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Comment by digitalsushi | Hacker News Reader

We've had this thing to deliver content for 20 years (the web) but in the same 20 years no one has invented a simple way to pay for the content.

I'll balk at 50 dollars a year the same way I'll balk at 3500 dollars worth of gourmet coffees paid on January 1st. Just let me spend small amounts so I don't become aware of my own habits.

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> no one has invented a simple way to pay for the content.

Single click amazon payments, google wallet? Or gumroad? Or stripe?

How about monthly things like patreon? Flattr? Or things like bitcointip on reddit?

How much simpler do you want things?

http://www.patreon.com/

https://flattr.com/

https://gumroad.com/

https://stripe.com/gb

That's just it. You listed 7 different services that provide various ways of streamlining payment. Should I sign up for all seven? Or can I rely on all content providers supporting the one I choose?

Just like Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and Amex* are accepted everywhere, this problem won't be solved until an underlying universal payment network is established and ubiquitous.

So... BitCoin?

* I know I know, but it's 80%.

> Just let me spend small amounts so I don't become aware of my own habits.

ding ding ding

Amazon's mobile app does this excellently with the One-Click purchase.

And don't even get me started on Steam sales.

I dare not look at my spending history on either of those two.

For me that's GOG.com and the Humble Bundles. I keep telling myself that someday I'll have the time to go back and beat Baldur's Gate, or any of the hundreds of other games I've bought on sale. Fat chance...

One of these days I'll do something like this: http://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/1jg15u/so_i_actu...

A while back NPR's Planet Money did a show on the penny[1]. It included a piece on a company that was trying to allow and make easy to charge/make fractional cent payments, so we could have content that cost a fraction of a cent. While there are obvious technical hurdles to be overcome at multiple levels in a technology like that, I like the idea of allowing small payments for content to support the production and delivery of that content.

1: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/05/16/312732409/episode-...

The subscribe section gives you 12 weeks for $12.

Bitcoin makes it very easy: http://www.coinwall.co

No, it doesn't. The intersection of New Yorker readers and people who already possess Bitcoin would be infinitesimally small.

This would, in fact, mean "Open a Coinbase account, scan your drivers license and passport, link your bank account, do the two-small-deposits thing, initiate a transfer, wait the first-time-purchaser waiting period, and then read the article. Weeks later."

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