[not-elite]

> Crypto continues to help nobody and achieve nothing in the real world

It's kind of surprising how little progress has been made.

It is absolutely possible to use privacy-respecting low-fee tokens to purchase ebooks, purchase "no advertisement" article reads, or subscribe to periodicals.

Even something like Taler is better than Visa and Mastercard. I would love to know why lwn.net, ars, or the register don't try. I would absolutely pay $0.25-$2.00 per read for the ~50 articles I read per month on these websites.

Micropayments for tech readers seems like a good place to start. Tech readers use ad blockers, but are also willing to try new tools with janky UX.

[JeremyReimer]

I believe the case for micropayments was shot down back in 2002 when Scott McCloud first proposed it as an option for webcomic authors in his comic post "I Can't Stop Thinking" (the original no longer exists at his site, but various rebuttals [1] are still around)

Basically, people hate microtransactions. They hate the very idea of paying per article. They don't want to do it.

Ars, among many other sites, offers yearly subscriptions with various benefits (such as no ads) and that business model has worked well for them for many years.

[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/06/22/magic-its-what...