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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Peter Todd Retweeted
Finally, the dark pattern version: https://twitter.com/cdelargy/status/1030173081715855361 …
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Replying to @peterktodd
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.
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Replying to @NickSzabo4
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.
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Replying to @peterktodd @NickSzabo4
That's seems to be the problem with your writing on this subject: you're using somewhat arbitrary definitions that don't map to actual user experience. That's not useful.
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Replying to @peterktodd @NickSzabo4
Utility bills are the best example I can think of. Nearly universally accepted and the individual 'transactions' (turning on a closet light for 1-2 minutes, opening the refrigerator door once) can be truly tiny.
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Replying to @AeonCoin @peterktodd
People next to never actually pay money when they open the frig or turn on a light. They typically pay a bill once a month. You only metaphorically think of them as small transactions because electricity, unlike most things people pay for online, is fungible.
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P.S. next to nobody can tell you off top of head actual cost, within reasonable error bars, that they incur when the open a frig or turn on a light. That level of granularity is useless for creating a more efficient market. Typing it into a calculator would cost more than saved.
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Replying to @NickSzabo4 @peterktodd
It's actually critical to an efficient market because unless it is individually charged, there is no tie to efficient usage. People (sometimes) think about opening the refrigerator less or turning off lights, etc. because of the direct charge.
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Replying to @AeonCoin @NickSzabo4
...and the amount of thought they put into knowing that is proportional to the expected cost. Comes to mind a non-technical boss I had ages ago, who told me to make sure I turned the heaters off at the end of the day because they cost a dollar an hour. He was right.
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