A Micropayments Marketplace | Hacker News Reader

A Micropayments Marketplace

medium.com

62 pointsmgdo9 comments

> Paypal famously got to scale by becoming the currency of choice for eBay buyers and sellers.

Slightly off topic but after seeing this statement, it triggered an old question in my mind: would anyone happen to remember how payment-industry companies like Paypal were able to scale so well when their model depends on traditional ACID properties? I've never been in the payments field, but I've always wondered how their backend structure differs from those of say Netflix or Facebook, of which I'm more familiar with.

Transactional logs. It's like double-entry accounting. You build the state by keeping each transaction and then processing them in order. You can obviously cache at intervals. This allows for a full audit trail. Bitcoin is also a sum of a complete series of transactions.

Volume is tiny, see this blog[1] from visa bragging about handling 47,000 transactions per second in 2013. PayPal volume is probably much less.

[1] http://www.visa.com/blogarchives/us/2013/10/10/stress-test-p...

The interesting part is how they got any users. Even a junior programmer could build such a system within a day. The answer is: Give each new users 10$ then an extra 10$ for each user they recruit. Acquiring users in this field is the hard part.

This seems pretty useless, in that it requires particular hardware.

right now.

> If you have a 21 Bitcoin Computer, you can explore the marketplace today at 21.co/mkt; if not, please go and sign up for our forthcoming free client at 21.co/free and you’ll be able to access it soon.

OK, thanks.

I would be very interested in a micro-payments marketplace though, I think they need a better presentation, because I didn't understand. Do I need to signup? Give them my bitcoins? What do my customers have to do to pay me?

Fantastic good job 21.co team. Just got a txt directly from 21.co computer

Reply on news.ycombinator.com