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battani | 11 years ago

True. But a lot of merchants are moving away from this model anyway because it turns out consumers hate micropayments online. http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.ht...

Many are moving to a subscription model per month (simple and predictable pricing) — think Spotify, Wall St Journal, etc.

But curious, what kind of things would you like to buy at 50cents or less online and that you really can't right now (either as part of a larger bundle or a subscription)?

Also, the blockchain is not particularly good at managing micro-payments. First because of miner fees and second because micro-payments without fees open the door to blockchain spam. Most of the bitcoin micro-transactions done today are centralized off-the-blockchain transactions.

discuss

untilHellbanned|11 years ago

Your article is from 2000. Consumer behavior and internet technology have changed massively since then.

Subscriptions can be ok but many don't want to pay $10/month for something they don't use $10 of (true of pretty much all services besides Netflix and spotify).

All digital content can make use of Bitcoin micropayments. Off-chain works too as there are still essentially no fees (again compared with the prohibitive $0.30 + 3% fee with credit cards).

Why watch an ad for 30sec when you can pay a fraction of a penny in Bitcoin and watch instantly? Onarbor, https://onarbor.com proposes exactly this.

battani|11 years ago

There are many more recent articles on the same topic — internet technology may have changed a lot, but consumer behavior hasn't. Consumers still want simple and predictable pricing.

When's the last time you paid at a paywall? It's just that the mental cost of calculating how much I'm spending when I'm spending loads of fractions of pennies everywhere is pretty big. To cancel your ads, just pay the monthly $10. It's simple, predictable, and covers you for all ads all the time.

robryk|11 years ago

Isn't a large part of the problem with micropayments that they are complicated for the user with the current state of online transactions? I've read the article and it does posit other reasons, but it seems to be purely hypothetical.