441 sats \ 3 replies \ @petertodd 19 Sep \ on: The Mental Transaction Costs of Zaps bitcoin
Szabo's hopelessly wrong about that. Lots of things are associated with per-use, or even per-second, micropayments. Every time you turn on a lightbulb or a tap you're paying by the second for the power and water you're using. Sure, the micropayments are added up to a monthly bill at the end. But they're still payments like any other.
Indeed, the trope of middle income parents getting angry at kids for leaving lights on or taking long showers is precisely because those things are micropayments. Hell, I once got (mildly) yelled at by a boss when I forgot to turn off the electric heaters when I left the office. He had worked out that it cost ~$10/day to run, and he wasn't going to waste that money if he could help it.
There is still the issue that you have to trust the biller to compile your charges correctly or you have to take the time to review it. I suppose what most people do is check the total, and so long as it is roughly where you expect it to be, don't sweat the small stuff.
This works with a single provider, which is something people in the '90s were quick to point out: monopolies like utilities are the most common place to find usage-based payment schemes. I think Szabo was pointing out that it would be difficult to create the equivalent for content on the internet.
He was probably right that most people don't want to deal with pay-as-you-go services. I sure don't seem to pay very many bills in that manner. On the other hand is Stacker News and zaps on nostr. So there is something interesting going on here.
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The reason why big companies were the ones to do usage based payment was because there was no way to implement micropayments other than monthly invoices. Other than bitcoin, there still isn't!
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Bitcoin is clearly the technical innovation micropayments have been waiting for, but the question is will people still resist micropayments for content on the internet simply because it can be so annoying to deal with. My inclination is yes. No one wants to have to think about paying per second they read an article or paying per click of a link. There's also the issue of rejecting most of your content consumers before they even reach you (if you paywall your content--even on the micropayment level).
Maybe what makes mictopayments work on the internet is the combination of the technical innovation of bitcoin and the social innovation of mostly voluntary payments. There is something about zaps that makes them not annoying. What is it?
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