The problem with crypto as a solution is that there isn't much money to be made from the pool of crypto users, they are a small niche and notoriously low spenders (a fact that anyone who has accepted bitcoin payments for legal products/services can attest to). Of course, more money is better than less money, however we're talking about a drop in the bucket, not a real solution for publishers. Finally, there's also a strong political ideology that tracks pretty well with crypto-users that would make it additionally prohibitive for many flavors of journalism.

Bitcoin can't directly do Micro payments, is there an Altcoin that can handle say 20 billion transactions a day?

If not then cripto currency's don't actually solve this problem.

Unfortunately, Brave is incompatible with the current business model of journalism, and I don't know if journalism can survive a war on multiple fronts - that is, a war on its pocketbook from the consumer side, and a war on its integrity from the government side.

It is? How so? As far as I can tell, sites don't need to change their business model at all; they can just start collecting payments from Brave in addition to their ad revenue from non-Brave users.

> Once a user enables Brave Payments, the Brave browser automatically and anonymously keeps track of the publisher sites each user visits. The more times that a user visits a site, the larger the proportion of the user’s monthly contribution is “ear-marked” for that publisher. These funds grow as new micropayments are added. When contributions for a publisher exceed $100.00 USD, an email is sent to both the webmaster of the site and the registered domain owner from your WHOIS information. The email explains how to verify the ownership of your website with Brave Software.

(See https://brave.com/publishers/)

I really like this implementation, because it avoids the chicken-egg problem that other solutions like Google Contributor have by not requiring the publisher's cooperation in order to work properly. Visitors on Brave don't see ads, period. Publishers can choose to collect money from Brave users if they want, but that doesn't change the experience from the user's point of view.

Brave blocks ads. If a user isn't using Brave Payments, then there is no replacement for that lost ad revenue.

Steem (https://www.steemit.com) is doing this. Basically a reddit clone with upvotes having value.

I don't see how Brave/BAT solves this problem. There is no anonymity between publisher and advertiser on Brave. Amazon could just as easily pull ads on Brave.

https://satoshipay.io/ is another interesting project. (Disclaimer: I don't have any stake in the company but Meinhard is a friend of mine.)

Reading the grandparent comment I was thinking to myself that Brave is trying to fix just this. Seeing you beat me to this comment made me happy!

It's super fast and very modern. Much faster than the live release of FF

There's no relationship with Firefox. A better comparison would be between Brave and a vanilla Chromium + uBlock.