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Comment by khalladay | Hacker News Reader

I could be misremembering, but this seems like an idea that's been tried (and failed before). I have a memory of a service whose pitch was that you'd load funds into an account (a 1 time large transaction to get past the CC fees), and then individual sites could request micropayments from that account balance. No crypto then of course, but I'm not sure adding crypto makes this idea functionally different from how it looks without it.

I could be totally off my rocker, but I'm pretty sure I remember this from sometime around the early 2010's ?

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I think the point is that nobody wants to make some account, then pre-load that account with money, and then wonder what the balance is, etc. etc. etc. Yuck! If this problem is going to be properly solved, someone has to solve the [evidently very hard] problem of being able to send $0.25 over the Internet without all these accounts and without getting overwhelmed with fees from the banking establishment.

If we had a magic wand, and there were no technical, business, or security constraints, what would the ideal micropayment system look like? A button on the web page that, when I press it, sends $0.25 from my bank account to the web site. Isn't something like that the holy grail? No need to "have an account" at the web site, and "have an account" with the payment processor or pre-load things with funds or any of that garbage. I already have a bank account, why do I need a handful of other accounts all over the place?

There's the UX. I think it would be successful. But nobody has managed to build it yet.

This is what Web3 is supposed to be. "Want to store some data? Just pay the market rate for data storage!" Of course they chose the most expensive and unwieldy data storage mechanism imaginable.

Inb4 "but X chain is so cheap!", all chains are cheap until they're popular. Make a chain that gets faster&cheaper to commit on as the amount of compute on it increases (as you would expect... pretty much any CS thing to work) and you've solved web3. Oh but then the asset is inherently inflationary and people care more about getting in on the next big hockey stick than sound financial instruments. So... there you have it.

The blockchains you are thinking of were never meant to be data storage layers. The proof-of-storage chains (at least, the ones that store "real" data) are much more reasonable, check out prices for storage on FileCoin.

The distinction here is that nodes publish proof that they have data stored on chain, rather than publishing the data itself on chain.

Yep, proof of storage is the only way forward as far as I'm concerned. At least of the currently available options. But they aren't great for representing a ledger. Some sort of hybrid is needed.

Back in the dot-com era (and maybe since), there were some startups in the micropayments space.

>If we had a magic wand, and there were no technical, business, or security constraints, what would the ideal micropayment system look like? A button on the web page that, when I press it, sends $0.25 from my bank account to the web site.

That sounds like exposing my bank account quite a bit too freely. The obvious approach is that you have an account with someone who collects the money and distributes it--and yes it would probably be prepaid.

In any case, if there were a demand the technical and UX problems can be overcome. The bigger issue, other than establishing the network, are getting people to actually pay per article--given that we've mostly moved to all you can eat subscriptions for other media--at an amount that would actually pay the bills. And in light of the fact that a lot of people don't want mental transaction costs to decide if reading an article is worth it every time they want to read something. (Which Clay Shirky brought up 20 years ago.)

See Iota - the only zero fee crypto with realistic ambitions for supporting smart contracts.

As long as the reader needs 'an account' this will never take off. There should be some way to load money into my computer and then drag a quarter or half dollar coin onto an article that I want to read.

The only information that needs to transfer is the coin's value. There is absolutely no need for any account information to propagate off of my computer. But the current state of the internet basically guarantees that the most syphilitic tech whore lead is going to shout from the mountain tops who paid what to view which article and then carve it into stone which is subsequently dumped into a landfill.

> I think the point is that nobody wants to make some account, then pre-load that account with money, and then wonder what the balance is, etc. etc. etc. Yuck!

Those free-to-play phone games seem to survive ok while making players pre-load a balance before they can buy their in-game advantage items with it.

> Those free-to-play phone games seem to survive ok while making players pre-load a balance before they can buy their in-game advantage items with it.

Those games largely depend on addicting people to intermittent rewards and harvesting a disproportionate amount of their revenue from relatively few 'whales'.

Sounds like flattr.com would have worked for you.

> what would the ideal micropayment system look like? A button on the web page that, when I press it, sends $0.25 from my bank account to the web site.

Now imagine someone making that button 1x1px, same color as background, in the footer, and js clicking it regularly every seconds you spend on some random spam site.

Similar technology is actually already deployed in the real world. All you need is a phone number of a person browsing your website to automagically subscribe them into monthly mobile charges.

The failure in the 2010s, is due to (lack of) network effects (from lack of participation), among other things. Crypto doesn't necessarily solve this but things like the Solana cryptocurrency enable solutions built on top of it.

I think you are talking about Blendle which up until a few years ago let you pay by the article for many major newspapers and magazines.

I miss it.

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