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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Cryptocurrencies, ironically, enable micropayments. Orchid.com did an extensive write-up on how they achieve this (https://www.orchid.com/assets/whitepaper/whitepaper.pdf Chapter 5, Nanopayments) The Brave Attention Token is another example.

Although, I am not convinced micropayments would save the Internet from this ad-winter: It is hard to beat free at scale.

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There's a little bit of a fundamental problem here.

We're talking about paying a cent to avoid an ad. On a blockchain, work needs to be done to register that transaction. If the fee is a fraction of a penny, who is going to want to do the work? I get that you'll make it up at scale, but each transaction must be cryptographically secure (and therefore take up some type of resource), so there's a problem.

For "crypto" transactions, on-chain is no longer seen as a stringent requirement. In fact, the entire DeFi ecosystem wouldn't exist if there wasn't a cryptographically-secure way of doing transactions off-chain on second-level chains (0x, Polygon, Compound etc) or on chain of chains (Polkadot, Cosmos, Kava etc), or on chains built for payments (Celo, Diem, Stellar etc).

Beside, Orchid.com whitepaper talks about doing nanopayments on-chain, which is quite a radical approach.

Sure, if you put a layer on top, you can do whatever you want! It just adds more centralization, which isn't better than something like a Venmo that would be based on fiat.

Not all off-chain layers are centralised.

"Enable micropayments". Where are they disabled? And in what world is it easier to do a micro payment with cryptocurrency instead of one of your cards?

Not if the transaction cost is $10

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