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0 pointsufmace10y ago0 comments

I always thought of micropayments as being like 1cent or less, like a small enough amount to be forgettable for even the stingiest people. And to somehow make it effortlessly simple to pay, so it's closer to an impulse purchase. There's a lot of friction associated with finding a credit card and punching in numbers and an address.

I'm already using Google Contributor, and have apparently effectively paid amounts from less than a cent to $0.35 to various sites I've visited in the last month or so, and all for $5 a month. Seems like a better way to handle paying for content than signing up for subscriptions individually with dozens of sites.

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oska10y ago

21.co is targeting micropayments [1] (and many other things) in a novel way.

You will have a low powered bitcoin mining chip built into your device. This chip basically turns electricity into very small amounts of bitcoin (you'll be able to specify to do this only when your device is plugged into the wall, so as to not drain the battery). The chip's mining efficiency is less than state of the art bitcoin mining farms, but for the small amounts you are mining that really doesn't matter. The benefit is having (a small amount of) money put onto your device without you having to make any effort at all and replenished over time. There will also be the ability to specify a threshold below which money can be transferred from your device to a website without your authorisation. So you might specify 1 cent a webpage (for a collection of high quality sites) that you're happy to pay without constantly having to press an “ok” button.

This will then deliver a very low effort system for micro-paying websites requiring very little need for attention and management from the user, effectively automatically paying websites with device-generated digital currency rather than with attention/exposure to ads.

[1] https://21.co/learn/21-micropayments/#how-21-micropayments-w...

iSnow10y ago

That seems like the worst of all worlds. Mining on a desktop computer just barely works, but I'll be damned if I want my laptop's fan to spin up all the time just so I can tip some web site. And I absolutely don't want my mobile to die on me daily because the bitcoin mining drains the battery. And considering the current BTC price, I'd burn like $3 for every $1 gained.

Someone come up with a service where you push money to (so any security breach is limited to the $20 or whatever you keep there) and then have a browser plugin that reacts to a payment challenge (either HTTP 402 or some meta-tag) and presents me with a native chrome button that can't be spoofed by site JS. And add a whitelisting option for something like The Guardian where I currently pay a monthly fee.

kwhitefoot10y ago

> Someone come up with a service where you push money to (so any security breach is limited to the $20 or whatever you keep there)

That's how I use my Paypal account. I top it up occasionally by transferring money from my real bank. Paypal has usually the equivalent of about USD100 and it does NOT have my credit card number.

I would be quite happy to use Paypal for micropayments but I haven't seen anything yet that works and asks for a small enough amount to qualify as micropayment.

konschubert10y ago

I was once attempting to write something like this and had a test version up.

Here is the repo: https://github.com/KonstantinSchubert/bitcoupon-public/

Somehow I got bored with debugging all the different components, but I still think it has a lot of potential.

oska10y ago

> Mining on a desktop computer just barely works

You would not be mining on a computer's CPU (or GPU). You would be mining on a dedicated ASIC chip (that is already in production).

> And I absolutely don't want my mobile to die on me daily because the bitcoin mining drains the battery.

Which I why I specified in my comment that you could limit the mining chip to running only when the device is plugged into the wall (e.g. when you charge the battery overnight).

ssharp10y ago

Besides it being utterly ridiculous to have a mining chip in your computer, you are ignoring that Bitcoin is terrible for micropayments.

1) The blockchain can handle approximately 3 transactions per second, which if actually spread evenly across the day (which they wouldn't be), it can handle around 260,000 transactions per day. A website like the New York Times does over 1MM unique per day.

2) In order to get settlements on your transactions, you have to pay a fee or else miners will ignore you. Current fees are around the equivalent of $0.04 USD. So your 1 cent transaction will not only bound up the network, but also cost you 5 cents to actually get processed.

Bitcoin is not now, nor will it ever be, a feasible solution for micropayments. And the ridiculous 21.co mining rig is even more ridiculous of a solution.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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oska10y ago

21.co is targeting micropayments [1] (and many other things) in a novel way.

[1] https://21.co/learn/21-micropayments/#how-21-micropayments-w...

iSnow10y ago

kwhitefoot10y ago

> Someone come up with a service where you push money to (so any security breach is limited to the $20 or whatever you keep there)

That's how I use my Paypal account. I top it up occasionally by transferring money from my real bank. Paypal has usually the equivalent of about USD100 and it does NOT have my credit card number.

I would be quite happy to use Paypal for micropayments but I haven't seen anything yet that works and asks for a small enough amount to qualify as micropayment.

konschubert10y ago

I was once attempting to write something like this and had a test version up.

Here is the repo: https://github.com/KonstantinSchubert/bitcoupon-public/

Somehow I got bored with debugging all the different components, but I still think it has a lot of potential.

oska10y ago

> Mining on a desktop computer just barely works

You would not be mining on a computer's CPU (or GPU). You would be mining on a dedicated ASIC chip (that is already in production).

> And I absolutely don't want my mobile to die on me daily because the bitcoin mining drains the battery.

Which I why I specified in my comment that you could limit the mining chip to running only when the device is plugged into the wall (e.g. when you charge the battery overnight).

ssharp10y ago

Besides it being utterly ridiculous to have a mining chip in your computer, you are ignoring that Bitcoin is terrible for micropayments.

Bitcoin is not now, nor will it ever be, a feasible solution for micropayments. And the ridiculous 21.co mining rig is even more ridiculous of a solution.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse