[phoinix]

At the gaming industry, noone i know of that plays chess has implemented this. At Lichess there millions and billions of games played each month and they don't pay with micropayments for each game. Other chess websites charge monthly fee.

Micropayments are a hassle for any system that has people, actual human organisms, being responsible for a gazillion of small transactions. The involvement of a human increases the cost of each money transaction. Only for detecting and resolving fraud a human needs to spend minutes and hours of his life, his boss has to pay him at the end of the day, and that cost bubbles up to the consumer. Minimum fees have be to many cents or dollars for each transaction, so the micropayment starts to not being a micropayment, it starts to seem very much like a payment.

The only solution to that, is a fully automated money transfer mechanism, an immutable public ledger with all the pseudonymous transactions, i.e. bitcoin. The miner network ensures the validity of the transactions, that no malicious actor in the whole network change one bit of a transaction to his benefit. Humans can do that, have done that for centuries in the banking system, by hiring trusted employees, and by following protocols to ensure the validity of each transaction, papers with stamps and all of that.

Micropayments can help for a person to change a light in the street, and charging all the residents around, a thousand of them, for 1 cent each. 10 dollars he will receive in total, 5 dollars for his work, 5 for the light bulb, and he will be paid the minute the work is done. No need to give a corrupt politician 10 million dollars, for all the work in his municipality, and the politician afterwards he will pay the technician for the fixing of the light. That creates a honey pot ready to be exploited. Micropayments can make that honeypot disappear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Ef6I7R0zY

[0xy]

That's because the average chess player would rather pay a $9.99/month subscription than pay $0.10/game. Even if they played less than 100 games a month this would be true.

Consumers despise paying for usage. They'd rather pay a monthly fee and have unlimited usage.

[phoinix]

Consumers are different with one another. I would gladly pay, for something i like, a bit more money to have some luxuries. A faster car may be it, or maybe i pay to lichess, to pair me for a game with good players, so as not to be cheated for example. Or maybe analysing my games, with some state of the art chess engine to spot mistakes or improvements. Other chess players however may not be so keen about more, just play a game and that's it.

[setr]

The common solution to the flat-cost-per-transaction problem is to use not-money. Do microtransactions with company script, and buy the script in bulk units (eg 100 NYT coins for $5)

Which is generally how games do it

[auxym]

FYI, I think you mean "scrip".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip

[setr]

You’re correct.

[phoinix]

Yeah of course, but that's and IOU, it is not a micropayment. Transaction means that the money/tokens are transferred right away. In the example i gave with the light technician happens the same thing. He completes his work and it is the promise of the state that he will be paid at some time in the future. That's called IOU not a payment transaction. It is the promise given only, albeit by a big company we trust, or a state we trust. Or we don't.

[dragonwriter]

> Yeah of course, but that's and IOU, it is not a micropayment

If I pay for something with a credit card, that's a payment transaction. It also involves (a whole chain of) IOUs.

[paxys]

Look at how much money Fortnite, GTA Online, FIFA, Clash of Clans etc. are making. If there is a business justification for it then every problem you mentioned above will be solved.

[phoinix]

Human fraud is not an easy problem to solve. Micropayments can enable a fraudster to commit microfrauds, and by the time someone else finds about it, it's too late. The incentive of internet companies to solve it is huge, i however argue that the best way to solve it, is with an immutable public ledger fully automated which records pseudonymous transactions. Fully automated by proof of work machines, and no human involvement in the transactions.

[Grustaf]

> Micropayments are a hassle for any system that has people, actual human organisms, being responsible for a gazillion of small transactions.

When you visit any website, a dozen or so companies are charged tiny amounts of money for showing their ads to you. Charging a single entity, the reader, is much less complicated. So it's not a technical limitation.