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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I don't think anyone is going to pay 5 cents to see a website. That number is likely to get big real fast if you like news aggregation sites.

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If the point is to stop spam it doesn't need to be implemented like that. One way to do it could be, pay $5 to create an account. Your money will be returned to you as you post on the site. If someone determines that you're spamming, any money that hasn't been returned to you is lost.

The idea is not to make people pay 5 cents to see a website. Instead replacing captchas with a toll for about how much it would cost to have a human solve the captcha for you.

There are already 'solve captcha as a service' sites all over, with highly developed APIs for their use. Lots of people use them for sneaker bots and ticket bots etc.

This is alosing idea out of the gate.

If you just open HN once per day and open all promising links in a new window you're already out a lot of cents.

This will only work with mechanisms that let you pay like 0.05 cents. Should be enough to deter bots that practically run for free these days.

Too bad any intermediary will want 0.30 dollars per transaction for the 0.05 cents :)

I mean... you just batch those cents and have cash out limits. Preload accounts, etc.

* note that the word just does an obscene amount of lifting in that sentence.

No fundamental reason a micro transaction has to be more than a tiny fraction of a penny.

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