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The original was posted on /r/nanocurrency by /u/dlan1951 on 2023-08-03 11:23:38.
I don't mind paying a fair price for online content, but when I encounter a paywall when trying to read a news article, there's no way I'm going to give them my credit card details and commit to paying them every month indefinitely when I just want to read one damn article. I subscribe to YouTube and Spotify Premium because I hate ads even more than I hate monthly subscriptions. However, this means I can't try out other video streaming platforms without either doubling up on my subscriptions or changing entirely and losing access to the platforms with the most content. This undoubtedly has led to the monopolies in these industries we now have.
What I want is to pay for the content I consume as I consume it, with zero commitments. I want to be able to pay a fair price to consume content from any news site, any music streaming service, any social media platform, any video-sharing platform, and so on.
The only solution I can think of is nano. This is the purpose of a fee-less, instantaneous online currency.
Here's an idea of how it could work at a user level:
You install the nano micropayments (nanopayments?) browser add-on. You navigate to your favorite website, and it asks if you would like to authorize nanopayments and provides a list of rates that you agree to (something like 1 cent per minute of video streaming or maybe 5 cents per article read). You trust the service to deduct money from your nano wallet at the agreed-upon rate. Once you've authorized it, you don't have to manually authorize payments each time you watch a video or anything like that.
"OMG, you can't trust websites to do that." Yes you can. We hand over our credit card details to any website that requests it without a second thought. You would set limits in the add-on to ensure a rouge website doesn't bankrupt you.
Now, theoretically, there's nothing stopping a platform such as YouTube from switching to a pay-as-you-use model now, where your bill at the end of the month is dependent on how many videos you watch, but they would never do this. However, this wouldn't work for a news website that you visit once or twice a year, and they are struggling, so maybe this would be a good place to start. The goal should be to make nanopayments the norm, and eventually, people will demand that all services switch to the pay-as-you-consume model.
How can we make this happen? I'm a software developer and I'm willing to put in some work to make this happen, but I don't know where to start. On the client-side, it sounds pretty straightforward, but how would we make the back-end software as easy to implement as possible into existing subscription services? And how would we incentivize users and services to use it?
