Hacker News Reader

Comment by otoburb | Hacker News Reader

>>usual tip is 20 doge. Seriously?

Think of it not as a negative thing ("cheap bastards!") but as a cheap A/B test. Now we know how much in actual monetary value micropayments can be based on.

20 DOGE ~= $0.03 (or 3 cents).

Prior to cryptocurrencies, there was no way to test this out in a live setting because money transmission fees would have prevented this on a large scale. Pay walls have to charge enough to cover credit-card fees + operating + profit margin in monthly or yearly amounts (or per hefty per-article fees); perhaps now they can harvest real data to determine whether micropayments would work via cryptocurrencies,

Cheap, live, at-scale economic experiment in micropayments (or micro-tips if you want to be pedantic).

View on HN

Micro-payments were not enabled by the cryptocurrency itself. They were enabled by the bitcointip bot (or doge or whatever), since they are off the blockchain, so nothing special was needed for this, just your usual centralized system. And if a Bitcoin clone enables microtransactions, it's because it's not big enough and doesn't need to worry about dust/spam transactions yet.

As usual, dogecoiners don't understand the first thing about their own currency. They think "more coinz is better because microtransactions". I can't believe so many people have trouble grasping the concept of decimals.

Dogecoin's genius is that they looked at how people actually act and saw "Many people have trouble grasping the concept of decimals", and then figured "Hey, we'll solve this by inflating the currency so that 0.005 BTC = 500 Doge!" It's an incredibly elegant solution to a real problem.

Logical fallacies that exist in people's heads are every bit as real as technical limitations, and much harder to work around. You can fix your product; you cannot fix a few hundred million peoples' inability to do math. So work around it and adapt your product (or currency) to the world as it actually exists rather than the world that you would like to see.

It's not incredibly elegant, it's just dumb. Would you say Infinitecoin was genius too? And it's mostly just an American problem (no wonder it exploded in Reddit, where the majority are American), since you guys are taught to use weird units, and all of you struggle trying to understand mBTC and uBTC which are simply powers of ten. Creating a new currency changing only the unit used and adding a funny picture of a dog is not genius, and saying such thing is an insult to the technology and its creator.

I didn't know that was one of the motivations for dogecoin. I agree that switching to a different display for bitcoins (e.g. mBTC or uBTC) would seem the more "logical" choice. But a majority of people seem stuck on this time and time again which suggests some sort of cognitive bias.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com