I feel like cryptocurrency is only a mechanism and not a solution itself. It seems the approach is for an organization to provide a solution (e.g. Brave), whether that solution involves a cryptocurrency (a token in their case) or simply a fiat currency wallet (makes per-microtransaction fee not prohibitively expensive) would be an implementation detail.<p>With that in mind, Brave seems to be the model in the right direction but the problem, as you pointed out, is having to use a specific browser, and relatively very few people would ever do that.<p>Ideally this is something every major browser would support (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge at the very least) which brings to mind that it really has to be a w3c standard. (I know there's Web Payments and Payment Requests API work being done, but I have no idea what they are like.) Payment providers would implement this standard, so perhaps at the beginning you have different web sites using a variety of payment providers. Eventually, they converge to one or two big players in the space taking payments (so by then you have a future where you maintain a wallet with that provider and use that same wallet at every content site). Because credit card fees for micropayments are prohibitively expensive, these payment providers are unlikely to be your traditional existing credit card payment services (e.g. Stripe in its existing form, or Braintree, etc.). It does mean there'll likely be a middleman platform provider (like Brave is now, but in this case it works for any browser). This is where the cryptocurrency mechanism can come in IMO; if such provider decides that crypto is the way to go to exchange money for this system, then it would be.<p>---<p>Outside of technical/implementation discussion, there's the implication of wealth difference globally. For example, many people in the west/the US think oh, paying $0.01-0.05 to read an article is very acceptable -- both as an expense and to support journalism. In other developing countries, that price point is already prohibitively expensive as an amount of money to spend in their life. Do we then lock out information from majority of folks in poorer countries? Keep in mind this would be compared against the current ad-supported model where everyone in the world (regardless of level of wealth in their country in a global perspective) get those same information for free, as long as they have an internet connection.