[ShinyCyril]

Continuing here, since my OP was too long:

From my reading, it seems like Taler and the Lightning Network are the two most promising solutions. Taler seems to be very well-suited to micropayments, but is lacking adoption from banking institutions, which would be required for people to actually use it. Not to mention that there would need to be a standardised way to request that your bank exchange some of your balance for tokens to be deposited into your Taler wallet. Given that banks in the US still seem to lack a widely-adopted API like the European Open Banking initiative, this seems a long way off still. The Lightning Network seems promising, but I can't picture how the exchange of fiat / Bitcoin would work. Perhaps there may be a number of companies like Strike competing, with browsers giving the user a choice of which service to use, in the same way a user currently selects their search engine.