[AndrewStephens]

The problems with monetization and micropayments are not technical and no easy-to-use API is going to help with adoption.

Dealing with money is a real pain due to fraud, security, and legal compliance and those problems don't go away when the amounts are small.

[TillE]

Even those are solvable problems, the real issue is social. There's a reason Flattr failed and Patreon has been a huge success. People would rather personally support a handful of creators at $5/month than put the equivalent money in a tip jar at a bunch of faceless websites.

[michaelt]

> Even those are solvable problems,

Are they?

Historically, there have been a lot of people eager to erect barriers to make payments difficult for those who want to gamble, sell porn, buy porn, donate to controversial political causes, avoid taxes, sell drugs, buy drugs, etc etc

So a system that lets me send $40/month of untraceable cash to strangers on the internet might face a lot of opposition.

[BlueTemplar]

You are the one that added the "untraceable" requirement.

[photochemsyn]

You can send $40 month of untraceable cash to strangers via the post office, how is that any different?

[AndrewStephens]

You can send $40 a month easily but receiving $40 a month from 20000 people is difficult and will raise questions.

[internetter]

Before coil failed, making this something that happened in the background seemed promising.

[revscat]

I mean I’m sure that’s what the processors want people to believe. But even if those problems are difficult, they aren’t insurmountable: I’m sure that libraries would be developed over time that would allow for these things to happen, securely and without error, much as the SSL libraries have developed over the decades.

[AndrewStephens]

You have missed my point. Actually carrying out "Shift 10 US cents from Account2732 to Account8462" is trivial. A simple server could deal with 5 million such requests an hour.

Now imagine you had to deal with $500000 moving around your system per hour.

* How many of those are fraudulent?

* How do you handle chargebacks? No one will use your system if you don't support them.

* How do people move money in and (worse) out of their accounts? That means interacting with banking and a small army of accountants.

* 99% of your customers will make $5 a month but 1% will take possibly millions, effectively becoming business partners. Do you police what they are doing? Are they laundering money? What do you do if they come to you asking for reduced rates?