[mirimir]

My point was that payments can be arbitrarily anonymous.

I'd prefer a micropayment system that was as automated as the current ad system is. Browsing a site would trigger an initial small payment. The total payment would be proportional to engagement, including the percentage of the article read, time spent on the site, links followed, and so on. There'd also be options to pay more, or to cancel payment.

I'm guessing that browsing would cost about $0.001, and that reading would cost between $.01 and $0.10 for average news articles, blog posts, etc. Magazine-length articles and reports would cost more. Is that about right to match typical ad income?

[manigandham]

Yea I mentioned this is my first post as time-based subscriptions would be perhaps the ideal instead of micropayments. The amounts you quoted are pretty fair.

The most scalable payments option is typical credit cards or bank transfers, which obviously come with identity information. Perhaps there can be an option for bitcoin but it's definitely not ready today. No company would deal with that at scale.

[mirimir]

Why not gift cards? Gyft and eGifter both accept Bitcoin. And numerous businesses accept gift cards, including Apple and Amazon, and many chains.

[manigandham]

Sure, you're right, we can reframe this and just say you're buying prepaid credit cards using cash/bitcoin. That could take care of the payment info anonymity. Not sure of scalability for mainstream but it could work.

The remaining issues of scale/tech remain though which is still a big problem.