The 402 response code in HTTP might be a useful thing to "hook up" to Lightning, which itself is useful because of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Having fast micropayments payments running on data requests is useful for a wide variety of cloud applications, including but not limited to data transfer costs and queries to machine learning models, all without the need for "users" on the systems being accessed.
The way I'd put it is that the killer use case for Bitcoin is yet to come, which doesn't make it a solution for nothing, but more like a solution before its time.
For a regular user to use Lightning, they would have to run an always-online instance of lnd--a very memory-intensive Go program that also requires a Bitcoin fullnode (300GB) or the experimental Neutrino light node either of which also has to be always-online. The average internet user has never typed a bash command so this is a pipe dream. Or you could have the alternative which is to push people onto centralized Lightning-like (but better, more polished) services run by the likes of JP Morgan. (It's my suspicion that focusing hype on Lightning instead of scaling Bitcoin Core was a way to sabotage it in favor of paid services of a certain company that most Bitcoin developers are employed by but I digress.) Micropayments in general is a bad idea which the market has rejected time and time again. If you really want to do something like that, just do it the same way all billing works, add it up and notify the user with an invoice at the end of the month or year. That could be integrated into browsers without being tied to a specific payment method or forcing payment. I don't even want to imagine how rich hackers would get if every web browser had a code path that transferred real money.
I use Lightning with an app on my phone (Eclair) and I don't need an always online node, that's just not how LN is designed. As long as the app can sync once every 2-weeks I'm completely safe.
That would change the dopamine cycle of content consumption. I really don't see that happening. And its not like this couldn't have happened without bitcoin.
Micropayments are actually very difficult to implement without accounts and some type of payment system. With Bitcoin, and Lightning, it makes it work.
Having fast micropayments payments running on data requests is useful for a wide variety of cloud applications, including but not limited to data transfer costs and queries to machine learning models, all without the need for "users" on the systems being accessed.
The way I'd put it is that the killer use case for Bitcoin is yet to come, which doesn't make it a solution for nothing, but more like a solution before its time.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402