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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

If P2P micropayments could somehow have succeeded, then a different Internet could have been possible. Tipping content creators directly is impossible without megacorporations taking a cut, be it Apple, Paypal, Patreon etc, and their unit economics work better with recurring payments, which lands us in subscription hell.

One would almost be tempted to ask for a cheque in the mail like in the old days.

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P2P payments/transaction media have been on the way out for decades due to the State's interest in controlling the financial transaction medium as tightly as possible.

The database has doomed us all! For it is the Seed of all Evil in the hands of the Wicked! ...and arguably the Good, but misguided!

flattr was an interesting idea of a micropayment approach. Asically a subscription amount and then spread around sites.

But I guess for publishers it never produced enough revenue to be worth maintaining the integration.

Cryptocurrency almost solves this, but the scaling issues and high knowledge barrier to entry is still holding this idea back.

It doesn't solve it at all, I am talking about real money you can spend in a store, not tokens that need to be converted through an exchange into cash each time.

There are stores where you can pay with cryptocurrencies. That said, GP said "almost". We will see if it ever reaches the point where this word will not be needed.

The reason why you can't spend it at the store is because the store doesn't accept it. The reason why the store doesn't accept it is because of the aforementioned scaling and complexity issues.

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