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Ask HN: Is there a payment processor for 5ct payments?

1 points by lecarore ↗ HN
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'm aware there's a critical mass challenge, but except for that, why doesn't this already exist? You could put a tiny paywall on things, that'd be so low that free users might consider paying for it

4 comments

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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.
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?
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.