It would be nice if there were identity providers that could vend attribute certificates with no PII besides the desired attributes, such as:

  - is_human
  - is_over_18
  - is_over_21
  - is_over_65
  - sex/gender?
  - marital status?
  - ...?
  - device_number (e.g., you
    might be allowed N<4 user
    attribute certs, one per-
    device)

The issuer would have to keep track of how many extant certificates any given customer has and revoke old ones when the customer wants new ones due to device loss or whatever.

Any company that has widespread physical presence could provide these. UPS, FedEx, grocery stores, USPS, etc.

I am still very curious about why the micropayment failed. I recall mass outrage at Brave for tying the concept with “cryptocurrency” but at the time the concept(minus the crypto and brave holding the tip unannounced if the site didn’t join-in) seemed decent.

Would the concept work, if it was unbundled from cryptocurrency and made into something like, Paypal, where you add money(prepaid), visit some site, if the site is registered, you see a donate button and decide to donate few cents/dollars/euros/yens whatever the native currency of the author is and at the end of the month, if the donations collected was more than enough to cover the fees + excess, it would get paid out to author’s desired mode of withdrawal?

Micropayments failed because users hate them[0]. They would rather pay more for flat rate plans. Here's an excerpt from The Case Against Micropayments [1]. It's an old paper, but human behavior hasn't changed.

Behavioral economics, the study of what had for a long time been dismissed as the economicly irrational behavior of people, is finally becoming respectable within economics. In marketing, it has long been used in implicit ways. One of the most relevant findings for micropayments is that consumers are willing to pay more for flat-rate plans than for metered ones. This appears to have been discovered first about a century ago, in pricing of local telephone calls [13], but was then forgotten. It was rediscovered in the 1970s in some large scale experiments done by the Bell System [3]. There is now far more evidence of this, see references in [13], [14]. As one example of this phenomenon, in the fall of 1996, AOL was forced to switch to flat rate pricing for Internet access.

The reasons are described in [19]:

What was the biggest complaint of AOL users? Not the widely mocked and irritating blue bar that appeared when members downloaded information. Not the frequent unsolicited junk e-mail. Not dropped connections. Their overwhelming gripe: the ticking clock. Users didn’t want to pay by the hour anymore. ... Case had heard from one AOL member who insisted that she was being cheated by AOL’s hourly rate pricing. When he checked her average monthly usage, he found that she would be paying AOL more under the flat-rate price of $19.95. When Case informed the user of that fact, her reaction was immediate. ‘I don’t care,’ she told an incredulous Case. ’I am being cheated by you.’

The lesson of behavioral economics is thus that small payments are to be avoided, since consumers are likely to pay more for flat-rate plans. This again argues against micropayments.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180222082156/http://www.openp2...

[1] https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/case.against.micr...

> I weep at the thought that every site will require login with sso from google (and maybe Apple if you're lucky)

I think that's where we're going. Not only is it a decent way of filtering out bad accounts, it's also often easier to implement on the dev side.

> Or there were some way to prove I am human without saying _which_ human I am.

I'm sure at some point a sort of trust network type thing will take off. Will be hard to find a way to make it both private and secure, but I guess some smart people will figure that out!