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Comment by flannelcatering | Hacker News Reader

It's worth testing. The reason we started with bitcoin is that traditional forms of payment charge a egregious fee (credit card, 3%) or require sharing private information (ACH). With bitcoin, I can send micro-payments trustless-ly.

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Paypal does do a "Micropayments Discount" for sums less than $10. It's still 5% + $0.05, so it won't work for your $0.01 suggestion, but you can ask for $0.25, although you get just over a half of it back ($0.13), which still feels might feel like armed robbery, but you'd be increasing your donation volume greatly.

Perhaps a Gratipay, or Flattr link?

edit: speeling

edit: thought Flattr was dead -_-

Why is there no gateway that can handle micropayments properly? Just do the following:

* Let me (in whatever guise, publisher, consumer, etc.) have an account that I can deposit/withdraw real world money into. Charge me a fee (percentage/fixed/minimum/maximum/whatever the market is willing to pay) for these operations.

* Let anyone transfer any amount of money (OK, impose some granularity, but make it like 20 decimal places, that's fine) from their account to another. Do all the right security stuff that we already do for this kind of thing to ensure no abuse.

* If the cost of transfers exceeds the income from deposit/withdrawals, charge some additional fee on a certain number of transfers, or charge a percentage on every $x transferred, or whatever it takes, so long as micropayments are still possible.

Now sit back and count the profit.

How is this not a solved problem yet?

> Let anyone transfer any amount of money

You would probably need a money transmitter license, which is hugely expensive and time-consuming. You will have to Know Your Customer to comply with anti money laundering regulations.

Basically you idea is to setup a bank and make transfers between customers free, which some banks already do, though not to 20 decimal places :-)

As a consumer, my choice is to now sign up for this tipping service, give them my identity, deposit some money, and then I can go tip a website $0.001 for a cat video. So now my identity and some of my money are tied up with the service.

Bitcoin seems more appealing than that scenario.

> How is this not a solved problem yet?

Because the State controls the banking industry.

Yes, I should have made it clearer that I'm envisaging a bank setting this up rather than Joe P. Bloggs! Maybe I'm the only one who imagines they would be clicking "Donate $0.01" buttons all day, if it genuinely cost just $0.01, but it feels as though there's an awful lot of money to be made, even in banking terms.

Ok wow that's a bit hardcore, I don't think you need to actually deposit money or become a bank.

Call it AdPoints, you can buy 1000 AdPoints for $10. Then you spend these points in websites you enjoy.

Add an API so they can be used as a virtual currency for goodwill (I liked this guy's post / comments, so I'll upvote him with my points) in those same third party sites.

Get a couple big publishers on board and it could become a pretty good deal.

You handle point purchase and deliver payouts to your publisher partners, add a reporting function to the API so they can overlay the revenue of adblock users vs non-adblock.

If you're operating in a regulated regime as a legitimate company, then the state will want to ensure that users aren't laundering money through your service.

Scenario:

1) Criminal outfit buys 100M AdPoints with dirty money

2) "Trusted parties" setup blogs and YouTube channels and has them get setup with the "publisher partners"

3) Criminal outfit "tips" innocuous quantities of money for cat videos and blog posts about gardening made by the "trusted parties"

4) "Trusted parties" cash out squeaky clean money

> deliver payouts to your publisher partners

Each partner would have to do the KYC/AML work for each content creator, but if they don't do it for donation sources, then you have the potential money laundering channel so the State will get involved.

Well realistically you would just do your due diligence in each new partner site. Also it would be painfully inefficient to launder money like this, keep in mind you wouldn't even let people buy large quantities.

In a real world scenario, you wouldn't even allow new partner sites to sign up online, instead you'd contact most of them via direct sales and vice versa.

I'm thinking about the NYTs and Yahoos of the world, not cat blogs.

I see your point, but this is more like buying world of warcraft currency than it is a bank.

>Bitcoin seems more appealing than that scenario.

Bitcoin is not fundamentally different. It decentralizes the role of the bank, but adds the step of currency exchange to get bitcoins in the first place. These currency exchanges have to comply with anti-money-laundring regulations that are very similar to those of banks, so they have to know your identity too.

The only advantage bitcoin currently has is that not all governments have gotten around to figuring out which existing regulations apply to bitcoin related businesses.

Well you don't have to go through an exchange to get bitcoin. And you can use the coins for anything, including tipping. This contrasts with "buying in" to a tipping service and locking up some of your money.

Also, there a plenty of governments that have placed Bitcoin squarely within the regulatory framework already.

May be there is no need for this. All those cheap skates which are telling you that they would give something if there would be a micropayment solution, would not give a nickel, even with zero transaction costs.

Because no one wants to set up the account to fund micropayments.

Any solution which would require the visitor to pre-fund an account, no matter how small of an amount, is destined to fail.

Personally I think bitcoin is the move. The long term deflationary nature, the hivemind of sage engineers swarming around scalability, with the end-goal being tiny machine-to machine-payments, and the precision of value that you can achieve make it perfect.

Why is 3% egregious? Bitcoin probably has bigger costs for all of us when you consider all the electricity required to sustain it.

Not to mention, I'm sure the losses incurred by not supporting traditional payment are far, far more than 3%. You have kind-hearted users who are opening their wallets, ready to donate money, but then you're telling them that you can't accept their form of money. In most cases these (lazy) users will, at this point, give up and leave.

credit card fees are not 3%, they are 3% + 30 to 40 cents, which effectively make credit cards ineffective for transmission of anything < 50c.

Checkout what Slate.com is doing with their AdBlock mitigation messaging. They'll detect AdBlock usage and try to upsell you to their Slate+ membership (yearly credit card fee)

Yup, lots of sites do that - e.g. theguardian.com. The trouble is that paying for a yearly subscription is a whole other prospect than paying a cent as a one-off or even on a per-article basis. Micropayments offer a much nicer business model, IMO - I am almost never going to pay for a subscription to a website, but I am totally willing to make one-off donations, and have done so.

I would gladly give nytimes.com $0.10 to $1.00 to read individual articles and probably do it scores of times in a given month.

But I'll be damned if I'm going to pay $455 per year to read all them on any of my devices: http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.htm...

Hey Colin,

Cameron Schorg here with SnipBit. We are currently creating a platform exactly like what you are describing. Users would have a browser extension that allows them to pay for articles with one click and browse the web a la carte style -essentially solving the subscription problem and the annoyance of the paywalls themselves. You should definitely check us out at www.snipbit.io . In addition, i would love to have a longer chat with you to better understand our user base. If you would be willing, please reach out to me at schorgie30@gmail.com!

I see nothing in my fairly basic up-armored browser. Who's the spammer/"mitigator"?

It's a fairly unobtrusive notice at the bottom of the screen. Screenshot: https://www.evernote.com/l/ABCw8ehFbgxMN6GYJ-RlacMysNSk3Iew0...

Bitcoin has transaction fees. From my reading of the link below, on a $0.05 transaction as suggested in your screenshot, you'd be paying at least a roughly $0.04 transaction fee (0.1mBTC). Admittedly, it's not as bad as the $0.20 base fee that credit cards would charge but a 44% fee still seems prohibitive to me.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

Most wallets these days implement micropayment channels, which eliminate the need to pay transaction fees on microtransactions. But even without micropayment channels, bitcoin transactions are cheaper than you think, because most of the time a transaction fee is not required at all.

An option to show the QR code payment request by default would be really nice.

trustless. This word, so wrong for what bitcoin stands for. Please, I beg you, as a technologist, to refer to it as trustfree. The semantic meaning of trustless is completely wrong.

Edit: Before you mention that trustfree doesn't exist in the lexicon, i will point out to you that the concept of a trustfree anything also hasn't existed, but now does, through bitcoin. :)

That's nice, but doesn't change the fact that most people don't use Bitcoin.

There are plenty of services that transparently convert fiat into BTC.

Which would require me to set up an account with them, which I may or may not be willing to do, due to the general shadiness surrounding bitcoin businesses.

It seems like you've already made up your mind that you're not willing to do any business in bitcoin, but, okay, I'll bite.

Name something shady (and true) about coinbase.

They're associated with bitcoin, and bitcoin business is quite shady.

You may not like or agree with the reasoning, but I guarantee you that a lot of normal, non-tech people are going to be thinking like that.

This is also in addition to the fact that I just don't want to make another money account. Especially for something I'm probably not going to use outside of this.

> They're associated with bitcoin, and bitcoin business is quite shady.

Ergo decedo ad hominem

> You may not like or agree with the reasoning

I don't dislike or disagree your reasoning, objectively speaking, your reasoning is a common logical fallacy.

Doesn't matter. That's how most people are going to react. And as I said, the major reason is that I don't want to create yet another account with credit card info that I have to worry about, and that I'm not really going to use for anything.

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