Nick Szabo  🔑

Alas no, but it's a nice thought. http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html …

The mental accounting cost for me, as a consumer, is very low. I'd definitely pay a fraction of a cent to read an interesting article. I'm not sure this will work, just saying it should be tried. Big media companies are losing most of the traffic behind paywalls anyways

It's been tried many dozens of times, several times a year on average for the last three decades. Failed miserably every single time. But it's a recurring daydream, so I expect many more lemmings to fly off the micropayments cliff in the future.

As far as I know none of big guys have tried this. Perhaps a few small ones, that provided very low value information already, have failed, it doesn't surprise me at all. However, I know at least 1% of readers do purchase subscriptions for high value publications.

Almost every major media company tried it, often several times.

I have never seen a one click instant buy button or qr code in any of the mayor publications. You may have info I don't since I haven't been that long in the country or with access to internet. Anyways, I sent them emails, it's worth a try.

They did large scale (but mostly not general public) trials, which were extreme failures, so they didn't take it any farther.

With Bitcoin or LN? When did this happen? Did Bitcoin already have significant network effects when this was tried? Sorry I ask so much, it really surprises me this has been tried before.