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I am interested in building applications that use the Lightning Network as a payment system and I want to leverage it's ability to perform micropayments. One idea I had was:

A rewarded video ad server that pays for every ad view instantly. Typically the ad server will keep a balance of what they owe you and you can withdraw once you're at a minimum amount.

What do you think of this idea and are there other applications for micropayments you know of?

There are already very established services like this.

You would spend lots of time/coin to build this service, but as soon as it started making profit the existing services could change their code to use the lighting network.

It's like people who go on Shark Tank and want hundreds of thousands to build a website to compete with PayPal, because their plan is cheaper for the consumer.  Not a good investment.  

keep thinking, and find a new idea for the lighting network.  :)

With lightning, you would face many problems as fee will go higher and higher, to be honest, there is no point in using lightning for micropayments when you need to pay for opening and closing channels constantly.



put it in a scenario and you will get it why this won't work without using third-parties(that will charge you later for each micropayment)

The whole point of the Lightning Network is for people to use it for quick and cheap micro payments, so why do you want a server to "cache" micro payments and then pay it over once it reach a specific balance?

I would say the perfect test/experimental site for real micro payments must be faucets. People get a fraction of a cent on these sites and it might be ideal to show that it works on these sites first.  Huh

Also, if you can create a platform where people are paid for small tasks, then you can link micro payments for those tasks.  Wink (There are examples of this, where people linked a tipping service to people when they are too lazy to search for things/products on the Internet and then pay other people to do it for them.)

I think the main problem of this idear at this point is routing. In order to pay somebody for faucet claims or micro tasks using the LN, somebody somewhere must have opened a channel TO the receiver of this micropayments AND this open channel must have funds on the other side (the sender).
It is not likely that the receiver already has a lot of open channels where he can receive payments from (my gut feeling tells me that the typical profile for a micro task executer is somebody does not match with somebody with open channels with funds on the other side of the channel... I can be wrong tough)

If I created a faucet (for example), i would not open channels that are unilaterally funded by me to each faucet user just to be able to pay them.
1000 faucet users * 2 on-chain opening/closing trancactions * 10 sat/byte fee * 120 byte = 0.024 BTC in on-chain fees.. It would take me a lot of time to tally up this amount of fees if i batch the faucet payments and make them on-chain.

My gut feeling tells me that in the starting phase of such a project, you would receive interest from many LN believers that have LN wallets with loads of open channels that have funds on both sides, so those initial (tech savvy, interested) users would have a great time in your micro earning platform... But after the initial hype dies down, and you start to reach your actual target audience, most of the payments would have no route to the receiver, and you'd be forced to open channels with them, talk them into opening channels themselfs and pay for something using the LN or resort to on-chain payments (BTC or alt's)

This exists already: Ads 4 Satoshis (https://ads4satoshis.com/):
You don't need to open a channel to a specific node, just leave it to the Lightning Network to find a connection. If you use a custodial wallet you don't even have to fund a channel.
I've tested this site in the past, but unfortunately viewing ads doesn't work at the moment. The (proof of) concept worked: view 1 advertisement, withdraw 1 satoshi :D

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I imagine faucet sites don't want to use LN, because they save money on users who never reach the minimum amount to withdraw. With LN, they could pay any amount instantly so there's no "small change" that gets left behind.

Since I am very well acquainted with the current situation regarding the faucets, your reasoning is partly correct. There are those bad faucet owners who have just that modus operandi to set a very high threshold for withdrawing funds, so that most users bring some profit to the owner, and never get anything in return. But most faucets have been using something called a microwallets for years, so when you claim on faucet payment is instant to microwallet like off-chain transaction. This is also solved problem of dust transaction.

I may be wrong, but somehow I don't see that LN is something that could be successfully applied to faucets at this point.