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Comment by mizay7 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know if anything in the space can allow for P2P microtransactions? Maybe in batches: people send each other a few pennies at time and cash out at the end of the month?

From my review it seemed like this is hard to manage with money laundering regulation but I would love to know if a fintech company can make this work.

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https://www.stellar.org/?

Has very low transaction fees and supports fiat-pegged tokens like https://stronghold.co/stronghold-usd/.

Could you describe a more specific use case? In the US, P2P is much more difficult than consumer to business.

Say i have a platform (like a game) and I would like users to be able to exchange tokens of some kind, like kudos. But i would like those tokens to have actual value. So a user might buy 50 tokens for a dollar, gift them to teammates at end of matches for good team work. At the same time the user is collecting tokens for her good teamwork. At the end of the month the user might have given out 40 tokens but received 200. So she can now withdraw 210 tokens from her account for a value of $4.05. Or maybe those initial 50 tokens cant be withdrawn, only the 200 that were earned are redeemable for cash.

Also, is this possible outside of the US? How would this work for US based users?

Not sure about non-US law. In the US, you would need to register as a federal money service business (MSB), as well as in all 50 states (it costs about $150k in state level fees to do so). In addition to this, it is (from my research) incredibly difficult to find a bank that is willing to touch you with a 10ft pole. When they are, they usually charge high account maintenance fees (one bank told me 10k / month) due to the increased record keeping they need to do.

I agree that there is a massive need in this area. It is total non-sense that every online transaction costs 30 cents + 2.9%. I think it is very much a reason why the whole internet is still ad and tracking supported. It is not possible to bill people near the true cost of computation on an incremental basis.

It very quickly turns into a money launderer's dream. So I understand the regulations, however, they are incredibly burdensome and feel anti-competitive (re: banks). The best thing to build it off of is ACH, so if you go this route you're looking for the cheapest ACH provider you can find. It does make sense though, one ACH charge on the deposit and one on the withdrawal, which enable a lot of (free) transactions in between. It could save a lot in the fixed costs (the 30 cents part).

I'm talking to a lawyer next week about some exemptions to see if a C2B play makes sense in this space. P2P is hard (in terms of regulations) and you're probably best served by cryptocurrency. That too may fall under MSB laws, so it is best to talk to a lawyer.

Yeh, my research had basically dead ended in MSB regulations as well. I get the money laundering concern but also strongly feel that absence of micro-transactions has destroyed the internet and is now doing terrible things to our brains.

I should look more into ACH, i dont remember why i moved away from that direction.

I considered crypto but it seemed like too much of a bucket of worms at the moment.

I was hoping somewhere in the fintech survey someone was doing something to enable p2p microtransation. But it seems like the quest continues.

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