I think it would have happened decades ago if we’d had micropayments. There were a lot of internet denizens who didn’t like the ad model. Part of the motivations of paypal was to provide an alternative (so said David Brin in The Transparent Society). If things had gone differently, many subsets of the internet would have users pay a tiny fraction of the server’s costs when they requested a page. Creators would no longer have to scrape to find a way to monetise their stuff just to keep it online. It would have been pretty nice.
As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a micropayment platform, for a long time. Paypal failed, iirc, it mirrors credit cards’ 30c charge per transaction. Bank transfers are slow. Most payment platforms charge very similar fees, which leads me to wonder if there’s some underlying legal overhead per transaction that prevents anyone from offering the required service.
I can’t see a reason it should be civically impossible to reduce transaction costs to negligibility, though. It’s conceivable that money proportional to the transacted amount must always be spent policing against money-laundering, but I can’t see why it should be proportionate to the number of transactions rather than the quantity transacted (obviously some cost must be proportional to the number of transactions- isp fees, bandwidth congestion, cdns, cpu time-, but that should be much lower than 30 cents)
For most people, the negative utility of deciding whether or not to do a transaction is on the order of a buck or two (based on some barely-remembered research from the ’90s). Pricing transactions less than this amount is inefficient; you don’t get enough extra transaction volume to compensate for the lower price (regardless of the value of whatever you’re selling).
That feels a lot like allowing your computer to write blank checks, which is a tough sell for users. If it were me, I’d want to cap the payments at some affordable maximum level. The service would likely find ways to ensure that users almost always hit the cap, after which point the cap is basically a subscription fee.
I think it would have happened decades ago if we’d had micropayments. There were a lot of internet denizens who didn’t like the ad model. Part of the motivations of paypal was to provide an alternative (so said David Brin in The Transparent Society). If things had gone differently, many subsets of the internet would have users pay a tiny fraction of the server’s costs when they requested a page. Creators would no longer have to scrape to find a way to monetise their stuff just to keep it online. It would have been pretty nice.
As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a micropayment platform, for a long time. Paypal failed, iirc, it mirrors credit cards’ 30c charge per transaction. Bank transfers are slow. Most payment platforms charge very similar fees, which leads me to wonder if there’s some underlying legal overhead per transaction that prevents anyone from offering the required service.
I can’t see a reason it should be civically impossible to reduce transaction costs to negligibility, though. It’s conceivable that money proportional to the transacted amount must always be spent policing against money-laundering, but I can’t see why it should be proportionate to the number of transactions rather than the quantity transacted (obviously some cost must be proportional to the number of transactions- isp fees, bandwidth congestion, cdns, cpu time-, but that should be much lower than 30 cents)
It seems Paypal have a microtransactions product where the fee per transaction is 7c https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/micropayments. Still garbage.
For most people, the negative utility of deciding whether or not to do a transaction is on the order of a buck or two (based on some barely-remembered research from the ’90s). Pricing transactions less than this amount is inefficient; you don’t get enough extra transaction volume to compensate for the lower price (regardless of the value of whatever you’re selling).
This argument doesn’t apply to the Agoric computing case though, in which the microtransactions are being decided by the programs and not the human.
And for common kinds of online activity, should be cheap enough that users can ignore it.
That feels a lot like allowing your computer to write blank checks, which is a tough sell for users. If it were me, I’d want to cap the payments at some affordable maximum level. The service would likely find ways to ensure that users almost always hit the cap, after which point the cap is basically a subscription fee.
Most people do this for other utilities all the time though (like power)