> We're left with a need for micropayments that don't cost more to process than the value of the transaction.
I disagree completely.
There's no technical or business reason why we couldn't have micropayments tomorrow. It's been tried many times already. The thing about micropayments is nobody actually wants them. Each time you make a payment of any magnitude, your brain has to process a 'purchase' which carries a large mental burden, and eventually you get decision fatigue.
Micropayments are one of those ideas that people think we want, but in practice, nobody does.
As a thought exercise, why do you pay Netflix $13/month and deal with sporadic content disappearances, when you could pay Apple $1.99 for a perpetual license to whatever piece of content you could ever want? Nobody wants to make that purchasing decision each and every time they want something. They'd rather pay for an all you can eat buffet even if it's objectively worse and more expensive over time.
> If we fixed international funds transfer we'd probably get some incremental benefit.
Check out TransferWise! They've done a ton to solve this problem. They even have a currency agnostic bank account with local banking details in 6+ regions and supports 50+ currencies. [1] IMO they've largely solved remittences for the average joe.
If you've got a ton of money to move you can use InteractiveBrokers to exchange currencies at market rates for $20 per million (!!) in commission.
I disagree completely.
There's no technical or business reason why we couldn't have micropayments tomorrow. It's been tried many times already. The thing about micropayments is nobody actually wants them. Each time you make a payment of any magnitude, your brain has to process a 'purchase' which carries a large mental burden, and eventually you get decision fatigue.
Micropayments are one of those ideas that people think we want, but in practice, nobody does.
As a thought exercise, why do you pay Netflix $13/month and deal with sporadic content disappearances, when you could pay Apple $1.99 for a perpetual license to whatever piece of content you could ever want? Nobody wants to make that purchasing decision each and every time they want something. They'd rather pay for an all you can eat buffet even if it's objectively worse and more expensive over time.
> If we fixed international funds transfer we'd probably get some incremental benefit.
Check out TransferWise! They've done a ton to solve this problem. They even have a currency agnostic bank account with local banking details in 6+ regions and supports 50+ currencies. [1] IMO they've largely solved remittences for the average joe.
If you've got a ton of money to move you can use InteractiveBrokers to exchange currencies at market rates for $20 per million (!!) in commission.
[1] https://transferwise.com/us/borderless/