Pay-As-You-Search (Value4Value) Lightning payments

marsknight1337

Hello 🙂

Have you considered a financial model based on microtransactions using the bitcoin lightning protocol?
This could be a good incentive for people, that aren't willing yet to pay a monthly fee.
I'm, myself, happy to pay for Kagi. But all those subscriptions the companies try to sell us start to be annoying.

Thank you for that wonderful search engine!!

You could ask them for help: https://getalby.com/

Vlad

marsknight1337 In general these ideas sound great but reality is different. Support for Bitcoin/Lightning was one of the most upvoted feature suggestions here that we spent months working on (biling systems for subscription are never simple), and the result is that relatively small number of users ended up paying with it (<1%). So we'd be careful before venturing again into these waters.

Jop

Kagi has already tried, and stopped using, a system for paying for individual searches. And Bitcoin Lightning has been a flop both for Kagi and in general. (I think Kagi should have gone with Bitcoin Cash instead, but they don't want to put even more work into it)

SK

Jop I agree that paying for individual searches would add a ton of complexity that is not needed. However, calling Lightning a flop for Kagi and in general? Sure, Vlad mentioned that only a small number of users pay in Lightning (Disclosure: I'm one of them), so by that metric, then Lightning flopped since the legacy rails with Paypal, credit card, etc, etc are still much more used. Lightning in general IMO is working great. It is scaling decently at the current time and serving its purpose in the ecosystem. More scaling will need to be done for sure to onboard the entire world via Lightning or other layers. I use Lightning all the time and it is not a flop.

I buy gift cards with it, send donations, transact with friends/family, micropayments for music (Wavlake) and podcasts (Fountain), and microtransactions on stacker.news (modeled around hacker.news).

I'd guess that Bitcoin Cash, with its much smaller user base, would have even less adoption on Kagi.

Thanks for integrating LN payments with OpenNode, @Vlad.

carl

Many many online services have tried micro-payments without much success. For example newspapers selling access by the article or by the day. Most have stopped because it's not worth the time or effort. Very few people want to pay by micro payments, but then they think "If it's only a dollar (or less9, it's not worth the bother to get out my payment details and start entering them".

Sorry for the negativity 🙁

Vlad

SK To be clear not calling lightning a flop or anything like that, but the return on our investment (multi month research and development) to what it eventually brought us was let's say not very favorable. I think that more people upvoted the original crypto support post than eventually ended up using the payment method when it was implemented.

In a situation where our resources are extremely limited, and there is much more low hanging fruit, it is hard to justify any further investment into web3 when the adoption for Kagi in that community is still rather small and the system we already have in place already fullfill the basic need that was requested.

Jop

SK Going off-topic here, but out of curiousity: What wallet are you using for Lightning?