The biggest problem with micropayments is how credit card payment processors work. You typically pay a percentage fee. But they thought of everything, so you also pay a flat fee per transaction like 10 cents. So they can get their money from tiny transaction.

So for something like a 20 cent micropayment, you pay more to your processor than you pocket.

One solution is a universal token system or something like it. You deposit say, 40 dollars, then get 10,000 tokens or whatever. Like Java Beans from back in the day.

The only way that will work is if each publisher has their own token system, otherwise you have created a new middleman who will want to take their own cut. That middleman will also have to deal with similar problems as payment processors, such as fraud. Perhaps it will be to a lesser degree, because it would be a less valuable target, but it would still add to costs.

Then you run into all sorts of other problems. How do you price articles? I remember running into academic publishers charging the same for a 1 page editorial as a legitimate scientific paper. And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views? If it is the latter, how do you ensure the buyer doesn't lose access? On top of all of that, how do you avoid incentivizing the wrong things? A 1 token article may be 10 times more popular than a 5 token article and cost 1/10th to write, but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half. On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff.

But the biggest reason why it won't work is because publishers don't want it to work. They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.

No, the biggest problem with micropayments is that they just don't match the needs of publishers. At all.

They work very well for LLM tokens though. So, go ahead and get your news that way.

Stablecoins are a pretty clean solution to this. Negligible fee, sub-cent transactions supported, no need for kyc when paying. Fill up your browser periodically, and pay from an embedded wallet.

Isn't this what Brave tried to push? You get their Basic Attention Token crypto

It's a real shame the grifters took over cryptocurrencies. I'd love to have a pre-minted ZKP USD style coin. Uncle Sam can take a small transaction fee as consumption tax, people can get wallets as they please. Fully private, semi-decentralized (you don't need full for a government currency), and gov even gets to "tax" transactions on illegal goods (Al Capone). But the two major flaws are that kinda kills a lot of the CC company businesses and it's not great for a country that wants to spy on its citizens. On the flip side, my nightmare is they implement that same system without the ZKP and now your grandma giving you lunch money gets tracked. Weirdly we want with grifting instead. Weird move...

Each card transaction comes with the ability for the buyer to do a chargeback. How would you price this feature, if not per transaction?

The solution here is a government operated utility that works like cash to reduce transaction costs, by not having the protections a card transaction has.