Re:Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
by acjacobson on Friday January 22, 2021 @08:32PM
(#25878651)
Forgive me if this is a naive question, but how is this different from Patreon, but dolled out in smaller ad hoc amounts? Is the legal distinction because with Patreon each user chooses the distribution ahead of time? Couldn't this be worked around by creating a white list of publishers you are willing to support that approves some set limit or transaction amount ahead of time? So as an example I whitelist a newspaper, and agree to pay $.005 per article view?
As secondary evidence for it being illegal in the US, the scheme you are proposing is pretty much exactly what WeChat and Alipay do in China. It is also exactly the problem that Paypal and Venmo were made to solve, but for some reason they chose much more convoluted and restricted solutions even though from a technical standpoint it is harder to do what they actually did rather than the absolutely trivial technical problem of the fully featured solution which just manages account balances and transfers between them, a literal CS 101 type of technical problem.