* Let me (in whatever guise, publisher, consumer, etc.) have an account that I can deposit/withdraw real world money into. Charge me a fee (percentage/fixed/minimum/maximum/whatever the market is willing to pay) for these operations.

* Let anyone transfer any amount of money (OK, impose some granularity, but make it like 20 decimal places, that's fine) from their account to another. Do all the right security stuff that we already do for this kind of thing to ensure no abuse.

* If the cost of transfers exceeds the income from deposit/withdrawals, charge some additional fee on a certain number of transfers, or charge a percentage on every $x transferred, or whatever it takes, so long as micropayments are still possible.

Now sit back and count the profit.

How is this not a solved problem yet?

You would probably need a money transmitter license, which is hugely expensive and time-consuming. You will have to Know Your Customer to comply with anti money laundering regulations.

Basically you idea is to setup a bank and make transfers between customers free, which some banks already do, though not to 20 decimal places :-)

As a consumer, my choice is to now sign up for this tipping service, give them my identity, deposit some money, and then I can go tip a website $0.001 for a cat video. So now my identity and some of my money are tied up with the service.

Bitcoin seems more appealing than that scenario.

> How is this not a solved problem yet?

Because the State controls the banking industry.

Call it AdPoints, you can buy 1000 AdPoints for $10. Then you spend these points in websites you enjoy.

Add an API so they can be used as a virtual currency for goodwill (I liked this guy's post / comments, so I'll upvote him with my points) in those same third party sites.

Get a couple big publishers on board and it could become a pretty good deal.

You handle point purchase and deliver payouts to your publisher partners, add a reporting function to the API so they can overlay the revenue of adblock users vs non-adblock.

Scenario:

1) Criminal outfit buys 100M AdPoints with dirty money

2) "Trusted parties" setup blogs and YouTube channels and has them get setup with the "publisher partners"

3) Criminal outfit "tips" innocuous quantities of money for cat videos and blog posts about gardening made by the "trusted parties"

4) "Trusted parties" cash out squeaky clean money

> deliver payouts to your publisher partners

Each partner would have to do the KYC/AML work for each content creator, but if they don't do it for donation sources, then you have the potential money laundering channel so the State will get involved.

In a real world scenario, you wouldn't even allow new partner sites to sign up online, instead you'd contact most of them via direct sales and vice versa.

I'm thinking about the NYTs and Yahoos of the world, not cat blogs.

I see your point, but this is more like buying world of warcraft currency than it is a bank.

Bitcoin is not fundamentally different. It decentralizes the role of the bank, but adds the step of currency exchange to get bitcoins in the first place. These currency exchanges have to comply with anti-money-laundring regulations that are very similar to those of banks, so they have to know your identity too.

The only advantage bitcoin currently has is that not all governments have gotten around to figuring out which existing regulations apply to bitcoin related businesses.

Also, there a plenty of governments that have placed Bitcoin squarely within the regulatory framework already.

Any solution which would require the visitor to pre-fund an account, no matter how small of an amount, is destined to fail.