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Comment by hagbardgroup | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this a reason to make it easier for people to use bitcoin to pay subscriptions? Transaction fees and chargebacks make a $0.50/month fee impossible, but using some sort of cryptocurrency, that could be a solid alternative to the VC + free model.

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Yeah, I was thinking about browser extension which tracks time you spent on various websites during a time interval (a month?). You specify a sum you are willing to spend, and that sum is divided proportionally to time spent. Now if each domain had something like special /btc.html page with an address, the extension could automatically send your money to corresponding websites.

(sorry for broken english)

I think it would be a lot easier to just charge them $6 once a year. Or just a one time fee, like pinboard.in does. (Currently $10.38, which is easy on credit cards.)

Good call.

Bitcoin transaction fees are around $0.40 to get your transaction accepted. While you could pay with no fee, it could take days for the transaction to be accepted. Maybe one of the altcoins would work better. But now you are limiting your customer base to people who have altcoins, which must be a pretty small market.

You could extend them a subscription on credit, just like businesses do before credit/debit transactions settle.

Ripple then? Again that rests on adoption for Ripple, which is probably even smaller than a lot of alt coins.

$0.40? As in 40 US dollar-cents? As far as I know, it's much lower than that, around $0.005 (probably lower now, Bitcoin has dropped since then)

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3305

"The new fee after this patch is 0.5 cents."

http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction

I'm guessing y-axis is cents. Looks like it's about $0.25 - $0.30 these days.

No, that's mining costs, not transaction fees. And it's in dollars, not cents.

Hmm, not sure where I got the idea costs were that high. I can't find any data anywhere what people are actually paying.

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