> If you could just send the money, the barrier to pay would be 100x lower.
We can already do that here in Brazil: the web site displays a QR code (plus its contents in text form), the user scans the QR code (or copies the text) into their banking app, and confirms it on the app to send the money.
I hasn't AFAIK made any meaningful difference for websites. What people dislike isn't the inconvenience of credit cards, it's the inconvenience of having any paywall at all.
That was possible 30 years ago. There have been probably been a dozen schemes that tried something like that over the decades, starting with DigiCash from before the WWW existed.
They all failed not because of fees, not because of security concerns, but because even having to think about whether you want to pay for something and how much incurs a mental cost that people avoid.
Free beets cheap by a margin that has nothing to do with how cheap or how easy.
We can already do that here in Brazil: the web site displays a QR code (plus its contents in text form), the user scans the QR code (or copies the text) into their banking app, and confirms it on the app to send the money.
I hasn't AFAIK made any meaningful difference for websites. What people dislike isn't the inconvenience of credit cards, it's the inconvenience of having any paywall at all.