> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee

One option is to have regulations about card fees, which is the case in the EU (0.2% for debit, 0.3% for credit).

Another is to use an alternative payment method, like India's UPI or Eurozone's SEPA which are free and instantaneous.

It's actually 2%+fixed amount fee (see e.g. Stripe.com and choose an EU country), 0.2 is just the interbank fee IIRC.

The UX around card and SEPA payments sucks, though. I hear UPI is nicer.

But the UPI requirements of forcing mobile apps makes the monetisation usecase UX pretty terrible (think App Intents to and fro on mobile browsers) and scanning QRs on desktop.

I’d rather like Taler.

SEPA via Stripe takes on average 5 days, max 14 according to their docs - instantaneous would be a game changer?!

https://stripe.com/docs/payments/sepa-debit

Instant free SEPA transfers are becoming more common in the EU, but as an easy payment method it’s still annoying from a UX perspective.

Where did you read that SEPA is free? Thats not true.

It is. Some shitty banks charge for SEPA Instant, but otherwise SEPA transfers themselves are fully free. Where aren't they?

> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee

This is anathema here in the US but the rest of the world typically does not use credit cards as the default payment method.

But they (we) do use debit cards as one tho.

Mastercard/Visa are not only credit cards - they're used for debit card transactions as well.

Americans use credit cards as the default payment method? Why?

Credit cards have by far the best in-person UX of the options that I am presented, tap my card or phone and leave and they're accepted everywhere in practice (my debit card is not).

The 'cardholder can always reverse any charge' behavior is also nice once every few years.

Fraud protections are, by law, much stronger in favor of consumers for credit card transactions in the US.

If you have good credit, you can also get 2-4% in credit card cash back on everything via rewards programs.

Fraud protection, mostly.

If someone steals your debit card and spends all your money, you might very well be fucked.

But (in America) if someone steals your credit card and spends a bunch of money, they technically stole money from the bank, so it's the bank that might be fucked, not you. All you have to say is "yeah that wasn't me" and the bank reverses the transaction.

If you're blatantly abusing this the bank will end their relationship with you and cancel your card, but that's pretty much worst case scenario, and you won't be on the hook for anything. And they obviously make enough money off of people who carry a balance and pay interest that they still come out way ahead.

I use it because if I used a debit card and it gets compromised then I lose whatever's in my bank account. Maybe I can get it back if I can prove it's fraud?

If I use a credit card and it gets compromised then my cash is still secure. If I have to fight a credit card company for 6 months to get the payments reversed I still have cash to live off of. If I don't win then hell I don't pay. Maybe I go to collections and credit gets dinged but my real assets are still mine.

To boost credit rating. When you have none credits, your credit rating is ZERO, and it is considered bad. So you could pay for example 10$ (yes, small amount) from zero percent credit, and regularly pay it and this will effectively raise credit rating.

Good luck getting something like that past Eu regulators.

Why? It seems like the sort of privacy-supporting thing they’d like.

They also like taxes, and this seems like a nightmare for VAT.

Frankly, this is probably just going to manifest as a digital currency. Add 10$ to your wallet. At the end of the month that's distributed or something

Flattr tried to do something similar, but yes I agree. It's unfortunate that bitcoin became a hoarding/speculation thing, rather than a useful thing.

Decentralized micro-transactions would have been cool had they been used with a decent friendly UI and been integrated into a browser or two as an extension.

My understanding (possibly mistaken - I've only been casually watching from the sidelines) is bitcoin (and at least most other blockchain currencies) suffers a similar problem to credit/debit cards, in that there is effort involved in validating/recording the transaction and that work needs to be compensated, and therefore there are transaction fees that are effectively independent of the value transferred, therefore microtransactions are disproportionately penalized by this necessity.

Especially with KYC/AML laws being necessary to run a legitimate financial exchange, there really is no getting around a certain cost-per-transaction and even in a best-case scenario that hits microtransactions "equally" as hard as "macrotransactions" which proportionally penalizes microtransactions.

To minimize the proportion of that going to transaction fees, you're better off making fewer transactions which then manifests as something like a monthly subscription instead of "I'll just transact ten cents to you per action".

The Lightning Network is a layer on top of Bitcoin, which allows users to aggregate a huge number of transactions into a payment channel that’s tracked off-ledger. The only transactions that need to be settled on the base layer (broadcast to the public Bitcoin blockchain) are channel open and close events.

There are already APIs protected by an L402 paywall that charges tiny fractions of a cent for access to protected resources.

http://l402.tech

> Decentralized micro-transactions would have been cool had they been used with a decent friendly UI and been integrated into a browser or two as an extension.

My position on cryptocurrency as well. I think that the ability to send money in this decentralized manner is fascinating. It's too bad it went far, far beyond that. Cryptocurrency should have never tried to replace normal currency, or any of that NFT bs.

Blockchain isn't really the solution there, though.

I don't want a public ledger with all my payments, which tells not only what I consume, but also how much I am able/willing to spend.

And as soon as you are in massmarket you need ways for humans to intervene, for handling complaints, mistakes, whatever or dealing with the unavoidable case that individuals lose their secret keys. Or even cases like medical restriction or inheritance requiring others to take over the funds.

All those things Blockchain purposely and inherently prevents.

You can just send a transaction from your exchange.

Like, let's say I want to send you $0.10 right now. I would just go into Robinhood and send 0.1 USDC to you on Polygon or Solana, that would arrive in your wallet instantly from a Robinhood-owned address, you would have no idea who I am or my previous transaction history. Robinhood also owns the private keys and account recovery process here - it's just using blockchain as the payment rail.

Go ahead and post your address and I'll send you $0.10.

Okay, so the solution is to use a bank, not Blockchain money.

But you can't send $0.01 instantly and anonymously with bank rails. The solution is to use a crypto exchange on crypto rails - just not a regular crypto wallet (you could, but perhaps not very user friendly)

Isn't that just turning the exchanges into unregulated banks?

Many exchanges are regulated, but maybe not as banks. But yes you're trusting that exchange with your money. If used for web-micropayments it shouldn't be much of an issue though.

>It's unfortunate that bitcoin became a hoarding/speculation thing, rather than a useful thing.

Brave tried to do this with their Basic Attention Token, but they seem to be focused on adding generalized crypto features like wallets rather than developing how it could work better.

> It's unfortunate that bitcoin became a hoarding/speculation thing

It's a natural consequence of its deflationary design, which encourages hoarding. Use as a currency would have benefitted from an alternate pure linear emission, with no reward halvings, where it would take 100 years to get supply inflation down to 1%. That would also leave later generations their fair share of supply.

That's how Brave already works.

Agreed. Brave actually implemented this exact thing[1], and then got dumped together with other crypto scam projects, which continues to happen in this very thread.

Crypto haters are quick to shout that cryptocurrencies have no practical use, and introduce many problems, but this is a perfect use case for them. The negative discussion has detracted from some truly disrupting technologies being adopted, which is a damn shame.

Brave Inc. has made some missteps, sure, but I don't think they're overall an evil or scam company. A solution like BAT can eventually move us away from the current ad-infested web where advertising leeches serve as sleazy middlemen between users and companies, and scams and fake content flood the web in order to trick SEO and get easy ad revenue. The modern web is a minefield corrupted by advertising, and things will only get worse as AI generated content gets widespread adoption.

If browsers integrated with a decentralized wallet, that can either be filled by watching privacy-preserving ads OR by manually adding credit to them, had Humble Bundle-like sliders for users to control how much of their credit is allocated for each site, and the web had standardized APIs for websites to set their minimum price, then it would solve the monetization issue once and for all. The basic customer-business relationship would be preserved, where customers actually pay for the services they use, instead of the corrupt business models of today where web users are not even the customers, but a piece of rock gold can be mined from, and its value milked in perpetuity.

I think the single largest reason this hasn't happened yet is because it would negatively impact the profits of adtech giants who are running the web, and have a strong sway in directing its future. If any solution has a chance in getting mass adoption it needs to happen outside of the web, and be built from the ground up by avoiding the mistakes we now know have lead us to where we currently are.

[1]: https://basicattentiontoken.org/

>> Crypto haters are quick to shout that cryptocurrencies have no practical use, and introduce many problems, but this is a perfect use case for them. The negative discussion has detracted from some truly disrupting technologies being adopted, which is a damn shame.

Crypto haters & "negative discussion" have not detracted from this use case anywhere near as much as the very real fraud and rampant speculation that completely defined this technology for the general public over the last 10 years.

Exactly the point I was hoping to read. Well said.

Rampant fraud and scams are what's at the root of the "negative discussion".

GNU Taler

I had for a while Coil installed in the browser and nobody cared about it, so I uninstalled it half a year later. I honestly couldn't care less if there's a blockchain behind it or whatever, but as long no sites (useful to me) implement it... Under the line I paid Coil some money for nothing, so maybe for them it was a business success.

I had Coil too. They shut down.

https://www.coil.com/#:~:text=On%20March%2015%2C%202023%2C%2....

Of course there is, there are tons of cryptocurrencies that can do this but everyone here hates crypto and throws the baby out with the bathwater and won’t stop parroting “SCAM!” every time they hear the word. It’s too expensive to use on-chain transactions on things like Bitcoin or Ethereum but there are other coins.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth...

You could also use Lightning Network on Bitcoin or any of the Layer 2s on Ethereum like Arbitrum or Optimism. Fees are in the cents range.

https://l2fees.info/

Pointing to my comment elsewhere on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39279246

Some blockchains have private transactions and very good at it indeed.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-xmr...

Monero has fees of six cents it looks like and a novel and private way of performing transactions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature

Layer 2s such as Bitcoin's lightning network do not use a public ledger for their transactions. The only thing public is the transaction that opens a payment channel, everything after that happens as peer to peer messaging across the network.

> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee? Or an approach that doesn't require one company to have a monopoly over it?

The short answer is, no. For the long answer, I really recommend people read a blog like Bits About Money or some Matt Levine columns to start learning about the actual plumbing of finance and payment processors, to see why such a thing is actually difficult or impossible to build. Something that seems like a simple transaction to us, like sending $0.10 to a webiste, actually involves many parties, all of whom are a) hedging against counterparty risk, b) required by law to do KYC/AML and c) required by law to have safeguards against leaving customers in the lurch. Providing a, b and c is expensive in both money and time.

There are a lot of layers of abstraction in this system to make sure that you, the end user, don't usually have to think about all the complexity, and so to you it just looks like "I sent money from A to B", but the complexity is nonetheless there and it's a real impediment to getting the kinds of fast, cheap microtxns you want.

This is literally the use case for cryptocurrencies -- digital cash, not investments.

In the more... questionably legal parts of the web, Monero is pretty common since you can't use regular banking anyway. The fees are pretty low, at around USD0.001 IIRC.

There's also Nano (feeless) but it doesn't seem to be very popular, unfortunately.

Please correct me if I'm wrong here (I've been out of the crypto game for a couple years), but I don't think crypto holds up here. The nature of transaction fees with crypto is they scale exponentially with demand. Monero fees are low because volume is low. Bitcoin fees are high ($9.97 was the average transaction fee yesterday!) because volume is high.

Any fully decentralized crypto at the scale of use that the Web Monetization API would need would have enormous tx prices. There are ways to scale this, ie the lightning network, but those are essentially centralized solutions to scale.

The current bitcoin blocksize is limited to 1mb. This means, on average, only 1mb worth of transactions can be written to the ledger. With that 1mb we save thousands of transactions. When you pay a transaction fee you are essentially bidding on your data being written to the ledger every 10 minutes. You are correct that the more people bidding, the higher we can expect the price to be.

There is however no technical reason we should limit the blocksize to 1mb. We could have 10mb or even 100mb blocksizes easily. Realistically a 100mb block would be large enough to handle all transaction data our species currently generates.

The transaction fee is a considerable portion of miner's revenue. Miners ultimately are responsibility for making changes to the bitcoin protocol. I think it's unlikely bitcoin miners will vote for a higher blocksize because it will cause short term decreases in revenue. However, they are missing a potential boon from the Jevons paradox -- the cheaper a resource becomes to use the more of the resource we use.

So in summary, it's not really a technical limit to have a high transaction volume but we aren't likely to see it from the current big coins.

That was the reason for the fork of Bitcoin Cash, and indeed BCH blocks are bigger and fees are much smaller. But BTC is still inexplicably way more popular.

Value of technology is not why people aggregate towards Bitcoin.

Otherwise it would've been long superseded by other chains.

Bitcoiners still arguing about the solidity of the network guaranteed by so much mining, yet virtually all the mining is in the hands of few specialized operations all knowing each other (so it's not really decentralized) and despite Ethereum proving new protocol to be a valid and safe alternative.

None of Bitcoin cultists at the end of the day understood that it wasn't about algorithms nor computers, but consensus among people.

And that consensus voted to have Bitcoin, the oldest and least technologically developed chain to be the "store of value" of cryptocurrencies.

Does not seem to be a sustainable solution: if the amount of microtranfers increase, the blocksize is going to be an issue again

The number of real time electronic transactions is virtually guaranteed to increase. This is not only a big problem now, it's becoming a bigger problem over time. I consider the unwillingness of the bitcoin network to increase blocksize to be a critical flaw.

Edit: The problem is not 100mb is too small for the future. The problem is that just like we cannot go from 1mb to 100mb today, we would have no ability to go from 100mb to 1000mb when needed.

Yet bitcointalk and /r/bitcoin were able to sway what later become to be known as Bitcoin Cash into the wrong fork.

> Realistically a 100mb block would be large enough to handle all transaction data our species currently generates.

Nonsense.

With the current block size and average transaction size, the bitcoin network processes ~7 transactions per second. A 100X increase in block size gets you to 700 transactions per second. A quick google says global credit card transactions currently average more than 21,000 per second.

You're still almost two orders of magnitude off, and that's just existing credit card transactions.

Maybe my global transaction number is off. I'm not sure if the blockchain algo would have other bottlenecks when at 10gb blocks which is the size it would need to grow in order to accommodate 70k/sec. Certainly storage and network transfer is sufficient enough. It seems pretty feasible to process 16.67 MBps of data even on inefficient algorithms.

With 10G blocks @ ~144 block per day, that's almost 1.5 TB per day.

The complete blockchain is currently about half a TB.

According to bitcoin technology experts, a network of Full Nodes is more secure than a network of Partial Nodes. Right now almost anyone can run a Full Node. If you make the blockchain grow by 1.5 TB per day, only big corporations will be able to run Full Nodes.

So no, existing storage and network transfer is not sufficient for large block sizes, at least not for the current way we validate BTC transactions. I assume if there was a good technology fix for the full/partial node issue, it would have been implemented already.

Why are you comparing this to bitcoin, bitcoin was never meant to be a fast network lol it was to be a network for cash to sit in "digital gold"...

Other networks were designed for speed and others are working on it (etherum with layer 2 networks, and more speed focused networks, for instance as was mentioned Nano was doing 1200-1500tps years ago, with plans for increases not sure if thtey eer went further.

The problem is crypto has a few solid real projects and a billion loud useless scam/spam projects that make the idea of "crypto" look like its all trash, finding the networks that actually have something to really give to the world is hard.

> bitcoin was never meant to be a fast network lol it was to be a network for cash to sit in "digital gold"...

Your claim is opposed to the contents of the original Bitcoin whitepaper

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

That white paper was written when? 2008, give or take a couple years? "Speed," as we refer to it, is relative to the age. In 2008, the threshold for terms like "fast" was much lower than it is today.

In 2008 I could make instant, secure online payments with credit cards.

I'm not entirely sure about the point you're intending to make but I have an assumption. Perhaps your intention is to say that credit cards were faster than blockchains at processing transactions in 2008 (they still are today.) In which case, yes, I believe credit cards have been a thing since the 1950s, so they benefit a lot from the age of the technology. Credit cards are also just kind of a concept that goes almost as far back as banks and bankers do, where banks would loan out money for you to spend and pay back. Credit cards just abstracted a concept that always existed with some additional systems that were built around them over time like maintaining a trust record for individuals (credit scores) and online payment processing that benefits from the simplicity of going through a single trusted party that goes virtually unchecked for accuracy (I can't make an audit of financial transactions that VISA handled today and say "Bob had a 0 balance but they spent $6000 today somehow," for example.) Blockchain has none of that historical advantage, and has essentially only existed since 2008, and has not benefited much from mass adoption mostly because it's extremely easy for rational consumers to dismiss it as slow, or "only scammers use it," which would be even less true if legitimate users dismissed it less easily. That's not to say I think blockchain is ready for general consumers, in my opinion it's still an incubating technology.

Where are you getting "speed is relative to age" from? As far as I'm aware 100mph in 2008 is the same as 100mph today, and 10 minutes hasn't changed either.

The bitcoin white paper clearly describes the goal as a digital cash with and low fee transactions without the used of a trusted third party. We have none of those today in bitcoin.

False equivalence. Cars are much older technology than blockchain. In 1908, cars were much slower than they are today. In 1808, horse carriages were much slower. You get the point. The speed at which I expect changes to process differs over time. In some future time, we may all be in self-driving cars that are able to safely exceed 200MPH and we'll think back to our 45MPH street speed limits and laugh. Just like how in 2008, the typical home network had a 5Mbps uplink to the internet, and today it's (depending on the source) at least 135Mbps, with the availability of >1Gbps depending on your ISP and region.

I was using the term "speed" as a concept, and you were using it as a constant. I referred to "speed" as "fast" or "slow." Which is to say, the subjective judgement on what is fast. Which is a decent way to default to judging speed unless the white paper specifies a threshold of transactions per second to be considered "fast." You thought of speed as a constant unit of measurement for speed, which makes no sense unless they have a target for their transactions per second. The problem with that is, the number of transactions per second that a payment solution needs to process is pretty much only going to increase over time, and thus, the goal to be considered "fast" does actually change over time. You're just potentially thinking in too short of a time range to see much drift in that subjective judgement.

I think you're mistaking my intention too. My intention is to say that Bitcoin's perceived speed with handling transactions then, is perhaps slow by today's standards. The goal you gave:

> digital cash with and low fee transactions without the used of a trusted third party.

is at least 2/3rd of the way complete. You have digital cash, with high transaction fees, and no trusted third party. The solution that blockchain designers/engineers seem to have come up with is referred to as "layer 2 rollups" where a bunch of transactions are processed quickly by a trusted third party, bundled together, and then enforced in one big transaction on the actual network in intervals. This promises to be faster, and possibly cost less in transaction fees, but then under-delivers on the third goal of not using a trusted third party. But it is apparently the best way that blockchain engineers have thought up to compete with the transaction processing speed of entities like VISA, at least today. While it's not ideal to trust that third party, presumably you have a choice to opt in or out of the layer 2 network, and enforce your transaction on the slower, more traditional blockchain layer 1. And at least with the layer 2 network, it eventually gets trued up on the blockchain with each of the rollup intervals. It's maybe up for an argument on whether trusting the layer 2 third party is better than, or the same as, trusting VISA. I would potentially argue that it's better, with the caveat of admitting that I am not a blockchain expert. I just potentially know more than the average crypto enthusiast that trades BTC and Doge on institutions like Coinbase.

I will note that the goal you gave said absolutely nothing about speed though.

You'll earn downvotes for the speed part, but this part is spot on;

>> The problem is crypto has a few solid real projects and a billion loud useless scam/spam projects that make the idea of "crypto" look like its all trash, finding the networks that actually have something to really give to the world is hard

Congrats to the OP who sent money to Vietnam. It's a fantastic use case. But as a non-crypto user I can't do that with crypto because I don't know which site to trust and which is a scam.

And -reputationally- they are -all scams-, some just haven't been caught yet.

(I know, I know, there are honest players, but even the -big names I recognise- get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, that taints everyone)

Age would seem to be a good indicator ?

Incompetents like MtGox and FTX lasted only a few years. OP claims the service they used has been operating for a decade already.

Same for the underlying tech : Bitcoin, Etherium and even Monero have also been around for a decent amount of time. (Of course you might refuse to use them for other reasons, like the wasteful power usage of Bitcoin or the money laundering enabled by Monero.)

(Note that this can generally be applied to anything money-related...)

The worst part of lightning is not even the centralization but the capital inefficiency. By definition, any money locked in a payment channel can not be used for anything else.

It depends on the chain. Some chains can support high throughput at low fees.

Theoretically.

Sure; they can. By sacrificing the very properties Bitcoin was designed for: decentralization and censorship resistance.

Which would mostly be fine for this usecase. Also, these properties wouldn't need to be abandoned entirely. Bitcoin in its current form isn't really a great model for this anyway.

this is the point of lightning network for btc, way lower costsand nearly instantaneous transactions. I haven’t tried it so far.

Because it's still theory 7 years after announcement it has been proven again and again to not be a real alternative.

Lightning has had lots of problems, but most of those are fixable through software or gets better and better with adoption (at least in theory).

The reason adoption has been so low is that with current hardware you cannot run a full node in a phone, so you either get a server to run a full node or you trade-off some control/security of your coins

There are still other theoretical problems, mostly things like denial-of-services, but adoption has been what has stagnated it.

The hardware/control tradeoff is a real PITA, we need a phone with like 50x more battery or efficient to be able to run lightning in a completely self-custodial manner

And there are still some people advocating for blocksize increase, which will make the problems of lightning even worse

> There are ways to scale this, ie the lightning network, but those are essentially centralized solutions to scale.

Some nodes are more popular than others for open a channel to, but there are still several thousands, so calling it centralized is misleading.

As mentioned, Nano is inherently feeless. In theory it's supposed to remain fast and reliable at high network usage, and as of right now it's very fast, but it's only doing about 26k tx/day (about the same as Monero) so it's hard to say.

unfortunately, looks like Monero just crashed from Binance delisting it for security reasons. hopefully it manages to recover.

Is there a way to use crypto for this without adding a bunch of new capital gain/loss items to my taxes?

For foreign currency, there's a personal use exemption, right? Does this apply to crypto?

Nope, as cryptocurrencies are not really currencies, so you are always trading capital.

Taler experimented with a different direction when they built a distributed payment system for moving usual currencies digitally, even with a asymmetric behavior to preserve buyers privacy while making sellers taxable. Sad that it did not catch on.

This would most likely be based on stablecoins (US users would use USDC/USDT etc) so no tax issues there.

Technically, you are creating taxable events when going in and out of stables to normal USD. Its just that there usually only very minimal gain or loss in the transaction.

I don't think the IRS has taken that position and no tax professional in discussions around these issues has advocated for that. It might be something high frequency traders might keep track of but it's literally a rounding error for everyone else.

If you try to be feeless you become super vulnerable to spam: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/03/11/nanos-network-flood...

IIRC this spam attack cost the attacker only $5000 but rendered the network pretty much useless for hours

Hashcash, Bitcoin’s predecessor, was created to solve email spam:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Having users to pay actions make spam unprofitable, as spam relies on tragedy of commons and abusing public goods. This is why there is so much less SMS spam compared to email spam.

Nano's updated a few times since then, I don't think there were any other major spam attacks after that.

> This is literally the use case for cryptocurrencies

This is literally where cryptocurrencies do the worst...high transaction fees.

> This is literally the use case for cryptocurrencies -- digital cash, not investments.

It should be, but the cryptocurrency crowd have internalized Austrian deflationary bullshit as a premise for their money system, it's just doomed to be unused as a payment mechanism and keep being used as securities.

It's literally Economics illiteracy killing the use-case.

Interestingly enough, the fact that they are used as securities is also responsible for why bitcoin is still the biggest fish in the pond while being technically pretty meh and long obsolete (very long block time, no “smart contracts”, failed as a decentralized system because ASICs, etc.).

Yeah, from my POV it just seems like the pro-deflation crowd simply proved economic experts correct. People start holding and hoarding instead of spending, while laughing at those who do (e.g. pizza guy).

This already works with Crypto, something like Hedera is dirt cheap (1/100 of a cent) and fast and scales really well. Wallets are easy to connect, but the disconnect to regular $$$ is still a bit too big for the regular surfin' user.

You've just described the value proposition for bitcoin, a peer to peer electronic cash system. Sadly, bitcoin has been captured by banks and is now only useful for gambling and parasitic investment scams.

:/ Distributed ledger technology ever being a viable solution for small, high-frequency transactions seems like a pipe dream.

I'm aware that tremendous effort has been and is being invested in that.

But I have yet to be convinced efforts in that direction won't all boil down to "trading decentralization for efficiency."

In which case, why not use a centralized, much more efficient solution?

How do you centralize without having a government requiring KYC?

I'd ask how you decentralize without having a government requiring KYC?

Anonymity of nodes?

If avoiding KYC / government-control is the primary motivation, then more centralized ledger systems look a lot like current payment networks... just with anonymous operators. (Oof)

Why is that even a real need?

All crypto cultists I know don't give a damn to give all of their info to any provider, out there, be tracked everywhere "they already know everything" and yet there is a problem for a 1$ donation on some random website when they using their real dollars online for literally everything.

Also, there's literally 0 ways other than bartering to get bitcoins really anonymously, and the number of people able to transact while staying anonymous is below 0. You need to take your credit card and pay for it on an exchange, so it's not anonymous.

And the anonymous chains are borderline ignored, because being anonymous is really not what drags people into Bitcoin, but the hope of finding a fool paying more than they did.

It's one thing to be able to track a transaction, but it's a real problem that a name exchange is mandatory for micropayments.

I don't know if I'm the only one, but I can't see myself giving my identity for 10c to buy blog articles.

Especially since first and last names are a powerful tracking tool that's not as easy to change as your IP address.

I mean, Solana does 3k tps on a good day (with less electricity than a google search and a fraction of a penny fee). So it’s not un-believable there will be a decentralized ledger that hits visa levels of throughput in the next few years.

I agree though that a centralized solution would be more performant, but it would have to have network effects for it to gain widespread use, which means it would be a monopoly and enshitify and start taking an unreasonable fee. So government should step in and offer something for online micro transactions, but at government speed we might be decades out.

So then we are back to decentralized ledgers…. Not technically better but organizationally, politically, socially better…

say what you want, but iota, out of all of them, actually seems to bring a promising technical solution. @hus_ky on twitter, one of their main devs working on it is a good follow.

Looks like https://getcode.com/ just launched to solve this problem. There have been many attempts at web3 micropayments, but this one seems slicker than most. Hat tip from USV, one of their investors.

> Privacy taken too far, however, can lead to bad outcomes. To mitigate the potential of Code being used for nefarious activity, Code users are limited to $250 USD per payment, up to $1000 USD per day.

This is a joke. Everything seems to be designed around their proprietary app, so why bother with a blockchain and custom currency at all?

The best way to do this today is through any crypto exchange that supports USDC.

I just tested this - I went in to Robinhood and sent 0.01 USDC to a SOL address. It cost me $0.001 as a transfer fee and took about 30 seconds total. I agree the process could be a bit smoother, but it works fairly well.

I'm grateful this hasn't been worked out yet. The magnitude of the shittification of the internet which will occur once this is a solved problem is almost too much to think about. If you are working on this, for the sake of humanity, please stop.

I think a large portion of enshittification comes from sites being advertising revenue driven. This leads to them needing more users with higher engagement, so they grow beyond their scope first and then shittify everything when they need to start making money (see reddit). A large reason sites have to be ad driven is that requiring users to sign up and pay for a site is a huge blocker for most people. So I feel like having a standard easy way for users to send money to a site they use for the utility they receive would go some ways to reduce enshittification, not increase it. But maybe I'm just an optimist.

I'm not saying there aren't good use-cases for this. There absolutely are. What I'm saying is that this tool WILL be used well beyond those cases in ways that make the internet much worse than the ad and surveillance nonsense we currently have to deal with.

As a thought experiment, consider a truly terrible group of smart and capable people. The kind of people who will exploit this new tool to extract and squeeze every cent from others to themselves without any care for what is destroyed, broken, or ruined. Imagine they do exactly this and become wildly rich. Their uncaring ruthlessness richly rewarded leading to normalization of such tactics which are then taken on by others as just the 'way things are done'. I ask you to consider just how this tool could be used for evil and then know that it will be.

This tool will allow any/all action on a website to be easily monetized. This will mean that eventually EVERY action will be monetized. Oh, and the ads and surveillance? They'll be there too.

I can see the risk... yet it's only a risk, and we're already starting to see the tidal wave of SPAM that ever smarter neural networks allow.

(Also, thankfully, there are still corners of the Internet that haven't been plagued by either ads or spam - because not popular enough - and are likely to remain so.)

Most of the "enshittification" that you're talking about is the result of having to find roundabout ways for people to get paid for their work, because simply charging the consumer isn't feasible.

websites charging money for the content and services they provide is not enshittification. it's just business. expecting everything to be delivered for free is what leads us to things like invasive tracking and targeted advertising.

I don't disagree about what the problem is. I just think this particular solution will cause more new problems then the old ones it will theoretically solve.

I actually think it will solve the enshitification problem, which is mostly ad driven.

Or random paywalls. I am fine to pay $0.10 per random article I get linked to and find interesting. I am not fine to pay subscription fees of $5+ for a single article.

The ads are never going away. We tried the 'pay your way' system with things like netflix and prime video, and guess what's on the way? Now you get to pay for it AND see ads.

Netflix doesn't work as an analogy here, because as a subscriber you're not paying the filmmakers directly.

The point from the OP there is less who gets paid but that not running ads leaves money on the table so money oriented people will eventually notice that and run ads as well as collect money directly.

Though I’d say this is more of an issue for the Netflixes of the world that have to please investors.

It doesn't even need to be that fast, as long as it's secure and credible. Stock trades in the US happen "instantly" (or near enough), but actual settlement takes place two or three days later.

The cryptocurrency people are hung up on the idea of "fast, irreversible payments" (that settle at the same time as the trade) because they desperately want a trustless, digital equivalent of cash for political reasons.

But for merchants and mainstream users, a fair, trustworthy payment system run by known intermediaries would be much better. It can be slow, as long as merchants know they'll get their money in some reasonable timeframe. The problem is that the Visa/Mastercard duopoly makes it hard to innovate.

It's possible FedNow will fix this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow

I think you need the browsers to act as a broker/escrow.

Brave tried to do this, but I'm not sure what ever happened to it. The way their system worked (as I understood it) is you deposited an amount in the browser each month and it was split between the sites you visited that month weighted by how much time you spent on each site, but it only worked for sites that signed up for the Brave reward program (or whatever they called it).

Brave/BAT is a massive "crypto" grift. It's an ERC20 token that they hold like 30% of in reserves. You also need to signup for Uphold / sign up with Brave to receive payment.

It's a cryptocurrency only in implementation, but the actual experience could be replicated with (GoFundMe or any other "creator platform") + A chrome extension.

Thanks for the info. I never actually used it and didn't know the details. Its just the only "real" attempt at direct web monetization as an alternative to ads that I've seen. Sad to hear its a crypto thing.

I'm working on something under a different use case that could fit for this, but maybe not at the scale people on this forum are looking for without additional support

I wont blab about myself here, but I do feel I have relevant background and a couple solid connections to implement something that works.

Cryptocurrency has failings for my use-case, based on what I've tried for designing around it so far. For strictly donating money in one direction towards a website, those failings may not be relevant though.

Sadly this project is not my day job, though, but it is something I plan to use for myself with or without more widespread adoption so it's moving forward regardless. I'm honestly only working on it because I wanted to do a different project that would work way nicer if tiny transactions with users are possible.

> Are there any promising avenues towards microtransactions that gets around small card transactions getting a hefty fee? Or an approach that doesn't require one company to have a monopoly over it?

Either one company with a monopoly or maybe a small number of companies is probably the only feasible way to do it, because efficient payment processing is only half the problem.

The other half is taxes. Every time someone in a browser pays to unlock content provided by someone in a different tax jurisdiction some government is likely to view that as a taxable sale that someone has to collect sales tax or VAT for.

In many places (EU, US) it is the jurisdiction where the buyer resides that is owed the tax, but the seller who is supposed to deal with collecting and paying it.

Unless we can get a lot of countries to make special rules for small consumer content purchases that greatly simplify this, the most practical approach is to have a small number of content marketplaces.

So say you are in the EU and want to buy an article from the New York Times. Instead of directly paying the NYT you would go to one of the market sites and buy a NYT access token from them. You can use that access token to get your article from the Times.

What going through the intermediate marketplace does is make it so your monetary transaction is with them, not the NYT. Instead of each content provider having to deal with taxes in dozens of different jurisdictions it is just the marketplaces.

The marketplace would pay the NYT for the access token, but that would be a business to business sale of a product for resale which most places exempt from sales tax and VAT. It's just going to be ordinary income for the content providers that they report on their own income tax.

You don't want too many separate marketplaces so that content providers can reasonably offer their content in all of the marketplaces. That way consumers just need an account at one marketplace.

The marketplace approach also largely solves the problem of transaction fees. Instead of each article you unlock for $0.10 being a separate charge on your card you'd preload your account at the marketplace you use. You credit card would only be charged for the initial prepay and then whenever you need to refill it.

The big issue I see is keeping it from devolving to something like the current streaming movie/TV market where content providers make exclusive deals with different marketplaces.

But why is the VAT a showstopper ?

Because of extra complexity ? But the payment software itself can figure out the exact amounts. Which then can also be aggregated monthly/yearly.

Not to mention that plenty of jurisdictions only require that for businesses, while non-businesses don't have to report anything about their donations/sales unless they cross a yearly threshold.

I can't find it now, but several years ago a dev posted his experiences here dealing with VAT when selling software across the EU.

He had to comply with a completely different set of tax laws for each EU member state that he received a purchase from. The cost he paid to his accountant to be able to be in compliance was like twice what he paid in actual taxes.

A big party of the problem is that many of the tax laws were so inconsistent and vaguely worded that every transaction had to be gone over manually.

That sounds like it was fairly long ago. With the introduction of the VAT MOSS (Mini One Stop Shop) system somewhere around 2015 it got a lot easier. VAT MOSS got replaced with something else a couple years ago, whose name I forget, but it largely works the same at least from the point of view of a non-EU company selling digital goods via the net into the EU.

The way VAT MOSS work is that instead of having to register for VAT collection in every EU country you sell in, and having to deal with reporting and remitting in every such country, you just have to register in one. You do all your reporting and remitting to just the tax authorities in that country.

You still have to collect the correct VAT on your sales into the other countries, but you report those sales to the country you are registered with and turn the money over to them. They deal with then reporting to and paying the other countries.

We're registered in Ireland. I wasn't involved in registering, but the person who handled it told me that it took something like 10 minutes on the web, with no need to interact with any humans. The quarterly reporting is, I'm told, a simple upload of a CSV file that contains a line for each EU country we had sales in listing the total amount of sales, the VAT rate, and the VAT collected.

That sounds like wonderful news!

The obvious solution is to have users buy a proxy currency that goes in a wallet that is then spent in frictionless (and fee-less) microtransactions. Many video game companies use this model, albeit for their own scummy monetization systems, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't work here - is there a reason you're not considering it?