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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem with micropayments is that the buyer needs to be anonymous or you'll be creating a massive surveillance apparatus, which is the thing we're trying to get rid of. But existing laws make it difficult to build something like that which is easy for normies to use, so someone either needs to come up with a creative solution or reform the laws.

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GNU Taler[1] is an interesting middle-ground in the payments space: privacy-preserving for consumers, non-blockchain digital cash, and keeps merchant activity taxable.

I do worry about their whitepaper recommending it for a CBDC[2] (linked from [3]) which points out the state can implement negative interest rates, and that its architecture requires the issuer to get involved even in "spot your friend a $20"-level use cases. Since the issuer would presumably be required to KYC everyone, that also creates a big surveillance problem.

[1]: https://www.taler.net/en/index.html

[2]: https://www.snb.ch/public/asset/de/www-snb-ch/publications/r...

[3]: https://www.taler-systems.com/en/digital-currency.html

Well my thought is in this case the buyer is OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google.

If normal people get to be anonymous then you don't know if someone accessing the site is OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, at which point why are they going to pay when anonymous access doesn't?

Also, this works pretty poorly for scrapers because people would just set up massive junk farms to collect micropayments from crawlers, and then either the amounts would be too small for real creators to get anything or anything requiring them just wouldn't get accessed. The latter is probably what a lot of the media companies want, but then if the AI companies aren't paying and the normal users aren't paying, who is?

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