I feel like we've always been living on borrowed time, due to the historical accident of the internet being built by academics and public institution employees. If internet protocols had been built by for-profits, HTTP requests would include credit card # as a mandatory header.

People were talking about micropayments for content in the early '90s. The first digital currency proposals were made with exactly this use case in mind. Ironically, the protocol that finally stuck the landing is terrible at handling this exact situation.