Completely disagree with the op re bit coin, but I do agree that people need easy ways to handle small transactions seamlessly. Mpesa and venmo provide plenty of reasonable use cases...

People already exchange tiny amounts of money. It's done through this cutting edge service called "banking." I think the implication of the GP's comment is that he considers blockchain/cryptocurrency tech a replacement for banking.

What banking service are you referring to? Credit networks, debit networks, ACH, something else? AFAIK none of them are practical for micropayments, in the US at least. It's possible that the banking industry could invent a network on which micropayments are practical, but it hasn't happened yet.

Micropayments is the perfect use case.

My vision is you would stock a wallet with, say $50, and then authorize a few of your regular sites in your client. Every time you loaded a new story, it might deduct $.01 for example.

Perhaps not with this tech, but one similar with fast transactions and tiny fees. See Iota for example.

Shifting from an ad driven to paid publisher/subscriber model has many advantages. Ideally you'd have a tech to support it which was a) not centralized, b) anonymous customer but visible vendor, and c) low transaction fees. This rules out credit cards and bitcoin but there are others.

I think all these visions for micro payments have been swamped by advertising as a source for revenue.

I dislike that fact, but I don't think most people care. So micro payments are just a way to make less money than advertising-based models.

Lol are you aware of the backlash against advertising?

I imagine Netflix working that way in an opaque way.

Of the 3rd-party produced works, I assume netflix pays them some fraction of my $x.xx/month based on my viewing time.

I really don't understand these examples for micropayments, they're always for things I wouldn't pay for anyway.

Oh? Do you fund anyone on Patreon? Is there no content you think is worthwhile, quality reading, that you'd pay a little to contribute your share, instead of ads and malware?

I don’t and nobody I know does either.

I'm not sure people need a lot of ways to exchange tiny amounts of money either, but the existing ones like Venmo work really well. Without a blockchain. And fast, too!