Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

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There is a legit use-case in micropayments with certain crypto implementations that don't share the blockchain's massive centralisation (what else do you call "every transaction has to be accepted on one shared append-only log"?), that would allow for offline P2P transactions if you have some trust.

These cryptocurrency implementations along with some infrastructure would let you build a cheap low-cost micropayments system where you would just need to have some local trust. You could build out a federated payment network and build out infrastructure based on needs. All while avoiding the massive waste that comes from "everyone store every transaction ever"

The problem of credit card companies and the like charging really high rates still affects a lot, and "Paypal, but federated" could help tackle this with some cryptocurrency concepts in the background.

Though to be honest, I don't think this is going to happen. The communities are so focused on completely trust-free models that they don't see how they could build something extremely useful with way less cost and more utility by being more flexible on that point

Interesting

Why not just use the real Paypal?

> Why not just use the real Paypal?

Some of us are banned for no actual reason from Paypal. Some others, banks.

Paypal micropayments cost 5% + 5 cents.

cryptocurrency micropayments could potentially be much smaller. What if you could pay per packet the wifi access point forwards for you? Or pay per watt some charger gives you? Maybe nanopayments is a better name for them.

Re Paypal cost, is that micropayments to businesses? I just sent my friend $0.01 and it was free, with a linked bank account. Understood that the bank account payments take a while to settle but we're talking about micropayments so settlement time doesn't really matter

Fair point about nanopayments. But what's the win? Why split up the cost per single watt or packet? No one cares about losing one cent per day due to rounding errors

> But what's the win? Why split up the cost per single watt or packet? No one cares about losing one cent per day due to rounding errors

Honestly with this question you've summed up most of my feelings about blockchains. Humanity feels like it's become more powerful in some very specific way. We have a new tool and we're trying to figure out what it's good for.

I've pattern matched this to early reactions to the internet. Many of the critics pointed out that the internet didn't really make anything new possible, we could already quickly communicate with people across the world! But, it radically lowered the cost of that communication and put it into a format computers could use and that was enough to put companies like Blockbuster out of business.

It's really hard to work backwards from a new tool to places it could successfully be applied. And if 10 years from now we haven't found a use for nanopayments I'll admit it was a silly idea, but it sure does seem interesting.

> And if 10 years from now we haven't found a use for nanopayments I'll admit it was a silly idea

Why do you need another 10 years? Bitcoin has already been around for 10 years. The micropayment and tipping use case has been explored fully and has failed.

ArpaNet was started in around 1969; it was only really good for email, and few people had a computer anyway so it wasn't very useful for them.

NSFNet started in 1985 and with it the US could finally transfer Megabits of internet every second! By that point more people had computers but they weren't on them enough for things like e-commerce to make any sense at all.

It took until 1991 for the Web to be invented, and arguably in 2000 the web had still failed to really find it's niche.

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I make no claims as to whether crypto will have as much of an impact as the Internet had, I suspect it will impact only a few domains. However, we're still decidedly in the ArpaNet phase. Bitcoin can only process ~5 txns/second, Ethereum can only process ~13/sec. This isn't good for anything at all! I'd argue the nanopayment use-case hasn't been explored at all, because there's still no good way for me to spin up a server and accept nanopayments with it. Bitcoin transaction fees just spiked to ~$1, ETH transactions currently cost 15 cents.

You're looking at a steam engine the size of a building and telling me it'll never fit onto a train. And you're right! It took something like a hundred years for them to be compact and strong enough to power any vehicles.

A lot of people with a lot of money are working on newer designs which can process a lot more transactions for a lot cheaper, it's only once those cryptocurrencies have been built that the experimentation can really begin.

RE the charger, that problem has mostly been papered over because people are willing to pay a decent amount over the cost ceiling for this kind of service (China you can pay $1 or so to rent a battery charger, and that's way more than the cost of the electricity).

Though the idea of even jokingly giving miniscule amounts of money to friends has some traction in stuff like WeChat. If the systems were more open then you could run a collection system on your site pretty easily.

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