> but I'd gladly pay 25 cents after reading a great article if it didn't require entering CC info and bouncing between three different webpages... Unfortunately

> but I'd gladly pay 25 cents after reading a great article if it didn't require entering CC info and bouncing between three different webpages... Unfortunately, this would require immense coordination between web standards, browsers, OS vendors, and banks to implement If you're okay with customers choosing to make piece-work payments after consuming the material, the problem becomes much easier because micro-payments don't have to be instantaneous or binding. All you need is a not-terribly-insecure ledger that the consumer has full read/write access to, and approves of every month (perhaps implicitly for bills under $X). This removes a lot of the security/trust/coordination issues -- an 90% solution is good enough if you just double-check with the consumer before doing anything actually important. Similar to the proposal here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/17/the-learned-helplessness-of-equifax/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/17/the-learned-helplessness-o... Micro-payments made by browser software (sim. SSNs) become spam-reducing mechanisms rather than trusted tokens. Of course, this doesn't work if you want true micro-payments; i.e., where the consumer pays for access to the material, instead of making a piece-work contribution after having already consumed the material.