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What I’d love to see is the government funding and running a way to do microtransactions over HTTPS.
Basically, one of the government’s jobs is to facilitate commerce, which it has done by issuing and regulating currency for centuries, and collecting sales tax. But we’ve moved beyond paper and metal currency. I can’t pay for an article on USA Today with a quarter. So the government should run a system, funded by automatically charged sales tax, that lets me do exactly that. Let me hook up my bank account to it, and say yes or no when a website wants to charge me 25¢ for an article (or however much).
It would be great to have a way that I can pay without a stupid subscription and without giving the website my credit card information. If I read 3 articles a month, I don’t want to pay a $14.99 subscription. But not charging that means news sites can’t survive. Wouldn’t it be great if we could pay for our media easily and news sites could charge for it in a non-exploitative way?
Could be easily done with crypto and browser wallets.
No need for the government to come in and offer its “solutions”.
But no thank you on the micro transactions
You use microtransactions all the time when you pay for things with cash. I’m using the term to refer to payments for one thing in a small amount. As opposed to subscription fees or buying a year’s worth of articles at once. And no, that’s not easy to do with crypto and browser wallets. We don’t need old people having their life savings irrevocably stolen, thanks.
The internet is a government solution, btw, so if you’re not fond of their “solutions”, well, you’re not fond of the internet.
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None of that was backed by the government.
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I’m not talking about the media, I’m talking about the payment systems. US bills are government backed. None of the payment systems you mentioned are government backed. I’m proposing a system that would be government backed, and would therefore be easy to setup both as a vendor and a consumer.