Ask HN: What's the road to micropayments being a first-class citizen of the web?

22 points by ShinyCyril 5 years ago | 11 comments

I've been going down a rabbit-hole these past few days investigating why there still does not exist a ubiquitous solution for micropayments on the web.

What requirements must a micropayment solution fulfil to be considered as the de-facto standard for the web? Where do current solutions fall short? Which are the most promising solutions today?

I certainly remember using Flattr a long time ago — what ever became of that? It seems that "Donate Bitcoin", Patreon, PayPal and "Buy me a coffee" (https://www.buymeacoffee.com) are the most popular methods of supporting projects on the web these days. However these have always felt like a stop-gap solution compared to being able to, for example, click a button and have your browser send a payment of $0.01 to unlock an article.

Brave Browser (https://brave.com) seems to be a project which crops up frequently, although it prescribes a very specific model (use a specific browser, voluntarily view privacy-respecting ads, earn tokens and distribute tokens to enrolled websites that you visit). Is it likely that the Basic Attention Token (the "currency" that enables the interaction described above) will be included with other browsers?

Then of course there is the Bitcoin Lightning Network, which sidesteps some of the limitations of on-chain transactions. Strike (https://beta.strike.me) seems to be the missing piece, which provides an end-to-end solution for sending fiat currency by using the Bitcoin Lightning Network as the underlying payment transport.

There is also Stellar, which it seems is more concerned with providing a method of sending payments, than being its own currency, although the native currency "Lumens" are still required to complete a transaction (as I understand).

Stepping outside of the cryptocurrency world, there is also GNU Taler (https://taler.net/en/), a project to create a privacy-preserving payment system using existing banking infrastructure.

ShinyCyril 5 years ago |

Continuing here, since my OP was too long:

From my reading, it seems like Taler and the Lightning Network are the two most promising solutions. Taler seems to be very well-suited to micropayments, but is lacking adoption from banking institutions, which would be required for people to actually use it. Not to mention that there would need to be a standardised way to request that your bank exchange some of your balance for tokens to be deposited into your Taler wallet. Given that banks in the US still seem to lack a widely-adopted API like the European Open Banking initiative, this seems a long way off still. The Lightning Network seems promising, but I can't picture how the exchange of fiat / Bitcoin would work. Perhaps there may be a number of companies like Strike competing, with browsers giving the user a choice of which service to use, in the same way a user currently selects their search engine.

matdehaast 5 years ago |

This is a problem space our company (coil.com) is actively working on. Part of our approach is proposing an open standard https://webmonetization.org/ and are actively working with browser vendors and W3C.

It is a chicken and egg problem though as browsers won’t implement anything without scale and it’s difficult to get scale without lots of users. We polyfill it with a browser extension. It’s not a great solution though.

We always looking for feedback and users :)

jfengel 5 years ago | |

I hadn't heard of this before. It would be nice if it works. Do you think that implementers could do so cost-effectively? (That is, not have to charge $1 to send $.01?)

Gotta say, this code sample on Interledger kinda threw me:

  fetch('http://localhost:8080/', {
    method: 'GET',
    maxPrice: 5000,
    plugin
   })

Seems like this kinda thing that would mandate https.

BenjiWiebe 5 years ago | | |

Would you expect https to be required on localhost? You gain very little (or nothing?) by doing it, but you do lose by adding complexity. Especially since you can't get let's encrypt to automatically issue a widely trusted certificate for localhost.

ArtWomb 5 years ago | |

+1 I was just about to recommend coil, as well as state the "chicken and egg" problem ;)

I think GitCoin is interesting as well. Rewards from DeFi and staking could in principle be used to fund innovation.

https://gitcoin.co/

godot 5 years ago |

I feel like cryptocurrency is only a mechanism and not a solution itself. It seems the approach is for an organization to provide a solution (e.g. Brave), whether that solution involves a cryptocurrency (a token in their case) or simply a fiat currency wallet (makes per-microtransaction fee not prohibitively expensive) would be an implementation detail.

With that in mind, Brave seems to be the model in the right direction but the problem, as you pointed out, is having to use a specific browser, and relatively very few people would ever do that.

Ideally this is something every major browser would support (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge at the very least) which brings to mind that it really has to be a w3c standard. (I know there's Web Payments and Payment Requests API work being done, but I have no idea what they are like.) Payment providers would implement this standard, so perhaps at the beginning you have different web sites using a variety of payment providers. Eventually, they converge to one or two big players in the space taking payments (so by then you have a future where you maintain a wallet with that provider and use that same wallet at every content site). Because credit card fees for micropayments are prohibitively expensive, these payment providers are unlikely to be your traditional existing credit card payment services (e.g. Stripe in its existing form, or Braintree, etc.). It does mean there'll likely be a middleman platform provider (like Brave is now, but in this case it works for any browser). This is where the cryptocurrency mechanism can come in IMO; if such provider decides that crypto is the way to go to exchange money for this system, then it would be.

---

Outside of technical/implementation discussion, there's the implication of wealth difference globally. For example, many people in the west/the US think oh, paying $0.01-0.05 to read an article is very acceptable -- both as an expense and to support journalism. In other developing countries, that price point is already prohibitively expensive as an amount of money to spend in their life. Do we then lock out information from majority of folks in poorer countries? Keep in mind this would be compared against the current ad-supported model where everyone in the world (regardless of level of wealth in their country in a global perspective) get those same information for free, as long as they have an internet connection.

jimkleiber 5 years ago |

I've hoped for an app that would be a central place for subscriptions, almost like a subscription store, where I could give them say $20/month and divvy that money up amongst a variety of services available there. Maybe one is $0.50/month, another $1, another $3, etc. And then this store can pay the services in bulk, say 1,000 customers at $0.50 is $500 payment to the company.

Should cut down on transactions fees and help both subscriber and service more centrally manage subscriptions.

pxtail 5 years ago |

I think that in order to make it work it has to be completely free, that is - no provisions (or really really extremely low provision), no ads hijacking and other weird gimmicks.

In my perception above is contradictory to plenty of involved entities interests - it's a golden goose, everyone's wet dream to run payment network and reap profits from transactions.

I have feeling that Facebook's Libra/Diem could be the gamechanger, truble is first of all they will face government(s) difficulties because it could make the company insanely powerful and secondly: it's Facebook

ilaksh 5 years ago |

Ethereum 2