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0 pointsThomasRooney10y ago0 comments

> It can't really be Bitcoin, because the value isn't sufficiently stable, there has to be some credit card option.

Perhaps not using purely bitcoin, but using it as a medium of exchange still makes sense with a volatile currency. As long as bitcoin is converted to/from a fiat currency within a short time period the risk of value fluctuations is pretty low.

This is the approach that coinetize (https://www.coinetize.com/) seems to be taking. They take bitcoin (among other payment methods), and convert it into credits which are valued at fractions of a dollar, and pay out bitcoin to the journalist when these credits are spent to access a page.

The transactional cost for bitcoin is too large to make 1:1 btc micro payments work right now.

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Retric10y ago

Each of those transactions costs money. In the end Bitcoin can't do 25c transactions at any real scale. You have some token* backed up by bitcoin, but at that point you might as well just use Money.

You could even pretend the tokens where bitcoins, but individual 25c transactions are not going to show up on the block chain.

PS: Dogecoin can handle ~10x as many transactions as bitcoin so it might work better for this. But, even then you can't have millions of people doing several transactions per day.

DennisP10y ago

If Bitcoin ever gets Lightning implemented, this could be a good use for it. Something similar already works as an Ethereum contract [0]; EtherAPIs is using it for micropayments on API calls over HTTP. [1]

[0] https://github.com/obscuren/whisper-payment-channel

[1] https://etherapis.io/

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