Micropayments as an idea have been around for maybe 20 years. The technology isn’t really the problem and you don’t need blockchain. You just need a centralized frictionless payment system that everyone uses. Clay Shirky wrote off the problem to transaction costs. It’s too much mental energy to decide whether to pay 10 cents to read an article.

I don’t disagree it would be nice. $100 per year subscriptions are a pretty high bar for me. But the evidence that people will consume digital news and other articles transactionally just isn’t there.