[ETH_start]

My view is that we need a good micropayment system to enable low-friction payments for per page access. Pay walls that can be bypassed with a $0.01-$0.05 payment effected by a single click would be much better suited to digital media consumption patterns. Building out the infrastructure for such a system is not trivial though. It requires significant development (as well as adoption and legal acceptance) across an entire stack of technologies:

• a scalable open financial system at the base. The best candidate is the blockchain, but it is still not ready in terms of being capable of providing sufficient scalability, and its privacy gaps (the activity of every account is public) are still not solved due to highly aggressive AML/KYC policies that make even decentralized protocols that provide strong financial privacy (e.g. Samourai Wallet's CoinJoin, Tornado Cash) legally suspect

• broad adoption of open e-wallets, like cryptocurrency wallets

• wide adoption of digital cash that is not confined to a proprietary platform. Stablecoins are furthest along in this category

[laughing_man]

People have been trying to make micropayment systems fly for a very long time.