Topic: Why aren't micropayments ubiquitous? (Read 58 times)

Over 20 years ago, back when the web was young, I imagined there would be a day when we could pay tiny amounts of money--say 25 cents--for things on the Internet in a fast, cheap and anonymous way.

Yet today, 20 years later, this isn't a reality. There are credit card payments, and services that are basically shells on top of credit card payments like PayPal, but the fees on these services are impossibly high, the complexity to make and accept these payments is impossible difficult, and most importantly, the payments require an exchange of personal information which means every payment you make runs a risk of your privacy being compromised.

Many people thought Bitcoin, and cryptocurrency generally, would solve this problem. But blockchain was never meant to scale, but rather it was only designed to provide government-resistant value transfer, which is actually a hard technical problem to solve that makes the transfer slow, complicated and expensive. And besides, cryptocurrency has found a completely different market in speculation, which has completely taken over its purpose.

So here we are, in 2024, and still no ubiquitous mechanism to pay somebody a dollar, or 25 cents, or a few dollars, and to do so without exchanging personal information.

Full disclosure, I've been working for the last few years to solve this problem myself with my new company, but I still wonder why others haven't solved it--and by extension, what hurdles I will be running into trying to solve it with my company.

I would love to hear people's thoughts on this: why aren't micropayments a thing?