Micropayments History
September 18, 2024
Hey, remember that period when there were like a ton of online ‘coins’ that people are trying to make happen? And they all kind of wanted to be ‘the one’, they all involved some kind of crypto thing you didn’t totally understand, and they’d all enable micropayments and also solve all of these interesting problems about money. Remember when people were like “let’s make an IETF standard!” and others were like “this is a thing we should do at the W3C”? And then some really big companies got involved? Do you remember that time… in the mid to late 90s?
Source: Micropayments History
Brian Kardell has a potted story of standardisation (and other) efforts for micropayments that is with a read.
No mention of interledger protocol, which while not expressly a micropayments standard is a standard that can enable something of that nature. The now defunct (Coil, a solution for streaming money while you engaged with a site is an example of what may be possible).
If we want a web and attention economy that is less closely coupled with advertising and the surveillance economy that has developed around it, then solutions for paying directly for the content and services we engaged with are vital.
There are only so many services folks are going to sign up for and a subscription based approach in still about centralising and aggregating attention, giving the aggregators (think YouTube or Spotify) outsized power. A way of more directly compensating the creators of content (and services) feels necessary for a healthy online economy.
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