Craic. You may not have heard of that word before. It’s Irish and pronounced like the drug that was popular in the 90s and the thing that plumbers have—crack. Wiktionary defines it as “fun, especially through enjoyable company, a pleasant conversation.”
Limerickman, podcaster, and professor of hot takes, Blindboy Boatclub, will often open episodes with “what’s the craic?” sort of like people in the United States might say, “what’s good?” The thing I like about ‘craic’ is that you can use it as a noun, as in “I had coffee with an old friend of mine, it was good craic.”…
I’ve been continuing to research micropayments since my last post. I’ve been seeing some tired arguments repeated over and over, but have seen relatively very few challenges to them. Here’s why the most common arguments against micropayments are probably wrong.
There is no evidence supporting the existence of “mental transaction costs” related to micropayments
Nick Szabo as early as 1996 argued that there were mental barriers to people using micropayments, and then reiterated that point a few times (1999, 2007, 2015). Clay Shirky made similar noises as earliest as I can tell in 2000, then again in 2003.
The argument is that micropayments are doomed to fail due to the “mental transaction costs” associated…
I’m going to cheat at the medium.com format I’m familiar with and attempt to use it as a place to collect my thoughts, share some research and potentially have some dialog about micropayments.
The title here is a nod to goats.com and some posts on it regarding micropayments I first read as a computer science student in 2001. Goats is a webcomic Jon Rosenberg created. It featured, among other characters, his friend Phillip (who’s last name I knew at one point, but escapes me now). I followed it religiously in the late 90s and early 2000s.
