this is a good counterpoint, but I would say this in response:

1. Ad networks tend to benefit from having more data. There are economies of scale for sites like Youtube vs random pop-up video hosts that would want to mirror youtube videos, for example. The "bottom" may still be a micropayments system because they're easier to deploy.

2. It's possible that the entire ad economy is destroyed anyways through the use of adblockers, which is increasing. Hence google's push for WEI and the general industry push for TC and such. As long as none of these mechanisms of client authentication are able to take over the web, the profitability for ad networks will dry up.

Absent micropayments, there will be other attempts to introduce sybil resistance to the web, due to threats like AI scraping. Currently people are deploying PoW-based solutions, because they are the lowest effort (they can be implemented by polyfill). I imagine a hybrid PoW/micropayments system could emerge where PoW mining shares could be used interchangeably with micropayments. Basically each website acts as a cryptocurrency mining pool, so the website gets some reward in the mean.

I think the main failure of micropayments lies in the integration with the web browser, it needs some sort of plugin where HTTP 402 is effortless to interact with. It goes without saying that if you don't build it, they won't come.

There is not really a "killer app" yet. Some attempts in the bitcoin community like nostr and stacker.news are marginally used (but only to facilitate bitcoin dork-to-dork communication), and there have been some experiments in live-streaming and gaming. But nothing stands out. The barrier to entry of any app that requires putting money in, even a small amount, is naturally very high. A hybrid PoW/micropayment system is promising because it has the lowest barrier to entry.

On the technical side, you have tradeoffs between the complexity of using the app (especially with bitcoin payment channels) and decentralization. I don't regard it as an intractable problem.

The social problem is that most internet users are short-sighted and don't care about decentralization. They are just looking at some new company/service to throw their money into and escape their current service provider, which creates the problem they are running from. See: users fleeing twitter for bluesky, users fleeing streaming services after fleeing cable.

So pretty much any solution with a tradeoff between complexity and decentralization will suffer compared to a totally centralized and simple solution.

The decentralization of the new system needs to enable some new feature to get a foothold. Facilitating piracy is one such example, it could be the "killer app" for micropayments. Sites like Anna's archive already have some sort of cryptocurrency donation mechanism.

Firstly, that appears to be a negative externality. It seems to affect people who use the conventional credit card system as opposed to the new cryptocurrency/micropayments system I propose. So it has the effect of strengthening the cryptocurrency/micropayments system against competition.

For example, I would say that the credit card system is essentially subsidized through other forms of payment via transaction fees/cashback (I can go into detail why I think this is the case, if you would like). This is a mechanism that benefits the credit card companies at the users of other payment mechanisms (cash, crypto, etc.). So this mechanism of the credit card payment system has the effect of strengthening it against competition.

Secondly, I am not even sure if it's a negative externality. It depends on how fraud is handled in the conventional banking system and who takes the blame. Let's say that the charge-back goes all the way to the exchange, so now the exchange that facilitated the transaction is down both X cryptocurrency and Y dollars. In order to be profitable, the exchange needs to charge more in fees and needs to spend more in surveillance to counteract fraud. So ultimately the users of the exchange would pay for fraud.

Lastly, it is important to differentiate the two sources of fraud. There is the fraud inside of the micropayments system, where I pay 0.01 cents to view a webpage and I don't receive what I want. That's a very low-risk fraud, and by gaining a fraction of a cent, they can lose like 100x that in potential business through micropayments.

Then there is the fraud that happens at the border of "hard" money (cash/precious metals/crypto) and "soft" chargeback-able money in the conventional credit card system. This is pretty much facilitated just by these hard forms of money existing and being exchangeable with soft money. I would argue the weakness lies in the insecurity of the soft money systems (specifically the outdated systems of authentication). But you could still apply some sort of limit to the amount of money a single bank account can exchange for crypto (say, $20 a day) without hurting the micropayments system, because the payments involved are so small. So the risk of fraud at the exchange could be much lower for this specific use-case of cryptocurrency.

Your response is predicated on the fact that sites like archive.org already exist and don't charge. In a world with accessible micropayments, I think pretty much everyone would charge.

Sites like the internet archive are already funded by donations from viewers like you. I see the scheme as essentially spreading out the donations based on who uses the most bandwidth. It makes it easier for anyone to spin up a mirror of archive.org, and it makes it more secure for sites like archive.org to accept donations.

"Intermediate" micropayment solutions already exist. Anna's archive charges like $5 a month for a "donation" that puts you in a fast lane to download PDFs that you would otherwise have to get from some book site or a scientific journal. I bet they would prefer to charge per-download if they could feasibly do it.

I agree that some (most?) applications of micropayments are really gimmicky. But some applications are naturally suited to micropayments. The advantage of micropayments is that you can interact with ad-hoc vendors without setting up a pre-existing financial trust-relationship. For example, you could be at an bus terminal and have several pop-up vendors for wifi or electricity that charge per MB or per watt-hour. It enables competition.

The more gimmicky applications you mention like hardware subscriptions all involve some element of vendor-lock in that prohibits the advantage of micropayments systems in dealing with ad-hoc vendors. This is more analogous to those in-flight wifi services on airplanes: there is an established financial relationship with the airline and no competition, so there's little use for the low-risk micropayments.