Comment by braza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by braza | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> nobody has cracked microtransactions

It's hard to agree on this one.

Personal anecdote: In 2010's I worked in a micropayments broker linked with all telecom companies.

The whole thing was: that NSFW creators used a shared SMS shared code (i.e. a SMS number that receives messages for several creators and the code (for instance HNCODE25) was used to move money to a balance account) and for each of the payments that people used to do with them the telecom company got 15% slice, and the rest the telecom moved the money to the broker.

Another point: In Brazil due to the PIX [1] almost all of those payment platforms (Paypal included) are becoming irrelevant because you can generate random tokens that can be hard to trace, and all the payments occur instantaneously giving enough time for withdrawn before any attempt of censorship and or any policy change. [2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system) [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867120 ...

About the article itself, it's surprising to me (and I assume some sort of intentional ignorance here) that even in the current state of technology we do not have a "dumb pipe" payment system as before and we're still relying upon those middle man actors or not-so ergonomic alternatives as P2P crypto.

People like the service that the middle man provides. They may not like the middle man, the fees, etc. but tell someone that "your transactions are not reversible, if you lost your money that sucks I guess, even if we messed up" and they will be happy to pay that transaction fee with another provider instead. Even with the small amounts, you either have to approve each transaction (which leads to another category of scams), or trust someone with access to your account.

If you care about spending just $2/mth and not more... that may not be a risk you wanna take.

> People like the service that the middle man provides. They may not like the middle man, the fees, etc. but tell someone that "your transactions are not reversible, if you lost your money that sucks I guess, even if we messed up" and they will be happy to pay that transaction fee with another provider instead.

This might not be entirely realistic, but the idea of passing that choice on to the end user seems interesting:

  Payment of 12.99 EUR (VAT of X% included) to $vendor for $service, choose one:
  [ ] - regular payment, 0.50 EUR fixed fee
  [ ] - safe™ payment*, 2.00 EUR fixed fee
  * safe™ payments can later be disputed and reversed, if necessary

Or something like that. I mean, regulation aside (this is a thought experiment), I can already choose whether I want to pay extra for tracking for international deliveries and when buying goods, sometimes extended warranty/insurance is offered as an option. Why wouldn't I get the choice whether I want my payments to carry less overhead OR have the protections you'd expect with the "middle man", as a choice within the same payment platform?

You can't give the choice of whether a payment can be disputed to the purchaser. The reason you can't do that is that you have no way to verify that the purchaser is who they claim to be. If you accept payment from a stolen card, it will be reversed, even if the thief checked a box saying "it is impossible to reverse this payment".

I guess some are making that choice for themselves, in the form of using crypto (which then comes with a long list of issues).

Then again, I guess it's also possible to go in the opposite direction and look into additional means of verifying who is making a purchase - over here, we have chips in government issued ID cards which can be used for signing documents, whereas most banks already use a 2FA system with codes (mobile app, not SMS; but also not TOTP, rather issued certs based on a contract with SmartID) for approving access to bank accounts and then another code for confirming orders. It wouldn't be entirely unrealistic to imagine that technology progressing and merging in the decades to come: you can already use the ID cards for signing into everything from government portals, to utility service providers.

PayPal does this with Friends and Family.

Go onto the various scam reddits and see how many people suddenly wish they hadnt listened to the seller and used friends and family instead.

There's no cure for stupid. No matter how many warning labels or hoops you put in front of the potentially dangerous option, someone will hurt themselves with it. That doesn't mean the option shouldn't exist, though.

Under what circumstances can people be banned from PIX?

We do not have the jurisprudence for that, so in principle if a single federal judge establish that you will be banned via your bank blocking your account. If this happens, for sure the Supreme Court will chime in and establish an common understanding and the lower/higher chambers will legislate around it.

Despite of what happen in Brazil politically this is a very serious process that if a judge misjudge that it could open a huge precedent for a lawsuit against the state.

In practice you can't. Nobody required banks to implement this, they certainly didn't go out of their way to build it.

You can still have your bank account blocked by a judge.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com