Nick Szabo  🔑

You don't want CONSCIOUS micropayments, you want automatic micropayments in real time using a service.

An extremely difficult problem for almost all kinds of consumer transactions; for the computer to act beneficially on behalf of the consumer it has to know the consumer's preferences and not have embedded conflicts of interest, among other things.

True. On one hand, it could provide much more flexible and fair subscription models, on the other hand it's hard to align incentives or stop service providers and users from gaming the system.

But I can imagine a scenario, where user is incentivised to use such service and save money (as opposed to monthly sub for example) and businesses are motivated to install such system to attract more users, even though payoff from one users is lower.

People can imagine all sorts of fantastic things, but the very many in the many years before and since I wrote that piece who have actually tried to do this have all failed.

It was the same with Bitcoin - people imagined trustless decentralized e-currency long before they actually managed to create it, failing all along the way. That is no excuse to stop, just to learn from past mistakes. The question is: are micropayments actually wanted by market?

ideally, micropayments would be deeply integrated into OS. otherwise user engagement would be low. what if user allows <1$ for a trusted app and the app could charge in background while the platform displayed payments in status bar realtime ? we are building this into BTC wallet!

Seamless stream of <1$ payments while a user interacts with certain services, beautiful.

yep, say lightning enabled reddit app, you'll allow up to 10k satoshis. every upvote on reddit could be 1 satoshi, so that's like 0.000066$. it would be seamless. user decides which apps they want, they can always cancel and they always see the payments in status bar.