Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

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Unsolved, difficult problems of micropayments:

- pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?

- so do you give refunds a la steam?

- pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying

- pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?

- pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)

- pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off

- pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?

- pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?

Essentially the problem with micropayments is microscams.

I think the only real problem there is the "how do you know who you're paying?" part. Everything else would be solved or effectively ignored with the following:

I send you 10$ somehow, you send me email with ten hashes. Each hash worth a dollar.

I pay to alex by cut and paste on a webpage (here's the catch, maybe It's a scam!)

Alex has registered as content producer to your service. Alex immediately sends the hash with his on handle crypted into one neat package, to your servers. As soon as it lands, you add the dollar to his account. The particular hash is now rendered useless for the rest of history.

You send "valid transaction" message to Alex. Alex then lets me to comment his excellent blog post.

What am I missing? If it was that easy, it would have been done.

> If it was that easy, it would have been done.

Part 2: business model problems!

- getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of card TX for pure digital goods

- nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%

- winner-take-all effects are strong

- Play store et al already exist, why not use that?

- Free substitute goods are just a click away

- Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is

- No real consumer demand for micropayments

=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero

- existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money

- friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned

- first most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)

- Internet has actually killed previously working micropayment systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.

- accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630862 Slashdot (2003): https://news.slashdot.org/story/03/07/22/138257/whatever-hap... HBR: https://hbr.org/2010/02/why-i-hate-micropayments.html

"Play store et al already exist, why not use that?"

Play store does not have the content I want. And it seems overly difficult to post the content I want to make. And if I want to pay for engagement with the content, that's not an option.

Patreon is lot closer to what suits my needs. But even that is too inflexible on how to use payments and to what you should pay. So far everybody seems to be making their micro-transaction payment models "flexible" by making the amount paid flexible. But that's exactly the one thing I want to be fixed. I'd like to host my entirely own webpage and patreon just to handle the money from exactly the kind of transaction I want.

"Pirate" is not the thing I would concentrate on. People want to see the stuff before they pay for it. But if I could somehow engage with Slavoj Zizek about the superb youtube video he made, I'd actually pay for it. Or if I could promote that video to people in my home city I'd pay for that also. If some of that money went to Zizek I'd be even more willing to pay, because that would support him to continue. People underestimate the need for other people to be social about the content they consume.

People on reddit are using the reddit gold as super upvote. But that only works in Reddit.

I never thought of Zizek as the vanguard of the micropayments revolution ...

I agree about the "funding more content" angle; I hope twitter eventually realises this, but they really have a bad idea about how their own platform works and seem to be allergic to taking money from users for features.

Off-topic, but the particular video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7JgfB8PaAk

- Can you blacklist specific providers?

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