[10000truths]

The issue is that DOM structure does not correspond one-to-one with perceived structure. I could render things in the DOM that aren't visible to people (e.g. a transparent 5px x 5px button), or render things to people that aren't visible in the DOM (e.g. Facebook's DOM obfuscation shenanigans to evade ad-blocking, or rendering custom text to a WebGL canvas). Sure, most websites don't go that far, but most websites also aren't valuable targets for automated crawling/scraping. These kinds of disparities will be exploited to detect and block automated agents if browser automation becomes sufficiently popular, and then we're back to needing to render the whole browser and operate on the rendered image to keep ahead of the arms race.

[emporas]

Servers operate on top of tcp/ip not to serve information, rather to serve information plus something else, usually ads. This is usually implemented with websites and captchas n stuff.

That's a problem of misaligned economic incentives. If there is a blockchain which enables micro-transactions of 0.000001 cent per request, and in the order of a million tps or a billion tps, then servers have no reason not to accept money in exchange for information, instead of using ads to extract some eyeball attention.

There is no reason that i cannot invoke a command line program: `$fetch_social_media_posts -n 1000` and get the last thousand posts right there in the console, as long as i provide some valid transactions to the server.

Websites and ads are the wrong solution to the problem of gaining something while serving information, and headless browsers and scraping are the wrong solution to the first wrong solution and the problems it creates.

[aniviacat]

No need for blockchain, microtransaction functionality should be integrated into our existing payment methods.

[emporas]

Existing payment methods, paypal, google pay etc, have been absolutely crucial for internet payments, but the micro in the word never ends.

If there are internet payments with a minimum payment of 1 cent, then we need payments of 0.1 cents. If that's achieved, then we need 0.01 cents minimum transaction. The micro in the transaction always needs to be smaller (and faster).

Free competition (or perfect competition) over a well defined landscape, internet protocols that is, has proven to always deliver better quality goods and lower price. Money derived from governments is far, far from free competition, let alone well defined internet protocols, and there is a point in which existing payment methods get stuck and cannot deliver smaller transactions.

I don't personally know where and when that point is, but if i have to guess, existing payment methods have reached that minimum point for at least a decade. In other words, their transactions minimums have to be high enough for them to make a profit. Yes, they can implement microtransactions, but they will not be profitable.