Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This is micropayments, again. There have been many, many micropayment schemes. The trouble with micropayments is that all the enthusiasm for them comes from the people who want to collect them, not the people paying them.

One of the better ideas was micropayment email, as a solution to spam. You have to pay the recipient to get an email through, unless they've whitelisted you as a friend. A centralized service could do that. (One could see Gmail or Facebook doing that. LinkedIn already does. So do some dating services.)

Doing it in a distributed way is hard. Blockchains probably won't help; the cost of a Bitcoin transaction is too high and the network capacity is orders of magnitude too low for mail. Local proof-of-work systems have been suggested, but never caught on. (Probably not a good idea in the era of battery-powered devices.) Worth thinking about, though.

Urbit has a scheme where identities are anonymous but not free. That's an anti-spam measure, because spamming results in negative reputation for a paid-for identity. It thus make spamming expensive. Urbit is probably too weird to get much traction, but there are good ideas in there.

    > The trouble with micropayments is that all the enthusiasm for them comes 
    > from the people who want to collect them, not the people paying them.

That's because the people paying them have never lived in a world where micro-payments are possible, but the people who want to accept micro-payments have studied them, and see a potential. It's like before the car was invented: all the enthusiasm came from car inventors, not the general public; the people just wanted faster horses.

Micro-payments enable applications that were not possible before, like trustless pay-per-view, where you pay 0.1 cent per second of video. So the excitement is understandable, I think. The execution just hasn't been all that impressive.

I think the Stroem protocol [1] will be the winner in the short term (within the next decade), enabling a form of micro-payments that are not trustless, but with so little barrier to entry for micro-payment issuers and so huge benefits (send money to anyone anywhere instantly and incredibly cheap), I think it's inevitable. But just as with Bitcoin, we have to accept that it's not what some crypto enthusiasts envisioned. With Bitcoin, many people thought some cryptographic construction would solve the double spend problem, but in the end it was brute force - proof of work - that (partially) solved it. I think the same will be the case for micro-payments. We want trustless micro-payments, of course we do, but in the end I think a promissory note-based system will be stable enough that its lack of complete trustlessness (á la Bitcoin) won't be a deal-breaker.

[1] https://www.strawpay.com/docs/stroem-payment-system.pdf

I see it exactly the opposite way. The people getting excited about micro payments are the ones who have failed to grasp the revolutionary potential offered by the prospect of doing things collectively, in distributed fashion, without having to saddle every interaction with the overhead of commerce. Amazing things become possible when you give up the need to pay and be paid; the micropayment people don't seem to be able to see that vision.

We've been doing commerce for millennia; it is profoundly boring.

If there is no payment system, then resources are guaranteed to be oversubscribed and exhausted if they are at all interesting. In the Iain M Banks Culture, that works, but we're not there yet.

That's the scarcity model in a nutshell, and it has run its course. We won't get to a Culture style future by nickel-and-diming each other; we'll get there by developing better mechanisms of communication, fostering low-overhead group decision-making, which will allow us to collect, share, and distribute resources without having to run everything through the enervating meat-grinder that is commerce. Capitalism got us where we are, but we have to build something better if we want to go further.

The best parts of my life are already voluntary, cooperative, and social - people working together to make things better for each other. I want more of this, not less. Micropayments just drag the old way into the new. Why waste our time on that? Let's build the future we actually want to live in.

This. A thousand times this.

If I could pay one cent per top level web page I load, and never have to worry about seeing ads or updating ad blockers or their compatibility again, I would buy that!

What's described there, (skip ahead to page 14) is a ordinary prepaid token system. You get a value token from an issuer, you spend it with a merchant, and the merchant redeems it with the issuer. Of course, you have to have previously paid the issuer. There's a lot of crypto/blockchain/Bitcoin stuff wrapped around this, but it seems to work financially like every other prepay system.

It's just VISA on top of Bitcoin, essentially. The difference being that the protocol is open, so anyone can join.

> That's because the people paying them have never lived in a world where micro-payments are possible, but the people who want to accept micro-payments have studied them, and see a potential. It's like before the car was invented: all the enthusiasm came from car inventors, not the general public; the people just wanted faster horses.

That assumes that micropayments appear as an improvement over the status quo to payers. However in an internet where most things are "free" and existing payment solutions work "good enough" for the remaining cases, I don't see that.

In fact, many micropayment solutions can feel even more oppressive than more coarse-grained payments to consumers. For example, I would feel much better about a video that I pay once and then can watch however often I'd like than one where I have to pay again for every second that I watch, even if it's likely that latter price would be less. (provided that's the case)

To tell it with the car analogy, selling cars to a society of coach drivers is one thing; Selling cars to a society of winged people is something else.

    > That assumes that micropayments appear as an improvement over the status quo to payers. 
    > However in an internet where most things are "free" and existing payment solutions work "good enough" 
    > for the remaining cases, I don't see that.

The existing solutions always appear good enough, because they form around what is possible. So they are good enough, for what is possible now. Right now it isn't possible to accept payments unless you get the customer to give you their credit card number (a blank check), thus forcing merchants to put ads on their site to finance it.

Ads aren't the revolution of the internet. They're a poor man's replacement for proper financing. And all the companies who can't deliver a product that can be financed by ad revenue are cut out. The only truly victorious player, in the end, is Google, who've become the world's private banker, financing internet pages all around the world, because no one understand the root problem lies in poor financing opportunities. Consumers are happy because they think they get something for free, when they're just paying with personal information, because no proper online means of payment exists.

The way things currently work is as much a symptom of what is missing as it's a symptom of what is there.

I was thinking about spam resistant mail. Maybe one day I will do this as a service. It's greatest strength is also major inconvenience. So I hope it would work not only for technical minded. Probably it could be dealt with by having good UX/UI.

Basically the point is to give every interested party separate address to write to. Giving user a button to generate new random address (120-160bit random number encoded with Crockford's Base32). A bit like user+whatever@gmail.com that gmail supports, but my idea can't be easily gamed by not having constant part (like user@gmail.com). User can register to various services with different address and can detect when his email address was compromised.

Inconveniences: giving address to friends, writing them down on paper forms, dictation via phone. Maybe it would be a bit like having multiple telephone numbers - separate for every one.

For leaving out address for random people like on mailing lists or blog posts, there could be additional step of sending introductory e-mail with certain subject prefix required that would work a bit like CAPTCHA. Than you could reply from new address - designated for this person.

Yahoo had this ages ago. You'd pick a static prefix, but it'd be different from your primary address, and only whitelisted suffixes would be allowed through.

Micro payment has already been tried in large scale by phone operators, pay per minute, per sms, per megabyte. The market has had its say and nobody likes it, everybody just wants flat rate so they can pay once then get on with their lives not having to think of the cost of every interaction you have throughout a month.

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