> The thing that killed the momentum then is the same thing that still kills it - card transaction fees.
If only there were some permissionless internet payments system that has near-zero fees and realtime settlement that works across borders and has frictionless setup.
The real problem is not the market or the technology, it's that the state wishes to surveil and ultimately exercise veto over all payments in society. Lightning payments solve this perfectly and could across the whole web but it's illegal in the US to "transmit money" without doing all sorts of market-killing, expensive customer intrusion and surveillance (and buying expensive licenses in every state).
There's nothing technically stopping a browser extension from letting you anonymously pay a penny per request or something in one click to pass a paywall. It's just the state's incessant hunger to want 100% transaction surveillance and veto.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's not a thing. Bitcoin transactions can easily cost tens of dollars each, and Lightning balances are ultimately settled via Bitcoin.
My guess is you haven’t used bitcoin a while. You could easily get away with paying 1sat/vbyte (< $1 for a typical transaction) for over 2 years now.
While the 2nd part of your statement is on the surface true, it misses the point. You can gets hundreds of thousands of transactions out of a channel without ever closing it. Batching on-chain transactions is now easier than ever so you can close and rebalance hundreds of channels cheaply. You can very easily do automatic swaps between onchain and lightning channel balances. You can be the counter party to either side of these transactions depending on if you need inbound or outbound channel liquidity. These transactions can also be easily batched allowing you to unlock liquidity where you need it for a fraction of the price of a single spend bitcoin transaction.
There is still a long way to go to scale bitcoin to billions of users while keeping the blockchain accessible to all.
For further interesting scaling solutions in the works checkout.
- cross input signature aggregation: A way to super charge batching.
- channel factories: a way for a lightning channel to be trustlessly owned by multiple parties.
- MuSig: multisig that is indistinguishable from a single signer transaction.
- federated chaumian mints: a way to do privacy preserving custodial wallets.
- drive chains/space chains: a bitcoin merged mined side chain.
- eltoo: new lightning channel upgrade that cuts the space complexity of channels from O(n) to O(1).
- covenants congestion control: allows a sender to commit to spend while the receiver gets to choose when to receiver. Exchange withdrawals during high demand times while a customer can wait for a lower demand time to fully receive the coins.
And yet there isn't a single vendor that's succeeded in bringing a solution to market. Why's that? Nobody likes paying Visa and MC fees. If it works, it should be a slam dunk.
There are plenty of alternatives outside of BTC but lightning works.
In EU there are also free and instant bank transfers.
CC payments can be reversed though (which is a cons in my mind, I don't understand why merchants should lose the money by default in case of a dispute).
Because the impact that a fraudulent seller has on an individual is generally going to be much higher than the impact a fraudulent buyer has on an entire business.
Sellers can price in and insure themselves against fraud. The protections offered by CCs are that insurance for consumers.
Solana transactions cost thousands of a cent and settle in 30ms.
Which, incidentally, is why it's the blockchain with the second highest number of users. Basically free and instant transactions enables seamless integration with the web.
> If only there were some permissionless internet payments
Card fees are consequences of their pricing decisions, not marginal cost of transactions. And, the reason they have "pricing power" is the size/market position of their networks.
> browser extension from letting you anonymously pay a penny per request
Of course, and there is no need for crypto currencies. Paypal could have implemented this for twenty years.
I'm not sure how you would go about being anonymous if you already gave them all of your bank info and IDs.
Monero is the only payment method I would consider to be most likely anonymous. It has very low transaction fees (<0.001%) and completes a translaction in about 20 minutes.
> The real problem is not the market or the technology, it's that the state wishes to surveil and ultimately exercise veto over all payments in society.
With anything cryptocoin, everyone on the planet can now analyze where my money flows to and from. That's decidedly worse than governments which need court orders to do so.
The DHS has been able to track Monero since at least 2020 [1]. Basically, as long as you have an in and a likely out, governments can do statistic analysis to determine payment flows.
This is a corporate piece essentially informed by the company itself outlining they can do so. Who knows if it is true? The fact of the matter is if your argument is going to be "Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is it" (which is what you are proposing), that is not proof. It's a strong hunch.
Granted it is a cryptocurrency, but it is feeless and ~1 second confirmation.
I too thought it sounded like magic when I first heard of it.
Also, the browser extension you wish for exists, it's called Coil: https://coil.com/ but it simply doesn't have enough buy-in to work. The real problem with microtransactions has nothing to do about some bigwig execs or some deep state preventing it crap, it's simply that EVERYONE has to buy into it for it to work properly.
I'd rather a link to a commercially available software that does this. If I'm a business considering alternative payment methods, I need a vendor's quote, not a lecture about how transaction settlement works.
When it's not being spammed into a standstill, Solana is a potential candidate that could facilitate micropayments in a trustless fashion. I'm not completely sure but the new Solana Pay might be a step in that direction
If only there were some permissionless internet payments system that has near-zero fees and realtime settlement that works across borders and has frictionless setup.
The real problem is not the market or the technology, it's that the state wishes to surveil and ultimately exercise veto over all payments in society. Lightning payments solve this perfectly and could across the whole web but it's illegal in the US to "transmit money" without doing all sorts of market-killing, expensive customer intrusion and surveillance (and buying expensive licenses in every state).
There's nothing technically stopping a browser extension from letting you anonymously pay a penny per request or something in one click to pass a paywall. It's just the state's incessant hunger to want 100% transaction surveillance and veto.