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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   12219 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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(semi-relatedly, I would love a substack setup where you could buy say 10 (or whatever number) of general purpose credits and use them across any substack.

This is the use case that I'm annoyed Crypto hasn't managed to fill.

Same with newpaper articles. I'm not going to create an account and subscribe to read the couple articles per month I find interesting with every news outlet.

But if I could pay like 15-150 cents to read a particular article on the spot, with just a couple of clicks, I'd be pretty happy to do so.

Why on earth would you need crypto to solve this rather than just a credit card?

Because credit cards are very bad at EXACTLY these kinds of small and inconsequential transactions, especially at scale.

And it's in large part because they have to worry about, e.g. fraud and money laundering protections and massive regulatory burden.

The other part is the infrastructure to handle the bandwidth of that many transactions, which crypto has as well.

Crypto could fill the same niche that used to be filled by carrying around a few spare quarters.

Credit card processing fees are about 25 cents, IIRC. What are they going to do "If you pay the credit card company $0.15, I'll pitch in another $0.10 and let you read the article."?

This was also the idea behind Patreon: a 100 fan to 100 artist transaction would take 10000 payments normally, but Patreon could reduce it to 200 and some internal accounting. (That didn't last too long, though.)

That didn't last too long, though.

What do you mean?

At launch, Patreon was focused on bundles of $1 payments to each creator. Then it focused on bundles of $10 payments. Then individual $10 payments, billed separately. Now it's largely the same as any other content hosting/discovery/payment platform.

To add onto ToaKraka's reply, crypto is literally designed to be transferred in increments that total up to sub-cents. Micropayments were one theorized method of paying for the Internet, but were deemed to be impractical. Brave's BAT was created as a sort of alternative to the modern ad-driven internet we have.

Credit-card processors impose fees that can be major impediments to small transactions. One page describes a fee of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents. In that environment, making a 15-cent purchase is not feasible, because the fee would be literally twice that much. (See also all the small businesses that refuse to accept credit cards for any purchase smaller than 15 or 20 dollars.)

Thanks. I thought that the length of the blockchain was making transfer costs go up... has this issue been solved?

I don't know that much about cryptocurrency, but it's important to note that different cryptocurrencies have vastly different transaction fees. According to this graph:

  • Bitcoin itself (BTC) is quite bad for small transactions, because its transaction fees are enormous—at present, 3 to 6 dollars.

  • Monero (XMR) has fees of 0.05 to 0.07 dollar, in addition to offering anonymity.

  • Litecoin (LTC) has fees of 0.007 to 0.008 dollar.

It wouldn't work like that. The aggregator would only bill the card monthly, or when it reaches a certain amount.

Then they're extending credit. Which they certainly do not want to do.

Nah, the dollar amounts are low enough that one month of access wouldn't be a problem. That's the way a lot of court vendors that provide online access work. When the product only costs 50 cents a page or whatever they aren't going to bill each transaction, especially since most of their customers are professionals making a lot of transactions. Instead they just bill monthly, and PACER only charges if you spend more than $30 in a billing period. If this is too risky, then they can always set up a draw-down account where you pay, say, $30 up front and it bills your account until it reaches zero before automatically replenishing.

It's in no ones interest to move to a worse revenue model in a field where almost noone pays anyway

Substack seems to have proven that's a problem with the content, not the audience.

I’m actually surprised enough that there is no newspaper subscription service which comes with, say, 50 free articles/mo from whatever selection of newspapers that I assume it falls afoul of anti-trust law somehow.

Because a large number of subscribers presumably read only a few articles each month and might cancel their subscription in favor of that cheaper model across multiple papers.

There are aggregators like PressReader that include every major news source but cost hundreds of dollars a month for full access (the ‘professional’ plan) and there’s Bloomberg, which also has every major news source but costs tens of thousands of dollars a year.

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