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Homepage > News > Finance > 402: Payment required The business model of the Internet is broken. With websites monetized by annoying ads, content hidden behind paywalls and expensive subscriptions, and data-harvesting middlemen running 24/7 digital surveillance, it’s time for a change. But what would such a change look like? Is a new Internet possible? What would replace ads to monetize the Internet? Enter micro and nano payments. Tiny payments can fuel every ping request, exchange of information, and interaction between humans, machines, and artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The key to making this work is a forgotten status code built into the HTTP protocol: 402 – Payment Required. Reserved for a future payment system that never materialized, 402 was meant to allow websites to charge users for access. However, since no scalable micropayment solution existed, it was left unimplemented. All of that can change now that the BSV blockchain can do one million transactions per second (TPS) with fees of fractions of a cent. Let’s dive into what the new Internet might look like. What are micropayments, and why do they matter? When Bitcoin was released in 2009, the smallest online payment possible was around $5. Things have changed since then, but making sub-dollar payments via the most popular payment methods is still challenging. Micropayments could be anything below $1, but they can go much lower. These days, it’s possible to make payments of $0.00001 on scalable blockchains like BSV. Why are micropayments important? As we’ll explore in this article, they make entirely new business models possible, lower the barriers to entry for doing commerce online, and can fundamentally fix the broken Internet we all rely on today. For micropayments to be possible at the scale required, they need a scalable utility blockchain like BSV. Slow, expensive blockchains like Ethereum…

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Filed under: News - @ March 5, 2025 2:27 pm