No one's yet made a workable solution for web micropayments, but one aspirational design metaphor I like is an electricity meter.
I don't think about running my dishwasher as a transaction with a price and a receipt: I just do things, and I get a bill at the end of the month.
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Prices are (fortunately!) calibrated so that the monthly bill is not usually a big deal. If it seems high, I might dig in: hey, this appliance is wasteful! Or maybe I need to turn off the mining bots or whatever. But default-batched transactions really lowers friction.
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It's interesting to think about monetizing web content along these lines: you just read things; small charges accumulate; you pay the bill at the end of the month and maybe change future behavior if it seems too high. You could set a cap if you wanted. Aim for effortlessness.
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I was excited to discover today that there's a proposed web standard very much along these lines! webmonetization.org
I don't know if this is the right solution, but *something* like this might help us escape the awful ads model.
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What do you think of the way Brave does this with BAT? Basically as seamless as you were describing but you just engage with ads or buy an allotment of BAT upfront to cover costs and your browser pays the sites you visited every month
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Sounds promising! I haven’t looked at it in detail.