That's not how a micropayments system would work, and you don't need a token system. It would work similarly to how my transit card works. I use a credit card

That's not how a micropayments system would work, and you don't need a token system. It would work similarly to how my transit card works. I use a credit card to put some amount of money on the card itself, say $20, and then every time I use transit, the payment system just deducts $2.85 from my balance. Once my balance goes below a threshold I set, it charges my card again to top up the balance. So instead of seven $2.85 charges, there's one $20 charge. A micropayments system would charge you that $20 once, and then deduct 20¢ from your balance every time you read an article. For 100 articles, you've charged the card only once. It would work similarly on the website side: the micropayments platform wouldn't send a deposit over to the website owner every single time a visitor paid 20¢; it would aggregate payments and either pay out on a timed schedule, or when some minimum dollar amount is reached. You don't need a token system for this; denominating the "wallet" balance in dollars (or whatever the user's currency is) is fine. A token system might be useful in order to make pricing easier from the website operator's side, but IMO they suck because they hide the actual amount of money the user is paying. It sort of like when you visit a foreign country where you're not familiar with the currency, and so you see that something costs 1,000,000 foobits, and it has no meaning to you, because the exchange rate with your own currency is something like 1:4285.