Low-friction payment methods are here. Apple and Google Pay for example work pretty well. But if I pay for access to something today, how do you know it's me when I return a year later and want access again?
A good password manager can make creating an account almost effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution.
Yet another reason why identity verification by default would make the net better. No spam, easy payments, elimination of middle-men for many use cases.
Notice that they said "yet another account" - I'm pretty sure that they're not objecting to the idea of creating a single account for the micropayments service, but instead creating a separate account for each individual service that they could instead use micropayments for.
> A good password manager can make creating an account almost effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution.
That was already excluded by their comment - "and giving them my credit card info" - wherein it's made clear that part of the problem is the proliferation of private data among a very large number of individual sites/services/systems. A password manager doesn't do anything at all to help secure your private information from these services that you would be signing up for.
There is the privacy aspect too. Maybe I don't want [big sketchy data] to be able to buy my CC purchases and see know which creators i support.
SecurityNow did a podcast about it (episode 477).
I'm not sure whether or not Google & Apple pay are "micro-" enough, though. Do they charge per-transaction fees that are significant enough that 5 cent transactions are infeasible? What's the transaction time like? Can you set up 1-click payments?
I know that creating an account isn't adding _much_ friction, but there is some and I could see myself appreciating this.