Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security risk. Because of this insane system of credit cards, where you give the other party a "secret" which enables them to take the money from you.
If you could just send the money, the barrier to pay would be 100x lower.
Most websites pay the bills via ads. And make less than $0.001 per visitor. If they could sell a monthly membership for a one-time payment of $1, they would have a way better business model.
There are traditional ways to send money without giving out a secret, like Apple Pay. But there's plenty of fraud in the other direction, people accepting charges with stolen payment info that end up being reversed. It's always a little the merchant's job to decide whose "money is no good here," and that's because of laws.
No, that's not how it works at all. Apple is neither in the authorization nor the transaction clearing/settlement flow.
> How do you pay Apple without giving them a secret?
Credit cards being effectively unrestricted bearer tokens isn't nearly the only way to do payments. For example you could send a signed message to your bank instructing them to pay Apple (in a world in which you'd be paying them; again, Apple Pay is not that).
I think Apple has some special relationship with banks, so it's not this simple. But yeah, one way or another you're trusting Apple Pay, which presumably is more trustworthy than a gas station sale terminal.
And if you were signing your own payments, you'd still have to trust your computing device and the bank.
With crypto, you would not have to trust your computing device nor your bank.
You would send $100 to your computing device every now and then. And use that for day to day spendings. If the device turns out to be malicious, you lost only the $100 and stay away from the brand that made the device.
But you're sending that $100 from another computing device, and if you're not trusting a bank-like entity to hold the cryptocurrency for you, you're responsible for securing all your money on that device without locking yourself out.
On the other hand, having some money outside a bank is nice. I've had them freeze my assets before just cuz they felt like it, until I spent a whole day telling them to fix it.
Having a couple hardware wallets in different places + a paper backup split in a couple pieces gives you enough redundancy not to worry about this. Source: my own experience of close to 10 years now.
Unfortunately I will never be willing to entrust my financial safety solely to an algorithm.
An algorithm cannot be reasoned with, it cannot understand that your house burned down and destroyed your ID. It cannot accept liability for it's actions.
If I lose my bank card I go to a branch, verify my ID, and get a replacement. The bank is liable if they allow somebody other then me access to my accounts, regardless of how convincing the fraudster might have been.
Exactly. I've held large amounts of Bitcoin for years but always been too intimidated by hardware wallets or the fancier security schemes. It takes time to learn and try that stuff to the point of 100% trusting it, and I'd rather be called obtuse than overconfident like this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/TREZOR/comments/s9lgyy/5eth_bounty_...
My solution in the end hinged on a paper recovery phrase, stored in... a bank.
Yes, the barrier is high because paying is a high-friction activity whenever cards are involved. That's why the various quick checkouts are all the rage the past 10 years or so.
This has very little to do with the original claim of "Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security risk". Users have no issues paying for stuff online.
> If you could just send the money, the barrier to pay would be 100x lower.
We can already do that here in Brazil: the web site displays a QR code (plus its contents in text form), the user scans the QR code (or copies the text) into their banking app, and confirms it on the app to send the money.
I hasn't AFAIK made any meaningful difference for websites. What people dislike isn't the inconvenience of credit cards, it's the inconvenience of having any paywall at all.
That was possible 30 years ago. There have been probably been a dozen schemes that tried something like that over the decades, starting with DigiCash from before the WWW existed.
They all failed not because of fees, not because of security concerns, but because even having to think about whether you want to pay for something and how much incurs a mental cost that people avoid.
Free beets cheap by a margin that has nothing to do with how cheap or how easy.
> The day a network exists where you can reliably send like $0.001 of value with little/no fees is the day the internet changes forever.
It will change absolutely nothing whatsoever.
> So many ideas are infeasible right now because CC fees are high, and making any payment is extremely high friction.
Making payments will always be, is inherently high friction, and reducing the amount does nothing below a threshold that is much, much higher than $0.001.
There have been lots and lots of micropayment schemes, and they have all failed because the very fact that there is a payment already introduces mental friction that's effectively higher than current CC fees.
Any idea that is infeasible because there is no way to reliably send $0.001 is in fact easily feasible today by monetizing it some other way, usually via ads.
Lower fees are only relevant for high-volume fully automated transactions with a substantial financial incentive behind them, and those can already be done basically for zero marginal cost, see HFT. The only micropayments that people are willing to engage in individually is when they involve addiction, and that as well can and is already done in gambling apps masquerading as games.
This is something that feels pretty lost in most modern crypto discussion.
It's evident in literally the first line of the bitcoin whitepaper:
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution"
If paying a random person online was as easy as dropping a quarter in a cup the internet could be a very different place.
I think the part about not going through a financial institution is brought up pretty often, but that line doesn't mention the payment being especially small or quick.
> The day a network exists where you can reliably send like $0.001 of value with little/no fees is the day the internet changes forever.
Why do you set the bar at $0.001? Even sending $1 reliably and with low fees (which has been doable with crypto since its inception) would be revolutionary in my opinion.
Then it could be way shittier because every GET request will be monetized. Also your whole browsing history will be public if you're ever tied to a wallet address.
Are you talking about SCT Inst? It seems like there are no fees built into the protocol itself, but your bank can still charge you to use the service, and it seems many banks charge between 1 and 7 euros:
I didn’t mean a specific protocol, just based on my experience. But where do you see 7€ in this document? I see lot of banks offering zero or below 1€ fees. The highest I see is Novo Banco at 5.20€ (page 18).
Besides SEPA which mandated the upper ceiling and an upcoming regulation which forbids banks from de-prioritising payments to/from other banks (can't remember what it's called now) many European countries have had instant bank transfers locally. For example, Swish in Sweden: https://www.swish.nu/about-swish
So many ideas are infeasible right now because CC fees are high, and making any payment is extremely high friction.