Doesn't at least some part of you think, "If it was so easy, it would have been done at some point in the past 15 years? There are all of these absolutely brilliant minds working on this problem - why haven't they done this before?"

Microsoft tried to get micropayments rolling at least half a decade ago, that's probably why there isn't a workable system in place yet.

There isn't a workable system yet because each company tries to make something proprietary. Micropayments will catch on when there's a simple protocol for it, like SMTP is for email.

That could be a good deal for a spamming business. I think that certain spammers currently invest significantly more than 1/100th of a penny per solved CAPTCHA.

Well, yeah, but it would give them an incentive to invest more in targeting their customers correctly. At this point, a million new addresses to a spammer is an asset; if we implemented this plan, that would be a huge liability.

The ideal, once your email-receiving price gets high enough, would be for spammers to basically send the kind of spam that you would have paid to know about anyway (e.g. instead of reading a gadget blog, spammer pays you $1 to look at his customized spiel pitching a particular gadget similar to the ones you've previously liked).

What about the processing costs?