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Comment by jiri | Hacker News Reader

In EU it is really trivial and very cheap, fast and safe to transfer payments between individual bank accounts and business bank accounts. It would be really hard to further simplify it.

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For me, the allure of bitcoin and any other newer payment transfers systems is to be able to get rid of the "In $somelocation" clause. I want internet money to be as universal as email.

10x times better than the US? Maybe yes - but not cheap and fast enough for micropayments.

Why do micropayments need to be fast? Seems like exactly the kind of thing that could be held on to and batch processed.

I mean, I have used Giropay and SOFORT, both of which have been always confirmed instantly with relatively low fees (about 2% for my purchases, tho I'm not certain how that scales for sub-10€ purchases).

Please take a look at the demo they have set up.

They show an example micro payment system as browser plugin, where you pay for reading articles.

I am excited at the prospect of paying for articles without spying adware and coin-mining javascript.

Back to your point: Even in the EU paypal has still users, because it is still easier to use than SEPA - transactions.

I like that prospect too, but many media companies have proven to be scummy enough with their malvertising and tracking that they're likely to add micropayments and keep their spy/adware. A recent example is German television switching to a new digital terrestrial transmission format, whereupon the commercial (ad-ridden) channels now require a yearly subscription to watch, but have kept the ads. The enabling technology was the possibility to encrypt said channels in the new format, and they, of course, jumped on it, pocketing the extra money but keeping all their ads.

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