[sneak]

Cheap and safe payments are of tremendous utility.

The problem is that anonymous payments are essentially illegal under current regulations designed to protect the large incumbent businesses.

Cryptocurrencies could render paywalls and signupwalls a thing of the past, allowing you to pay a fraction of a penny for a page view automatically in browser without an account.

Such systems are illegal.

[eigenket]

There are some pretty big, obvious reason why true anonymous payments are illegal under a lot of regulations in different countries. Supporting current big businesses is pretty damn far down the list.

[sneak]

Yes, the reasons are big, but they aren't valid or useful unless you are a large incumbent (or the state itself).

[mindslight]

I was with you until "pay a fraction of a penny for a page view". Trying to push the web back into the closed pay for access model is something that leaves a bad taste in many people's mouths. I'd say it's only a positive thing if it's funding new nodes working to route around existing attempts at artificial scarcity (to drive the price to within an epsilon of zero). But given the way the legal shakedown regime works we know it won't actually play out that way.

[callalex]

Any payment that can’t be reversed after a dispute is inherently unsafe.

[mindslight]

It's a different type of primitive, which can be used safely or unsafely. For example if you're selling something on craigslist, then it's unsafe to accept any form of payment that can be reversed after the item leaves.