

Ask HN: Why don't we solve the micro payments problem? - 3pt14159

There have been countless times where I've thought up some little idea that would involve paying thousands of people a dime for a second of their time, the problem though is that it isn't worth it because there is a fixed cost associated with transferring money. So I got to thinking that if 1000 people could know, for certain, that they each had a 1/1000 chance of getting $100 bucks (minus, say 50 cents in paypal fees) they would be willing to do "dime work".<p>Right now I'm thinking of a one way function that could take in 1000 different concatenated seeds supplied by the workers themselves and, even in theory (not just in "there isn't enough computing power on the planet"), would map to a 1 in a 1000 chance to awarding someone $100 that nobody could game. Not even me, the employer.<p>Ideas?
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cd34
<http://www.centipaid.com/> comes to mind. At one point, they had an apache
module to allow paid access to individual photos/resources. It becomes
difficult as you need to load the card, sit on the cash, make sure it is
available, send it out, etc.

MTurk does microtasking/crowdsourcing like that, and the income earned stacks
on your affiliate income.

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minalecs
the stacking of income , is why I don't see op's idea working. If doing a dime
worth of work is really worth a dime's worth of time. Why wouldn't I just do
it on my own time, till I work up enough money to cash out.. rather than
taking a risk of possibly never seeing any money.

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AdamTReineke
Nobody would do just a dime's worth of work and quit. Why not just pay out
after a certain amount is reached, such as Adsense does?

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3pt14159
The reason is that even though a bunch of people would do 10 cents times ten,
many, many people wouldn't do 10 cents times a thousand.

Adsense is a poor model because the website owner doesn't actually need to
continually do stuff, he can just hope that the traffic comes in over the next
2 years.

