- The amount of hoops we jump through to get around the problem that credit card numbers are fundamentally insecure is absurd. Transactions can be arbitrarily canceled up to a month after they happen, and platforms like Paypal will then happily charge you an extra fee for the privilege of reversing the payment.

- Bitcoin was also obviously a dumpster fire in this regard. It's not clear Bitcoin was ever going to be anything but a dumpster fire; the transaction fees were always going to make it terrible for micropayments, and they were baked into the design pretty early.

- GNU Tailor has been occasionally making the rounds for years, but I don't see any kind of timeline for getting real banks to adopt it.

It's a difficult problem.

But I suspect a truly decent micropayments system that didn't suffer from all of the privacy/gatekeeping/transaction-fee problems of credit cards and Paypal would fundamentally change the web.

And a functioning microdecision system that didn't wear you down from making decisions about whether everything you try and do is really worth spending or not spending $0.03, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day.

Been around for a decade, run by the old Piratebay guys.

Choice one, you have a dispute resolution system which costs money which requires high transaction costs, and can't have $0.03 transactions. Choice two, you don't, the user gets mad, disputes the charge with the credit card company and then the browser extension goes out of business due to chargebacks.

What you need is something that works like cash. Money is exchanged for goods and services, the end. If somebody steals from you or rips you off, your recourse is by recovering it from the person who ripped you off, not the bank. If that makes people stop doing business with shady people using this payment method, fine. Still works for the local newspaper.

Then you get the fraud the other way. People get content and then ask for a refund.

> If people abuse the system, ban them

So now you're back to needing an expensive dispute resolution process.

> If sites frequently get refunds requested, disable the app for them.

Which punishes the sites who are the most common victims of buyer fraud.

There are three options. Option one, dispute resolution process, high transaction costs. Option two, caveat emptor, no refunds. Option three, caveat venditor, totally unconditional refunds.

And option three doesn't really work either, because if readers are anonymous they could all ask for a refund with no consequences, but if they're not it's a privacy problem. So what you really need for small transactions is option two. Which isn't really a problem for small transactions, because they're small -- if somebody rips you off to the tune of $0.03, whatever, lesson learned, don't do business with them again.

They won't need you to do business with them again. 10k viewers being ripped off is $300, and let the site fail, onto the next domain to do it over again.

Now it's the email spam problem - every site gets to rip you off $0.03, you add them to your blocklist, but there are so many you never hear of that site again anyway.

I envision this as more of a European style tipping than American: I read an article, watch a video, cline a GitHub repo, etc. I find that the content is well made and I’d like to support the creator. I press the “tip” button in my browser and top them some small amount (<$1 in most cases).

This way there’s no need to deal with refunds, bad actors, etc.

We already have this problem with clickbait. They get the $0.03 from filling their site with spamvertisements and then waste your time getting you to click on it. Whether the $0.03 is from you or advertisers is irrelevant.

Though you could add a "screw those guys" button where you don't get your money back but they don't get it either. That might even allow there to be no transaction costs, by using that money to fund the system.