Why would micropayments require users to make "a hundred purchasing decisions per day"?
One of many counter examples is the streaming media use case. The user agrees once to a certain price per minute/second streaming rate then the wallet software does the rest until the user is out of money or decides to stop watching/listening to the stream.
The reason micropayments aren't a thing is because BTC decided to pivot away from being cash in favor of being a speculative asset so the software that would make use of micropayments never got built.
> One of many counter examples is the streaming media use case. The user agrees once to a certain price per minute/second streaming rate then the wallet software does the rest until the user is out of money or decides to stop watching/listening to the stream.
Sure, maybe. But different content producers are going to demand different pricing tiers. HBO isn't going to stream The Last of Us for the same per-second rate as a YouTube game streamer. Now if the "wallet software does the rest" and you have variable pricing, why wouldn't every content producer pick the top pricing tier? Without explicit decision making you lose the pricing signal.
Ditto The New York Times and BuzzFeed.
Suddenly your ecosystem fractures into a million pieces like Netflix did.
> The reason micropayments aren't a thing is because BTC decided to pivot away from being cash in favor of being a speculative asset so the software that would make use of micropayments never got built.
I suspect that's got a lot to do with Nick's motivations in publishing this, yes, but I think it's still correct regardless.
One of many counter examples is the streaming media use case. The user agrees once to a certain price per minute/second streaming rate then the wallet software does the rest until the user is out of money or decides to stop watching/listening to the stream.
The reason micropayments aren't a thing is because BTC decided to pivot away from being cash in favor of being a speculative asset so the software that would make use of micropayments never got built.