Good points, but I would argue that micropayments would be great if they required micro effort and no overhead. They would transform the ability of non profits to fundraise.
It's a tempting premise, though my counterargument is decision paralysis. Making any decision has some amount of fixed overhead in the human mind and eventually you just don't want to deal with making a decision - period - no matter how small. This is why Netflix/Spotify/Apple Music is so popular; you may well save money buying/renting via iTunes but you just don't want to deal with it.
Micropayments can exist, as simple ledger entries. You pre-load a, for instance, PayPal account then PayPal can allocate pennies or fractions of pennies on your behalf. There's no technical mystery. It feels like this hasn't been done due to lack of desire for it rather than any inability to execute.
It feels like this hasn't been done due
to lack of desire for it rather than
any inability to execute.
I always assumed it was three reasons:
1. A chicken-and-egg problem, where users don't join micropayment platforms because they don't have major content producers, and content producers don't join platforms because they don't have users.
2. There are actually a bunch of different visions for micropayments (articles costing $0.50 vs $0.05 vs $0.005 vs $0.0005; voluntary vs paywalls; drm-free vs drm; ad-free vs ads vs ad-blockers; articles vs music vs video; automatic vs manual payment vs automatic-with-refunds; quality professional journalism vs anyone can take part; free speech vs not funding hate groups....) and as your product vision becomes clearer, more and more stakeholders notice your vision isn't quite their vision.
3. If you're making a stored-value account in my country there's a bunch of regulation due to a history of scams. Presumably you would have to comply with regulations in every country you operate in, which would be nontrivial.
If you look at a country like Sweden, which is pretty much cashless, we can see that electronic micropayments are indeed transforming a society, but it can also be shown that this is actually not an ideal situation. There was an article on this very site a few days ago discussing this.
The problem with micropayments is microfraud, which can be scaled up to large amounts. It's bad enough with ad click fraud already, and that's a semi-closed system.
Micropayments can exist, as simple ledger entries. You pre-load a, for instance, PayPal account then PayPal can allocate pennies or fractions of pennies on your behalf. There's no technical mystery. It feels like this hasn't been done due to lack of desire for it rather than any inability to execute.