Subtract the standard ~3 cent transaction fee and he’d end up owing money instead. That seems to always be the catch with micropayment ideas.
Sounds like the above 2 ideas should be combined. Lightning payments are more or less free, and an index or tracker that looks at your bash history could make it possible to spread 5$ per month over all projects that you use.
It almost seems like someone ought to be able to build some kind of digital currency with low transaction fees and no centralized payment processor that could power microtransactions. I wonder why nobody has done that yet.
Sounds like we need an open source index fund where you can make one payment that goes into a pool of money which is invested into the top 1000 open source projects.