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I think there really needs to be a micro-transaction mechanism on the web, but unfortunately it was needed ten years ago and there still isn't one.

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Yes but the crypto folks didn't do that, they were busy chasing nfts.

There have been a lot of ridiculous things in cryptocurrency land, but what's wrong with Basic Attention Token? It has been around for six years and seems to solve the problem of paying content creators via microtransactions. The only wrinkle is that finance laws force everyone to verify their identity with a government-issued ID before transacting BAT.[1] This is a problem for all microtransactions, not just cryptocurrency.

1. https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032158891-Wha...

...And then we're back with the underlying conflicting interests surrounding governments guarding their citizen's privacy. Yes absolutely we want all our citizens to always use unbreakable and untraceble communication channels. Except when law enforcement needs to surveil and pry on the bad guys.

And where it's impossible to tell difference from a (pseudo) random stream of numbers.

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