Micropayments would solve so many Internet problems. It's not too late to adopt.

Content creators could charge by page instead of depending on malware/ad/surveillance revenue. Spam is cut if there's a charge per mail. Scraping abuse goes away, along with a bunch of DDOS garbage.

The impact is a few cents per page or mail, negligible for a human. But if you're consuming a trillion pages per day, you'd reconsider.

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novok 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Micropayments are blocked by government money laundering regulations increasing the costs significantly to make them untenable.

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Analemma_ 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Micropayments would solve all the problems except for the problem that people absolutely loathe micropayments. Like, vein-popping furiously hate them.

Whenever the topic of micropayments for internet content comes up, a bunch of people start talking about payment processors and their floor on prices, and so on. That's not wrong, but it can be designed around and I think it's a scapegoat to avoid confronting the fact that users despise micropayments and we'd rather blame credit card companies for the lack of adoption.

	▲	mindcandy 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Micropayments would solve so many problems for the internet. And, cryptocurrencies would solve so many problems for micropayments. But, it's a non-starter because any proposal gets flooded with people popping veins about how crypto can't solve anything.
	▲	imglorp 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It doesn't need to be crypto, or payment processor based. My ideal experience would be I load $20 into the browser somewhere like a wallet in one block (that could be a payment processor step). If I visit a participating page, it decrements my wallet $.01 or whatever. The downside is the possibility of abuse and tracking by governments, which would have to be handled at the source, not the symptom.