So many ideas are infeasible right now because CC fees are high, and making any payment is extremely high friction.
Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security risk. Because of this insane system of credit cards, where you give the other party a "secret" which enables them to take the money from you.
If you could just send the money, the barrier to pay would be 100x lower.
Most websites pay the bills via ads. And make less than $0.001 per visitor. If they could sell a monthly membership for a one-time payment of $1, they would have a way better business model.
How do you pay Apple without giving them a secret?
> How do you pay Apple without giving them a secret?
Credit cards being effectively unrestricted bearer tokens isn't nearly the only way to do payments. For example you could send a signed message to your bank instructing them to pay Apple (in a world in which you'd be paying them; again, Apple Pay is not that).
And if you were signing your own payments, you'd still have to trust your computing device and the bank.
You would send $100 to your computing device every now and then. And use that for day to day spendings. If the device turns out to be malicious, you lost only the $100 and stay away from the brand that made the device.
A bank would not be involved at all.
On the other hand, having some money outside a bank is nice. I've had them freeze my assets before just cuz they felt like it, until I spent a whole day telling them to fix it.
An algorithm cannot be reasoned with, it cannot understand that your house burned down and destroyed your ID. It cannot accept liability for it's actions.
If I lose my bank card I go to a branch, verify my ID, and get a replacement. The bank is liable if they allow somebody other then me access to my accounts, regardless of how convincing the fraudster might have been.
Source, been using banks for 30 years now.
My solution in the end hinged on a paper recovery phrase, stored in... a bank.
I wonder how small independent sites like Amazon and eBay exist then if people dislike paying on the web because of the security risk.
The reality is that people have literally no problem paying for stuff on the internet.
It's a high barrier for users to pay online. That's why they don't pay $1 on a whim on a small site, even if it offers something they like.
Paying online is more like a marriage these days. You pray that the other side will not disappoint you and then you jump in.
That's why big popular sites with brand names worth billions gobble up unproportional more paying users.
This has very little to do with the original claim of "Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security risk". Users have no issues paying for stuff online.
We can already do that here in Brazil: the web site displays a QR code (plus its contents in text form), the user scans the QR code (or copies the text) into their banking app, and confirms it on the app to send the money.
I hasn't AFAIK made any meaningful difference for websites. What people dislike isn't the inconvenience of credit cards, it's the inconvenience of having any paywall at all.
They all failed not because of fees, not because of security concerns, but because even having to think about whether you want to pay for something and how much incurs a mental cost that people avoid.
Free beets cheap by a margin that has nothing to do with how cheap or how easy.
It will change absolutely nothing whatsoever.
> So many ideas are infeasible right now because CC fees are high, and making any payment is extremely high friction.
Making payments will always be, is inherently high friction, and reducing the amount does nothing below a threshold that is much, much higher than $0.001.
There have been lots and lots of micropayment schemes, and they have all failed because the very fact that there is a payment already introduces mental friction that's effectively higher than current CC fees.
Any idea that is infeasible because there is no way to reliably send $0.001 is in fact easily feasible today by monetizing it some other way, usually via ads.
Lower fees are only relevant for high-volume fully automated transactions with a substantial financial incentive behind them, and those can already be done basically for zero marginal cost, see HFT. The only micropayments that people are willing to engage in individually is when they involve addiction, and that as well can and is already done in gambling apps masquerading as games.
It's evident in literally the first line of the bitcoin whitepaper:
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution"
If paying a random person online was as easy as dropping a quarter in a cup the internet could be a very different place.
Why do you set the bar at $0.001? Even sending $1 reliably and with low fees (which has been doable with crypto since its inception) would be revolutionary in my opinion.
(pdf reference) https://www.beuc.eu/sites/default/files/publications/beuc-x-...
For example from Germany to Austria, sending 1200€, I see multiple providers with no fees for quick transfers.
You can also check https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/news-insights/videos/...