> the bigger problem is that the more money you'd be willing to pay to get rid of ads, the more your eyeballs are worth to a potential advertiser
I think that's a concern, but it's not a bigger problem than money laundering or illegal activity or anything else that micro-payment systems have had to deal with.
With micro-payments, you can't deal in actual currency. You have to move around some kind of "Credits" that at some point get exchanged back to currency in bulk to a payment processor, otherwise the transaction fees are greater than the payments themselves. This is dollar signs in the eyes of anybody who likes to play games with international money.
It's a space for cryptocurrency to be sure, but the push-based architecture makes recurring subscriptions a little tricky from a user standpoint. Not to mention that the user has to have cryptocurrency to begin with.
>With micro-payments, you can't deal in actual currency. You have to move around some kind of "Credits" that at some point get exchanged back to currency in bulk to a payment processor, otherwise the transaction fees are greater than the payments themselves.
Which prompts me to wonder why transaction fees are so high.
Because they are a cartel. It the marginal price for a transaction is pretty close to zero, so the fact that the price is noticable means that credit card transaction are not operating in an efficient market.
Just because the marginal price is near zero doesn't mean you're not going to pay a lot. The marginal price for software is near zero as well. You may be right about it being a cartel, but the marginal price doesn't tell you much.
I think that's a concern, but it's not a bigger problem than money laundering or illegal activity or anything else that micro-payment systems have had to deal with.
With micro-payments, you can't deal in actual currency. You have to move around some kind of "Credits" that at some point get exchanged back to currency in bulk to a payment processor, otherwise the transaction fees are greater than the payments themselves. This is dollar signs in the eyes of anybody who likes to play games with international money.
It's a space for cryptocurrency to be sure, but the push-based architecture makes recurring subscriptions a little tricky from a user standpoint. Not to mention that the user has to have cryptocurrency to begin with.