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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10511 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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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.)

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.

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