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Ponydragon1 year ago

Well, this is old, but there are not that many topics, soo

Yes. It would be a bad idea.

It might be a good idea to be more independent of payment methods like paypal.     Like accepting credit cards directly, instead of indirectly through paypal. That is, because paypal has arbitrary standards and is not neutral. (Though, I think the devs do can activate credit cards, but opt not to, because they are too expensive. Wich is somewhat disconcerning, because the very same credit card will be billed by paypal for many users. )

But indipendence shoud not be done     via crypto.   Morality and such things aside, it is the amount of money that prohibits this.    Paying coffee money with crypto is   just not doable.   The transaction cost for small sums is just too high. Many times higher than the sum you want to pay. For bitcoin a few years ago this was in the vicinty of like 300 € for a single transaction in cost of energy due to needed computation power. Crypto means cryptography and de- and  encrypting is not for free  - it literally can't be, or it would not be crypto. Even if you cut this by factor 100 like Etherium or whatsitname    claims, you still have  like   a few € for a transaction of  ... a few € for a cheap indie game. Nope. Not gonna fly.

What might be possible is a wallet system.    Microtransactions are just very bad, if you pay directy. Sending 1 buck or sending 100 bucks is the same amount of work. Of course there might be reasons not to have a wallet system, but   I think it would be more practically than crypto by far.

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mid1 year ago (3 edits)

I think GNU Taler is a pretty good implementation for microtransactions, but adoption is basically zero. Using blind signatures it’s closer to a “virtual cash” than any other electronic form of payment and it grants anonymity for the payer, which even cash can’t do sometimes.

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Ponydragon1 year ago

There might be legal reasons with vat or age restrictions    why anonymous payments would not be viable. GNU Taler is not   about microtransactions, though they obviously strife to cover that nieche.

The idea with a wallet system for lack of a better name, is, that instead of many small payments, you make one bigger payment and have the smaller payments be  made more easy. Cause at the end of the day, you want to have money transferred onto real banking accounts. And those want money for their service. International money transfer and   currency exchange are additional problems.

A   defacto implementation is seen locally   with many services. Like Steam, if you pay them up front.   Then you do not have to transfer money each time for a cheap game. Also seen in many platforms that use "Points" or whatever they call their in-platform currency.

Ideally there would be  a service that implements this crossplattform. Paypal could have been such a service, but they suck big time. Foremost because they do not behave neutral, as a payment service should. They impose their own  arbitrary restrictions. But in a more practical way, they just   relay   the money transfer to the real credit card companies. Each itty bitty payment over paypal is a complete   transaction on my credit card bill. Waste of   transaction cost that could have gone to the developer. 

Makes me wonder why there is not such a thing already.   People want this. Probably the big fish have not interest, because they tink they can sell more by taking and converting money into points that are easier to spend, because they are not called money.

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mid1 year ago (2 edits)

GNU Taler essentially is a wallet system with minted virtual coins of variable value (and they are not coins in the Bitcoin sense). They can additionally be “tainted” so as to mark age restriction. Here is a more thorough discussion.

In their presentations they quite clearly state that microtransactions is of importance in its design. If you pay with a big coin, the exchange will return a smaller coin worth as much as your change. This is what they call the “refresh protocol”.

I recommend you watch one of their presentations. In some they do a live demo, and frankly I’m shocked this hasn’t been adopted yet.

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Ponydragon1 year ago

You are shoked that a half baked project with many wishful thinking and lots of unresolved or   inconvenient properties has not been widely or even narrowly adopted?

They can not even exchange currencies.   If you have to pay internationally, like on itch for example,   and you have € and  need  to pay in $ you cannot do this with Taler.

And yeah, a problem is, that they call their stuff coins. That was a bad move. Because, as I just said, you do not exchange your prepaid wallet money into Taler Coins. Calling any concept therein coins taints the whole thing with cryptocurrency baggage and all possible early adopters that do not accept "coins" for various reasons will skip it out of principle. (And to make it even more complicated, they actually claim that you exchange your money to their so called coins. But this is not true, as you would have automatic currency exchange this way)

Even the developers freely admit that their project is not ready for real usage.

Imho, they tried to implement too many features. They even offer their wallet  as a bitcoin wallet. Or    having the wallet only reside on the device.  That is a BS concept. I as a User would want something like paypal where I can send money at the ease of sending an email. That service would   hold the  microtransactions in escrow  from both sides, till the escrow sums have accumulated to a big enough sum. The buyer would have to prepay. pp could have offered such a service, but they do not. They evolved into a mere buffer in front of credit card companies. Makes it a little bit easier to accept money, maybe a little bit easier to pay as well, but the fundamental   prohibitivness against micro transactions does not change. (Oh, and while they are not cheap, they do offer currency exchange. Comparing prices with the one of your associated credit card is recommended.)

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mid1 year ago

They additionally use the word mint, so I’ll do so, too.

I don’t see why a bank cannot support one Taler exchange for USD and another for EUR. You would then withdraw these mints from your real bank of choice, like you would cash with a physical ATM, and use them wherever. And Bitcoin mints as well, which exist only to show how generic Taler is. Taler itself is not a currency, it is the payment system.

It seems to me you have heavily misunderstood Taler if you think it is not as simple as sending an e-mail. Perhaps going over internal details has confused you. But, suffice it to say, if you want something like PayPal then you do not want anonymity. That is fine, but it is alone no reason to dismiss Taler, which has additional design goals in mind. And it does not explain why a local wallet is a “BS concept”, considering it mirrors the use of cash near-perfectly.

I do not appreciate your tone. It seems to me you have read only a few sentences before dismissing it entirely.

The folks at Taler may not consider it production-ready, but in their own words, “this is not so much because of limitations in the backend, but because we are not aware of a Taler exchange operator offering regular currencies today.” Even so, I think a project developed by a considerable amount of people for 6 years deserves a better descriptor than “half-baked”. I don’t know where this bias of yours lies, but it is not my problem, so I will end it at that.

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Ponydragon1 year ago

Of course I overexaggarated. But I did read their own webpages faq and what the thing is supposed to do. And this is the catch. It says what they want to do, what it should do, but not what it can do and what it is. It is wishfull thinking about an ideal service or rather protocol. They try to catch the anonymous payments and while they are at it, the microtransactions as well. Of course , to show their  universal applicability, they include the ability to have bitcoins as well in their wallet. 

And it is a BS concept, because smartphones get lost or broken   and computers get hacked all the time. Electronic cash is not a thing people have trust in.   The guys behind the Taler are Germans, they should remember the Geldkarte.    It was around for like 25 years.     It was cash on a card. Pushed by banks and rather widely accepted.   But the only use those got were verifying age when buying cigarettes at a   dispenser. 

Sure, some anonymity would be nice when giving money to people you do not receive physical goods from. But I need not have that anonymity from the payment processor. They know who I am anyways, because I have to send them the money from real life accounts , like credit card. There is no principal technical barrier from making something like a Steam wallet x-plattform. And regarding micropayments, have a look how the pros do it.  They really exchange your money into virtual tokens that you do your microtransactions with. Usually for in-app purchases, but that is another discussion.  Regardless, such a service across platforms would implement the microtransactions we want. 

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