Ask HN: Micro-payments without cryptocurrencies? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Micro-payments without cryptocurrencies?

1 pointwuliwong3 comments

I've been thinking a bit lately about some ideas with micro-payments, mostly related to music. I was wondering if there are existing or promising solutions for micro-payments that pay directly in USD or other government-backed currencies?

I've seen something called flattr but that looks to be built around a subscription model. I am looking for something that allows me to directly send $0.01 to another person in very short time. It's possible this already exists and is widely available, I haven't been thinking about this for very long.

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Credit card fee structures make it a little complicated. Generally speaking, you'd want to pool both the input and the output, and then use paypal or something similar -- i.e., require a minimum of a couple dollars to be put in escrow, and then actually flush the payment once it reaches a couple dollars. That way, transaction fees don't totally overwhelm actual payments.

I haven't seen general-purpose systems optimized for micropayments in this way. Aside from flattr, I've seen token-coin (a blogging platform, essentially), and places like patreon roll their own system internally.

I wonder if it could be done where the service acts essentially as a bank but does not use fractional reserve policies. So a user A adds $100 to their account. We keep a log and add that $100 to our "real" bank account. User A then pays User B $0.01. So we keep it in our ledger that $99.99 is for User A and $0.01 is for User B. But we don't make any actual bank transactions until a withdrawal request happens. There is probably some sort of regulation around this but maybe we do it like SecondLife with Lindens and then people can cash out their Lindens later.

No, this is totally reasonable and basically what I meant by 'escrow' in my original comment. Most systems that perform microtransactions & handle credit card stuff themselves basically do it this way -- including Google, when it comes to Adsense and Adwords.

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