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kuboble | on: Brave Search API now accepts agentic payments via the x402 protocol
People only hate the inconvenience of existing micro payments.

The idea of paying for usage is actually very appealing.

howunfortunate | parent
This is not true. The psychology of positive and negative events suggests that to optimize your happiness, you should "lump" negative things and "split" positive things.

People do this intuitively with payments (negative). They'll buy a timeshare or a boat (expensive, "lump" cost) when it would be much cheaper on net to stay at resorts or rent a boat and pay by usage.

They'll pay for subscriptions (automatic payments) rather than pay per experience. Many people will pay $20/mo for Netflix, watch it twice a month, but would never rent movies for $3 on Amazon.

They'll pay a big premium for "unlimited" data plans when this actually makes little sense for anyone vs. paying by usage.

armchairhacker | root | parent | next
IMO micropayments should be so small that people don’t even account for them in expenses. It costs almost nothing for a website to serve a single request, hosting costs almost nothing.

There’s no reason a big host can’t be 100% free, entirely relying on user payments for requests to pay for electricity and new servers (where each request is almost free), a few engineers and security guards to physically install, maintain, and monitor the servers (funded by excess or donations).

IanCal | root | parent | next
It’s the difference between filling up your tank and having to approve every mile to me. A fund I top up and costs go to 0 when I’m not using it is attractive, much more so than a fixed charge and subscription.
brabel | root | parent | next
Shit . I feel dumb now.