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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

I worked on this before. You can solve the privacy issue using "statistical payments", by lack of a better word.

You visit website A,A,A,B,C,D,A,A

At the end of the month, you send your entire 20$ randomly to one of the websites you visited.

This will level out everyone's contribution and reward websites with lots of traffic. It eliminates the need for micropayments.

So I set up my own website and put a book on the F5 key to nearly guarantee I get my own $20 back. I also hotlink images from it to Reddit.

You can look into international call termination fee fraud in the public telephone network, for more on this.

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.

If it's so easy to solve, go solve it. Set up a test site with micropayments. Maybe scrape CNN and see how many people will pay you micro for a copy of CNN.

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