On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 07:50:07AM +0200, Nico Rikken wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> (I'm relatively new to this list, and I like what you are doing.)

Hi, Nico! I'm Peter (pharpend in the IRC channel).

A general point of advice for mailing lists: you should always start
your reply with a quotation explaining the context, like I just
did. This helps other people reading the list.

> Concerning the payment overhead, you might offer the option of having
> some monetary buffer at Snowdrift. Coming from a country where credit
> cards aren't as common (NL), I've observed such a deposit as a way to
> avoid automatic bank transfers whilst providing guaranteed payment. It
> of course also helps to reduce overhead for transfer.

It occurs to me that we could just *advertise* a payment as US $0.15 per
day or whatever, but only do the actual payment processing once a
month. This would sort of be a pain though, because we would have to

* Set up the account views to mirror this (i.e. remove $0.15 from
  someone's apparent funds every day)
* Have some sort of buffer system and a cron job for actually processing
the payments.

For those who somehow don't understand my awful explanation of my idea:

* Jan 1: X pledges $0.15 / day to project P, loads $50.00 into his account.
* Jan 2: X notices that he only has $49.85 in his account, however no
  actual transaction has taken place
* Jan 3: X notices that he only has $49.70 in his account, however no
  actual transaction has taken place
* Jan 4: X notices that he only has $49.55 in his account, however no
  actual transaction has taken place
* ...
* During this time, $0.15 is taken from his apparent funds each day and
  loaded into a buffer, which, at the end of January's 31 days, will
  have $4.65. Again, no actual transaction has taken place
* January 31: X notices that he only has $45.35 in his account. Today,
  an actual transaction will take place giving $4.65 to project P.

This is not difficult from a programming standpoint, although it is a
bit tedious. I don't know if the psychological benefit would be worth
the extra pain.

In addition, I don't want to get into the practice of playing
psychological tricks on our patrons. This isn't a casino, after all.

Peter Harpending

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