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