads forever and they cost money. Even expensive glossy magazines like National Geographic have full page ads, half page ads, etc. There is no natural law that ads will go away. Ads will only disappear if their presence would make the company lose more customers than they gain on ads. Ads make them money. If people don't mind it so muc…

Exactly, we see this play out clearly with streaming apps. Disney sells a subscription to remove ads, then one day they change their mind and now you only see “less ads” and they introduce an even more expensive plan that removes ads. The behavior should be criminal yet every major streaming app does this. These companies like to pretend ads are the pro-consumer approach when in reality they’d much rather scale throu…

Prime is worse.

Pay for the service. Then pay more to remove ads. But then a massive amount of their catalog remains “only with ads.” And then they pack half the usable screen with media that must be bought and titles that require add-on subscriptions.

It’s a real cesspool.

Hulu does a lot of this garbage too, but not quite as obnoxiously.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#249

Post by sanswork »

fruitworks wrote: post #241
sanswork wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightning isn't even a good solution for most diehard bitcoin users. It's a failed project. It would take 27 years to onboard every internet user to the lightning network unless you start adding level 3 aggregators and then at that point you lose all the benefit of it being on chain at all. It would take almost 2 years just to onboard every American assuming during that time there were zero other bitcoin transactions…

The throughput is arbitrarialy limited by bitcoin's current block size, which hasn't been increased since satoshi's era. Most cryptocurrencies have an adaptive block-size mechanism which allows the blocks to grow to a reasonable size which could facilitate such an onboarding of users. So it isn't a technical problem, it is just a question of bitcoin's current leadership, which is controlled by companies like blockstr…

People have been debating the blocksize for a very long time now and there doesn't seem to be any large desire to change it so while the ability to increase it exists changing anything that fundamental about bitcoin seems to be a non-starter and while that is true lightning is pointless as a solution for the masses.

Even if you increase the block size 100x though you're still not improving the numbers much since my very generous numbers ignore activity outside of lightning and assume a single on chain transaction for every user and a perfect network.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#250

Post by Paracompact »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #205
Paracompact wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you assuming the current landscape where engaging in a financial transaction, even if only for $0.01, is a tedious and unquantifiably dangerous gambit? (Sale of your info, leaking of your info, dark pattern subscription TOS's, etc.) Or would you still hold your opinions even in a theoretical landscape where paying $0.01 is just consenting to that amount being deducted from your bank account, with no friction or d…

If I could EASILY click "yes" to say, pay $0.01 from a pre-filled anonymous wallet that I have to manually refill (say, in $10 increments) and there's no way to hack payment information in any way, OR to figure out what info I've paid for, that would help a LOT. Of course, they would probably have to accept visa gift cards paid for in cash for this to actually be truly anonymous. I mean sure, I have nothing nefarious…

Indeed this is what I was getting at. I think you're far from the only one whose market behavior would change given such technology.

This is somewhat ironic to me, given that I normally despise everything about fintech. But this seems like a product/practice that could actually change the world for the better. The closest we have is crypto wallets and that's far from perfect.

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