this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Enabling micro payments is huge, and when combined with buyer privacy and merchant fraud protection it has the potential to finally rid us of online ads.
The concept of micro payments has been around for a while but there's been no corporate incentive to make it work since Google who controls the browser with the largest market share also has a vested interest in ads.
The idea behind micro payments is that instead of seeing ads everywhere you are asked to pay a very small amount (cents or fractions of a cent) to read an article or simply to support a website. If you agree, the payment would be very simple and instantaneous because the technology would be integrated in the browser.
It would also be possible to simply disable this feature and stop seeing any requests, or to take the middle road and automatically agree to very small payments as long as they don't add up too much or too quickly.