Comment by dboreham
11 days ago
Because Visa doesn't (hasn't) wanted to do microtransactions, ever, since the beginning of the internet.
11 days ago
Because Visa doesn't (hasn't) wanted to do microtransactions, ever, since the beginning of the internet.
You still don't need cryptocurrencies.
You just need a middleman that aggregates micropayments into large enough amounts to work with non-micropayment systems.
Some might object to having to get middlemen involved, but the thing is that even with cryptocurrency payments you are going to need middlemen because the web is international.
If your website is directly charging crawlers to crawl and you get crawled and paid by any crawler from another country, congratulations! You are now engaged directly in international trade and have a whole slew of regulations to deal with, probably from both your country and the country the crawler is from.
If you go through a middleman you can structure things so it is the middleman that is buying crawler access from you. Pick a middleman in your country (or anywhere in the EU of you are in the EU) and most of your regulatory headaches go away.
A middleman is not strictly required for cryptocurrencies. Regulations around them and how international transactions are taxed will depend on each country, just like anything else. These matters can be handled by lawyers and accountants as usual.
While I agree that cryptocurrencies are not strictly required for this, the infrastructure already exists to support micropayments, and is well understood and trusted. What infrastructure could support the same use cases for fiat micropayments? Would it be as low friction to setup and use as cryptocurrencies are today? Would it be decentralized and not depend on a single company?
I'm as tired as anyone else about the cryptocurrency hype and the charlatans and scammers it has enabled. But I also think it's silly to completely ignore the technology and refuse to acknowledge that it has genuine use cases that no other system is well suited for. Micropayments and powering novel business models on the web is one clear example of that.
> Regulations around them and how international transactions are taxed will depend on each country, just like anything else. These matters can be handled by lawyers and accountants as usual.
One of my points is that quite a lot of sites don't currently do any international transactions with site visitors. They make their money selling ad space. Their transactions are with a small number of ad networks, probably in the same country.
The site's lawyers and accountants are most likely just trained in dealing with in-country transactions.
If the site start directly charging international crawlers it is then adding international transactions and will need accountants and lawyers who can deal with that.
Big sites with a lot of revenue can probably handle this fine. Smaller sites are much less likely to be able to deal with it.
There is also political risk handling it yourself because some counties are viewing AI development similarly to how they view weapon development, and I would not be surprised to find that some countries will view selling AI crawling access to certain other countries as violating sanctions.
Thus for most sites that aren't already engaged in international commerce they are probably going to want to go through a middleman to sell crawler access even if cryptocurrencies are used for the payment system.
"I" pick a middleman like VISA and my regulatory headaches begin with THEIR policies on top of regulatory headaches.