What many people don't realize is that the operational and customer service costs of payments don't scale with payment amount. Customers will cost almost just as frequently dispute, have questions, have problems, ask for help, attempt to defraud etc with a $1 transaction as they will a $100 or $1000 transaction. This is the real killer with micro payment schemes. Customer service costs scale more with number of payments than payment volume. And these real costs are born by Patreon, by the networks and by the banks which is why min txn costs exist. The crypto bros totally miss the point in understanding this too.
Source: 25yrs experience building payment networks
Charge backs should also be less of an issue if the purchase is $1. Same with fraud.
The stakes are lower the lower the amount. Who cares?
It's not worth disputing. Fire the customer if it crosses a threshold.
Having run a B2C business with recurring monthly payments around $15, I assure you that fraud goes UP with lower payment amounts. You preferentially attract the worst possible customers who bank with the lowest common denominator banks and they charge back like crazy.
Some choice moments: "Please keep my service on, I only charged back because I needed to make rent this month", "I know that wasn't my card, but that b---- owes me money."
And it's hard to fire these customers because they come back with a different card and fake names. They don't care that they're committing fraud; no one will prosecute them for $10 here, $20 there.
The real promise of crypto is to provide a system with 0% low level fraud like this.
There's also the issue of <$10 services being used explicitly to test stolen credit cards, before they're sold and used for the big spending.
> with 0% low level fraud like this.
It's got its own issues. For example i hope you've got a separate wallet per transaction. Otherwise someone will use their tumbled BTC to pay you and you'll get blacklisted from using it in exchanges.
>Otherwise someone will use their tumbled BTC to pay you and you'll get blacklisted from using it in exchanges.
This is a non-issue for cryptocurrencies with mandatory obfuscation like monero. Worst case scenario, you swap your tainted BTC for monero[0] and take the monero to an exchange.