[__MatrixMan__]

> We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing.

Paying $1.00 for an in app purchase that you thought about and decided on is not a micropayment, that's just a small payment.

What makes micropayments interesting is that they can be small enough to escape notice, except in aggregate. They happen in the background, tightly coupled to the thing they're for, and not as part of an explicit purchase that added friction to the consumer's day.

I think there's probably a lot of potential to simplify things with micropayments. Like perhaps rather than paying my mobile provider to maintain a web of relationships with regional network operators and distribute money to them on cadence which has nothing to do with my usage of their network, I could instead just attach some money to each packet and transmit it to the lowest bidder in range (payment stays in escrow until packet delivered, then pays all operators involved). It could be that by cutting out the middleman I pay less and the network operators get more.

That's not what this is about though.

[beeflet]

There should be a new word for the not-exactly-micro-micropayments that the author describes. I suggest "minipayments".

As you, I associate the micropayment idea with truly tiny individual payments. Like paying for bandwidth by megabyte, where each payment is much less than a cent.

The risk of fraud due to any individual payment not being fulfilled is low. At most you loose 0.01c of money, and the vendor loses $ of potential business.

[__MatrixMan__]

I'm reminded of how tedious it is when people debate how small something has to be before it can be called a microservice... Maybe the language needs to focus on something besides size.

If you pre-pay, you're creating a debt which is destroyed when service is rendered. If you post-pay you're creating a debt when service is rendered that is destroyed when you pay. In both cases the logic of when and how you pay is decoupled from the thing you're paying for. You've got to ask how far you'll let the two accountings drift (sync monthly is a common choice).

My feeling for "micropayments" is that they happen as part of the same protocol which is providing service. There's just one accounting. Settlement schedule is determined by the nature of the service. Maybe it's page views or packets or gulps, but whatever it is it's imposed by circumstance. They're... situated payments?

And the other style is... decoupled payments?

[Izkata]

The $1 in-game content payments are already so well known (and for such a long time) as "micropayments" I had thought that was where the term originated.