[saurik]

And yet most people I know don't get microdecision fatigue every time they decide whether to turn on a light or use an appliance due to the electricity transactions.

I claim that--to the extent to which this was ever an issue--this is due to the notion of "micropayment" really being too large still: the industry has often used this term to describe transactions on the order $1-$10.

Instead, this discussion is about hosting fees for a chat app that will add up to almost nothing for light usage, not the $1 per article news companies keep wanting to charge. My company (Orchid) has been calling these fees for incremental hosting costs--which are on the order of $0.001-$0.10--"nanopayments".

[hnaccount_rng]

But that's not the correct comparison right? It's not that you have to initiate a transfer for the flipping-on of the light. You pay integrated, at the end of the month (or really, the utility trusts you to not change your behaviour dramatically and you pay an expected usage, which is then corrected at the end of the year).

That's my main gripe with all those transactions. If you need to initialise a complex utility that involves the trust of multiple parties and the need to verify identities on multiple people. That kind of thing costs macroscopic amounts of money (the going rate seems to be O(20ct)). Unless your average transaction size is much above that, you'll loose to friction.

[Vespasian]

There isn't a price tag on my light switch. Also light is of course a must have, news articles or chatrooms aren't.

If I could use micropayments this way and be sure that the final price is

a) somewhat predicable

b) usually not ruinous

It would work better.

Cloud Services for companies like AWS are using this mode and it's working well for them.

But I have a feeling it's not easy/legal to do away with the immediate price tag for consumers. At the very least it would require the a constant price per "thing" and a hard spending limit.

[philsnow]

Look at tarsnap's pricing: https://www.tarsnap.com/

currently it says "250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data"

[tweetle_beetle]

I can't tell what stance is being taken on Tarsnap here, but for the interested the background is worth a read.

https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2018-04-01-tarsnap-pricing-...