
Ask HN: Micro-payments without cryptocurrencies? - wuliwong
I&#x27;ve been thinking a bit lately about some ideas with micro-payments, mostly related to music. I was wondering if there are existing or promising solutions for micro-payments that pay directly in USD or other government-backed currencies?<p>I&#x27;ve seen something called flattr but that looks to be built around a subscription model. I am looking for something that allows me to directly send $0.01 to another person in very short time. It&#x27;s possible this already exists and is widely available, I haven&#x27;t been thinking about this for very long.
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enkiv2
Credit card fee structures make it a little complicated. Generally speaking,
you'd want to pool both the input and the output, and then use paypal or
something similar -- i.e., require a minimum of a couple dollars to be put in
escrow, and then actually flush the payment once it reaches a couple dollars.
That way, transaction fees don't totally overwhelm actual payments.

I haven't seen general-purpose systems optimized for micropayments in this
way. Aside from flattr, I've seen token-coin (a blogging platform,
essentially), and places like patreon roll their own system internally.

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wuliwong
I wonder if it could be done where the service acts essentially as a bank but
does not use fractional reserve policies. So a user A adds $100 to their
account. We keep a log and add that $100 to our "real" bank account. User A
then pays User B $0.01. So we keep it in our ledger that $99.99 is for User A
and $0.01 is for User B. But we don't make any actual bank transactions until
a withdrawal request happens. There is probably some sort of regulation around
this but maybe we do it like SecondLife with Lindens and then people can cash
out their Lindens later.

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enkiv2
No, this is totally reasonable and basically what I meant by 'escrow' in my
original comment. Most systems that perform microtransactions & handle credit
card stuff themselves basically do it this way -- including Google, when it
comes to Adsense and Adwords.

