(Full privacy is a harder problem to solve, but address rotation is a good 80/20 solution for now)
I think web servers monetizing any user identifiers possible should be assumed by this point in the web's evolution, and precluded to the extent possible at the protocol level.
No one is going to say "Oh, we've got micro-transaction revenue now, let's do away with ad tracking." They're going to say "Great, now we have both streams of revenue."
If Cloudflare et al. are stepping into the middle of the transactions, I'd much rather scope my identity leakage to only them than everyone running a web server.
So is the rise of microtransactions mostly history repeating itself? There are nuances but web microtransactions feel a lot more like putting a quarter in to an arcade machine than the iap for phone apps.
What have I missed where I can, today, feasibly pay $0.25 at a time, online, regardless of other factors such as privacy, without putting down a larger balance at a time from which $0.25 is deducted?
It would enable informational sites to fund themselves with small anonymous payments per article instead of squeezing ad revenue and personal data out of their customers.
Incumbents will hopefully be disrupted by this enabling more independent authors to actually make a living.
clickbait: the revenue per click is going to go up thus driving even more incentive to produce clickbait titles with no real content (hey they have already paid by the time they find out its not real but o well). also enter the age of AI agent clickbait designed specifically to entice them. you just made the existing problem worse and created a new one
paywalls: well yeah, it makes the paywall go away, by paying, just like you could today
not collecting personal info: yeah other than the ledger of every single article you’ve ever clicked and paid for
account signups: you think cloudflare will be the only one in the game? welcome to a world of 50 different micropayment wallets you have to maintain and keep funded or you wont be able to browse the internet
Proper spend delegation and permissions is a big focus of ours - it’s great to let your agent have discretion, as long as the damage from going off course is limited. Definitely want people to feel comfortable experimenting with emerging tech
Feel free to email me at (my username)@(my company) if you have any feature requests or things you’d like to see