I’m a retired IT guy. I personally have always been surprised that “newspapers” didn’t figure out and implement a micropayment system.
Imagine if you were asked for 0.0001 of something (i.e., a dollar; a bitcoin; a ruble; a yen) for an article. Not some number of dollars for a year, or month, or such.
When you get on internet scale, it’s not hard to imagine getting 50k readers each paying say a penny for an article. That translates to 500$ for that one article.
The current payment technology doesn’t pay to scale that price point.
But now, a paper could collect a fraction of a bitcoin from someone’s public key and encrypt the article so that only the person’s private key could decrypt it. At that level, it wouldn’t be worth pirating it or sharing you private key to deprive the sender of the revenue.
I think that would be the way to save the “local” paper with digital distribution of content.
FWIW YMMV
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Posted by reinkefj 
Reinke Faces Life 