I think that I by this time I have the technology to make something like this work, I was wondering if this is a good solution though. What do you think?
This approach may turn legitimate people away, namely:
1. People from regions where it is uncommon to have means to interface with payment processors.
2. Minors who, for one reason or another, are not able to obtain a debit card/credit card. Similarly, PayPal refuses minors.
Since I'm also generally against javascript, ideally the code would open-source and it could be verified that it doesn't do anything malicious...
Couldn't gnu taler allow this kind of stuff?
My parents don't even trust Amazon. They use Visa prepaid cards that they fill up at CVS whenever they have to.
Arguably they're doing the right thing and we're all doing the wrong thing. Either way, micropayments are one of those "ideal world" scenarios that are unlikely to transpire anytime soon.
The minor cost may be offset by the fact that getting a post through to a site that has almost no spam because of its filter is valuable in itself. If the bot is sophisticated enough that the stuff it posts is hard to distinguish from a human shill or shitposter it may even prefer sites protected with such a system.
Useful for the vintage VIAGRA HERE link dumpers perhaps though, but those can be filtered out with a content filter.
Say what you want about the site, but 4chans pass method of payment, which just removes all the captcha's when posting and lowers the post timer, was a fantastic idea, and just works.
Some examples:
> It seems more likely they are trying to steal cc details by asking for such a small payment.
This relates to being afraid using a credit card online against a non credible seller.
> Payment processing is nontrivial to set up
This one is about the technical difficulty (And possibly also regulation) for setting up payment processing
> regions where it is uncommon to have means to interface with payment processors.
This one is about inaccessibility to payment means, which also relates to a problem with the payment medium.
> You could use JavaScript cryptocurrency mining instead
I assume that bo1024 suggested this because he implicitly believes that setting up a payment processor will be more difficult, and give bad experience to the user.
The only objection I have seen which is more specific to actually recognizing humans is this one (by Freak_NL)
> What would prevent the bots from using the same system?
First, I think that it should make operating bots on a wide scale much more expensive. Second, if you make money out of bots coming into your website, would you really care that they are bots? I assume that the reason someone would block bots from the first place is that bots harm their money making business. If you had a system to collect this money back, shouldn't this considered as a problem solved?
I am working these days on a decentralized payment system that supports micro-payments. (I promise there are no blockchains inside). Solving the captcha thing can be a very useful use case. I will be happy if anyone wants to join forces on this one (My email is real (at) freedomlayer (dot) org).
I would really love to see a way to make small payments to sites that I visit simply and all managed in one place.