Nick Szabo  🔑

Actually I've been thinking about this the wrong way: from a user's perspective micropayments are already very successful, with huge sums of money being paid that way. Examples: your gas tank, phones, utilities, gambling, etc. Lightning can do all these.

People hear the Szabo (and others) view that microtransactions are too much cognitive load. But that's a UX challenge, not an insurmountable problem. Unlimited usage billing is nice, but it's *not* the only way to do things. Phone companies make *billions* off microtransactions.

The challenge for Lightning use-case devs is 1) finding apps that need micropayments in the first place, 2) figuring out a UX that reduces barriers sufficiently to be popular. Easy to imagine those criteria being met with clever UI's that automate/reduce decision making.

Example: a ad bypass protocol that used your browser history to figure out how many ads you see a month, then suggested a per-month budget to make 90% of those ads go away. The UI turns hundreds of decisions into one, w/ hundreds of micropayments happening in the background.

Finally, the dark pattern version: https://twitter.com/cdelargy/status/1030173081715855361 …

These aren't smaller than traditional payments. You've merely redefined "micropayments" to be small consumer pmts, which have worked for centuries & nobody has said won't work, blurring the crucial distinction "micropayments" makes between traditional & smaller-than-trdtnl pmts.

Yes, I'm using a useful definition from the consumers point of view. The fact is once I send a per-msg-billed text message, I *will* end up transfering $ to the phone company to pay for it. From my point of view, that's a microtransaction, implemented via a per-month bill.