Topic: How to do micro payments with bitcoin? - page 4. (Read 1327 times)

It is difficult to make small payments when the value of Bitcoin has increased significantly compared to before. You can switch to other coin for a cheaper deal!

Not aware of any, but I would look more to the developers implementing features like MAST or Schnorr for that type of information, the stuff that hits the press is usually self-promoting (why take it to the press otherwise). I think 1 MAST implementation exists (but is controversial), and no Schnorr implementations exist yet. Benchmarking to gauge the extent that MAST could permit larger blocks doesn't exist, AFAIK.



I'm not sure about Segwit being a one-shot, it's possible that future soft forks could be designed to increase the max blockweight even further. I would certainly hope it can be done, as it's the least disruptive way to do so.

This doesn't have to mean hard-forked blockweight changes will be difficult, though. I think once the case for that is genuinely compelling, then it will happen. Up till now, that case has been rejected by most Bitcoiners. But people will change their minds about it as improvements to block processing are tested and proven on the live network.

Have there been any noteworthy studies on the potential effects of bigger blocks since the IC3 and Bitfury studies? I suppose that data is a few years old now.

My biggest concern at this point isn't the marginal nodes and miners that couldn't keep up with the network. I'm much more concerned about the propensity for any hard fork to cause a permanent split with multiple resulting networks. Segwit was a one-shot deal; there's only so much you can do by discounting witness data. We can further optimize transaction size, but eventually, the notion of a hard fork block size increase will rear its head again.

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Define "too high". Clearly, everyone has different definitions of how much is too much, people are paying historically high average fees at the moment which are clearly not too high for those people.

As for on-chain size increases, those need to be preceded by study into off-setting the additional processing burden higher blockweight limits represent. Segwit is somewhat of an example; allowing signature hashing to scale linearly mitigated (but did not offset) the increase to a 4MB block limit.

Aggregated Schnorr signatures will positively off-set the effect of larger blocks; not only will they permit more space within the present limit, but the much reduced processing required for aggregated signatures means larger block sizes should be safer (but only for block-space containing aggregated signatures, much like how >1MB of block space is only available to Segwit transactions).


Segwit. Increased block limit to 4MB. No clusterfuck (or continuation of a non-Segwit hardfork) occurred.

What will happen once all on-chain scaling methods are already on place (so let's say, segwit at 90% usage, schorr sigs, MAST...) and the fees start getting too high even after deploying all of that? How high would the fee need to go to consider a blocksize increase?

And under what scenario isn't a blocksize increase a total clusterfuck which would end up with 2 coins? Because I don't see it possible, a blocksize increase will ALWAYS end up with 2 coins... the hardcore "original bitcoiners" will stay with 1MB and then the new whatever increase of blocksize new chain... I just don't see blocksize increase possibles without massive drama and a split of 2 coins happening, and unless developers can keep coming up with strategies to reduce fees on-chain without a blocksize increase, we'll have that drama sooner or later... don't like to think about that but I think it's coming eventually.

PayPal can't do micropayments either.

Micropayments are probably best defined as payments in amounts less than the smallest unit that a given payment network can process using regular payments. Which isn't possible on PayPal.

This wasn't really feasible before, but once Segwit activated a ray of hope came forth.  With Segwit implemented and gradually growing, and with Lightning now being examined more thoroughly, micro transactions are more of a possibility in bitcoin.

See project in my signature for details, the first phase of the project was proof of concept in the BCN GUI. The next phase will be doing the same thing in GUI settings in a bitcoin wallet (providing the option for microdonations at certain thresholds, for example), but in that latter context, the precondition has always been (1) Segwit and (2) a working Lightning implementation.

Cheers

(Note:  The 'first implementation' on the abis.io page is a dead link due to reorg of the BCN website, please scroll down to where it has a link described as 'bytecoin (BCN) ~ discussion' for more coverage of how this was implemented there for the proof of concept; it is certainly hoped that this will not only be able to be done in BCN (where it was first implemented) and also soon in a bitcoin wallet, but later in various other crypto systems as well.)

And for some other details of a project which will enable microtransactions which was spawned by ideas which were first discussed in the ABIS repo at https://github.com/ABISprotocol/ABIS -- please see http://subsatoshi.org/ which was developed by a colleague of mine, ktorn, and some other folks.

  what I consider bitcoin will be an expensive investments ,an the function of payment would be replaced by another one

Micro payments are really imposible for now in the network due to high fees. The lightning network would be the best big thing to the network I hope that this would be fixed someday. Last 2010-2014 fees are not even a thing when sending transactions it would just cost a few cents unlike now. Micro payments is not prefered.

When ASICs are using the then-current best fab process, their useful life will be much longer than the time between early 2013 and now.  At that point it should be easier for more non-farm miners to return since you’ll have years to ROI.

That's inextricably linked to fees. That's what the entire scaling debate was about: creating a fee market with limited block size. Limited block capacity means (due to bandwidth and storage savings) that "it's easy for lots of users and small devices." But limited block capacity also means that there is a market for transaction fees -- limited supply of block space vs. demand for on-chain confirmation. And miners are incentivized to confirm the transactions that pay them the most. This has made on-chain micro-payments untenable.

So, "limiting the size of the chain" has everything to do with fees. That's why I brought it up.

No way to do micropayments with the current network fess.

I'm big on Bitcoin, but sadly, at the moment, PayPal is probably your best bet

In practice, it'll be simple.

You can open a channel with yourself to start with. No need to lock yourself to anyone.

Then, the wallet software will dynamically open channels with whoever you need to transact with. The option of choosing specifically who to open channels with can be done, but it won't be as quick or efficient as using the wallet software to route the transaction for you.



"Force" is the wrong word. You're right though, there's not much point in adding BTC to a channel just for 1 purchase, you should fill it with as much as you're happy with so you can make multiple purchases from 1 channel. That way you can take advantage of the Lightning's fees, refilling channels with on-chain transactions should be kept to a minimum if you don't want to pay too much in fees.

Can you describe it with a practical example?


For example, I want to buy something in Amazon using LN. Where do I connect to, to a random channel or directly to Amazon? how do I know if I connect a certain channel it will re-route to Amazon and other places?

And lets say I also want to buy in some other less known independent website that accepts LN payments... how do I get this routed around by only opening my channel once?

Also, once the funds go to 0 because I spend all them, the channel remains open and I can make another on-chain transaction and fill the channel again?

Im not sure about this... it would force me to make transactions as big as possible, even if I want to buy something worth $40, depending on how crowded the mempool is, I may consume a big chunk of these $40 in fees... and I don't feel confident having big sums of money outside of my cold storage, I would like to get out only what im going to spend but I dont see a clear solution to this, LN forces you to fill a decent amount, like $500 with current fees I guess would be a decent amount to spend on smaller purchases and would last for a while until you need to refill again.

Honestly, the best way to send microtransactions right now, is to use an exchange to convert the BTC into another crypto with a very low fee, such as ripple.

BTC > Ripple > Sent to recipient > Ripple > BTC, this way you only pay the exchange fees and the ripple transfer fee which is still likely to be massively smaller than the BTC fee would have been. This process assumes that you move all your BTC to an exchange at once, and that your clients have an exchange or will accept payment in alts.

Other than this, you can use a transaction accelerator to push the tx, but depending on how micro we're talking about, this may not be economically feasible.

The way to be able to transact micro without the big cost is to use Criptobank application.

Cryptobank is an application that works like a Bank Account / Digital Wallet, but the special currency is Crytocurrency. To use the Customer buy first use Bitcoin or Ethereal money then in Convert to Token CRPT (CRPT is Currency Cryptobank), then CRPT can be converted back to BITCOIN and ETHEREUM to start shopping on the micro scale such as buying candy and coffee without a large transaction fee.

"while Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices."

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.28917


Sorry, but not related to fees.
It's related to tyrannical users that want to limit block size, for example to 1MB. For easy download,...

Some miners may prioritize coins that have many days destroyed or for very large txs.  Since you're sending tiny txs I would probably reccomend using an altcoin or a fork, such as bitcoin cash or litecoin.  Bitcoin (until LN is easy to use) isnt very conductive to micro txs.

It was one of the final posts that Satoshi ever wrote, two days before he left the forum forever. Here you go:


In any case, I don't think that we should take anything Satoshi said (including his design intentions) as gospel. What matters are Bitcoin's users, collectively. They determine the network's fate. That's partly the message I get from the above quote.