
Ask HN: Is there a payment processor for 5ct payments? - lecarore
I think we need a platform where you would load 10$ on your account with a payment method of your choice, and then have the ability to pay tiny amounts of money with virtually no fees. 
You could set it to give 5ct to the creator of every YouTube video you watch. Pay 20ct for that game micro transaction. Pay 5ct to send a private message to an unknown person in a social network..
Fraud prevention would be done upstream by the providers letting you load your account. 
I&#x27;m aware there&#x27;s a critical mass challenge, but except for that, why doesn&#x27;t this already exist? You could put a tiny paywall on things, that&#x27;d be so low that free users might consider paying for it
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mdorazio
This has been discussed _many_ times over many years, and was actually one of
the original use cases presented by proponents of cryptocurrency. The short
answer is that processing fees in fiat currencies make this infeasible, even
on software platforms (ex. PayPal generally charges a 30 cent minimum), so
you're going to be stuck with a virtual currency that is easily abused/walled
off from the real world.

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BA4gDY-cqjsEPWn
I considered doing something like this in the past with crypto and arrived to
the conclusion that to do it right I would need critical mass and my very own
exchange. Before critical mass, the fees would still have to be higher if you
want to make the system self-sustainable. If you don't mind investing your own
money upfront then you could start with the low fees hoping that critical mass
will be reached before you run out of the money subsidizing the operation.

Definitely sounds like something that VC money could be used for given how
ride-share companies low prices are just subsidies from VC money with the
hopes that they'll reach profitability in the future with a dominant market
share.

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lecarore
Thank you for your answer. So if we were to put some restriction on the
virtual currency, it would be worthless, and if we didn't it would be used to
do money laundering from stolen credit cards?

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kiran-rao
Venmo?

