The problem is if I was going to do that with the open source projects I use, it is more like a penny a month * 1000 projects.

▲

bobmcnamara 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

$.01/user/month would be quite a bit here

▲

einsteinx2 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Subtract the standard ~3 cent transaction fee and he’d end up owing money instead. That seems to always be the catch with micropayment ideas.

▲

__turbobrew__ 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sounds like we need an open source index fund where you can make one payment that goes into a pool of money which is invested into the top 1000 open source projects.

▲

janandonly 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sounds like the above 2 ideas should be combined. Lightning payments are more or less free, and an index or tracker that looks at your bash history could make it possible to spread 5$ per month over all projects that you use.

▲

aftbit 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It almost seems like someone ought to be able to build some kind of digital currency with low transaction fees and no centralized payment processor that could power microtransactions. I wonder why nobody has done that yet.

▲

einsteinx2 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I know crypto was supposed to solve this problem, but I’ve never seen an implementation that actually did the job. You’d think someone would have built a successful “Patreon for micropayments” in the past 10 years, but no one has.

	▲	aftbit an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah I think the problem is that most of the main chains had astronomical transaction fees; most of the side chains that solved this problem had a trust problem; and Bitcoin Lightning was sorta dead on arrival, though it had both the trust and the technology solution. At that point, this forum had already moved BTC from "amazing new technology" to "huge threat to social order and environment".

▲

ycombinatrix 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

payment processors: "how about no"

▲

karamanolev 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Why? If every person participating is giving $10-$20 per month to tens or hundreds of projects and then once distributed, this equates to $x00 or $x000/project/month, why would the payment processors mind. Of course, it's all in theory.

	▲	ycombinatrix 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		they charge a minimum fee per transaction. from Accursed Farms' donation page (https://www.accursedfarms.com/donations/) "Paypal keeps $0.30 + 2.9% of every donation, so please keep anything less than $0.32 as they have enough money already." i think Cash App has the lowest fees i've seen at like $0.01 which would still be too much. not saying it is impossible - but likely not viable directly with the current payment providers.

▲

squigz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is why I feel like a missing piece of Patreon/Kofi/whatever is the ability to say "Here's $x; divide it automagically amongst the creators I'm currently following"

Sure, I think a lot of those donations would amount to a few pennies or so at once, but I feel like a lot more people would be willing to support creators if they didn't have to constantly choose which to support.

	▲	robertlagrant 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I would love it if something like Github would accept donations from a repo and parcel it out to the repo's dependencies somehow. It would sadly make Github even stickier, but it would be a great feature.