> because at least i can quantify what I pay

And the publishers can quantify how much it gets.

With the volatility of crypto assets this is not a viable solution for the publisher, especially because readers who have an ad-blocker installed are likely to block the mining script as well.

This is a publicity stunt. Nothing more, nothing less.

If so, this is a stupid publicity stunt, given the largely negative reaction by this community and the media. If anything, more people will install adblockers because of things like this.

I'm sure as soon as that micro-payments model evolves Salon will be happy to switch to it. People have been saying that for 20 years, though, and this is the closest we've come.

In principle, yes, PLEASE!!!

In practice, people have been wishing for a well-functioning micropayment system for well over twenty years and the best we have to show for it is PayPal. Flattr seemed like a good idea, mostly, but for some reason it tanked, too (AFAIK).

Either people are not interested in creating one that works, or the problem is really, really hard.

I think the problem is simply hard. Micro-payments imply more infrastructure costs (more transactions) but lower revenue (because the payment itself is tiny, so the fee has to be tiny as well).

But look at Bitcoin's Lightning Network, it may very well become a valid micro-payment system. As far as I know it's biggest scaling roadblock is getting efficient routing.

> Better to evolve a micropayments model that works

I agree but until that exists this is the best thing we have. It's the only way you can pay cents without doing anything else than click a button.

Micropayment is the way to go. There needs to be a two-sided market. Free isn't the market clearing price and whatever the content producer wants to charge also isn't.

    Better to evolve a micropayments model that works

Only problem with that is that the web is decades old now and so far nobody managed to do that.