How to do micro payments with bitcoin?

[cellard]

How to do micro payments with bitcoin? The transactions need to be verified on the blockchain, but need to minimize the fees.

With the current situation of the network and all those fee it is actually not possible to do micro transactions with bitcoin. Your best option is to switch to some other Alt coins or just wait for the lightening network which is supposed to help us do transactions instantly with very less fees.

I don’t about micro payments but can you help me to explain something about micro payments that can help me in knowing more to this? Thank you for the response

Micro payments are low value transactions.

Xapo is a scam, don't use it at all, Bitfury and Coinbase and co are also not to be trusted, they are behind the BCash agenda.

I understand the deal with bitfury and coinbase, but why is Xapo a scam?

About Xapo: He shows a behaviour similar to Brian Armstrong (Coinbase CEO). He went up on the Segwit 2x train defying the community's will to not have another fork armageddon of 2 competing versions of Bitcoin. He is also constantly delaying scaling solutions like allowing native segwit support and instead he is profiting from enabling Bitcoin Cash and racking up the transactions fees in there.

I can't trust all these big blockers, they are all dodgy and they come from the old world, they just want to make more dollars, they don't even hold that many bitcoin themselves.

[MrCrank]

How to do micro payments with bitcoin? The transactions need to be verified on the blockchain, but need to minimize the fees.

Nowadays it is impossible.
Do you know how much fees today? It's very big amount.
I tried btc accelerator too, not working at these days

[Wirex]

As of Now, It is pretty much impossible to make micro transactions with bitcoins with their current transaction fees. However, We at Wirex have been working tirelessly to improve transaction speeds and costs of bitcoins within our network and have implemented SegWit for all our users.
We also have ZERO fees when transferring bitcoins from one Wirex user to another, making it possible to some degree to use bitcoins for micro-transactions .

We are also going to implement B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Customer) transactions to hopefully allow bitcoins to be used more as a medium of exchange rather then just a store of value

for more information, Please follow these links:

https://wirexapp.com/bitcoin-money-transfers

https://wirexapp.com/segwit-wallet-upgrade-lower-blockchain-fees-customers/

[Anti-Cen]

Lightening network takes care of that. This is how you will do micropayments or anything under 100$ with basically no fee.

Here is LN wallet, check it out https://htlc.me/

Yes if you buy a coffee each day from the same shop for a month and can spread the $30 cost over the month
as a type of surcharge on top of a $1.50 drink plus pay the fees of the hub/bank who you opened a
channel too.

What you are saying is not correct at all you have been mislead and micro payments are going to often be a few cents sent
to a web site needed to view VIP pages which i am sure we will start to see a lot of these soon.

From a development perspective LN is a hack job and from an economic perspective it could well
push fees even higher unless your doing 50 transactions a month and the hub you use has all the
right channels open and lets not forget that Hubs need to commit there transaction to the main
block-chain when doing inter bank settlements which is nothing new.

Please debate these guys if you feel that my description is incorrect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g   (Short version)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpfvhiqFw7A (long version, skip to 6:10 for the meat)

if the public block-chain was such a fantastic concept then how come they want to go off block now
and how did we ever mange to build scale-able system in the past (link web farms) without CPU wars for
mining or PoW and no we didn't needed to deal with 51% attacks because our systems were better than
that but yes DDOS can bring most systems down.

LN introduces a degree of centralization which I can live with but they are fudging the problem
which will create more trouble instead of dealing with the problem at the right level and breaking down
the block-chain to become a block matrix or do you think they like running out of space in blocks, only just
found out that this BC would not scale and are simply loving ripping us off in fees and some vain excuse
about running out of block space.

oh did i forget to mention "Lock-Managers" just in case the process was not far to
complicated as it is which might just give some of the current 20,000 full nodes needed
to preform seven transactions a second some real work to do for once.

I think all they have done is added another wheel to to the slot machine with a few more
buttons so when it costs you even more to play then it must all be the punters fault.

Yes I could go on a lot more but hopefully some of the developers here will start thinking
for themselves instead of being pushed along

[cybersofts]

As of Now, It is pretty much impossible to make micro transactions with bitcoins with their current transaction fees. However, We at Wirex have been working tirelessly to improve transaction speeds and costs of bitcoins within our network and have implemented SegWit for all our users.
We also have ZERO fees when transferring bitcoins from one Wirex user to another, making it possible to some degree to use bitcoins for micro-transactions .

We are also going to implement B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Customer) transactions to hopefully allow bitcoins to be used more as a medium of exchange rather then just a store of value

for more information, Please follow these links:

https://wirexapp.com/bitcoin-money-transfers

https://wirexapp.com/segwit-wallet-upgrade-lower-blockchain-fees-customers/

Wow, that is a welcome development for the bitcoin community and users as well. great work, Wirex!

[squatter]

"I don't think the threshold should ever be 0.  We should always allow at least some free transactions." Satoshi Nakamoto.

I can sympathize with Satoshi's sentiment there, but he didn't build incentives for that into Bitcoin's design. The system relies on rational mining incentive: miners publish transactions because they are incentivized to mine for block rewards and collect the fees.

As far as I can tell, Satoshi never intended the current situation to happen. Back in 2010, he already suggested to phase in bigger blocks again, but this never happened.

I don't think that's what he did. He said we could increase the block size that way. He then went on to say that Bitcoin users might become increasingly tyrannical about blockchain size.

When Satoshi created Bitcoin, there was no difference between nodes and miners: before asics took over, all nodes could mine. Miners currently earn around $30 million per day from block rewards and fees. I can only imagine how decentralized Bitcoin would be if millions of users could all run mining nodes on their own home computer, and all earn a few dollars per day from this.

Maybe that was a flaw in Bitcoin's design. On the flip side, ASICs can exploit excess capacity, which in turn secures Bitcoin's proof-of-work.

It's the mining incentive -- and therefore the protocol itself -- which resulted in this situation. This is the only way the system can guarantee block rewards in the future, once most of the 21 million coin supply is mined.

I don't disagree with the fee-replaces-block-reward thing, but in my opinion it's too early for that. It would be perfectly fine 20 years from now, when Bitcoin has a billion users who each make several transactions per day. Now 300,000 users pay around $7 million in fees per day, which limits adoption to the point that services that were accepting Bitcoin in the past, are now abandoning Bitcoin.

80% of the supply has already been mined. How long are we supposed to wait? More importantly, Bitcoin is an opt-in network. Why limit yourself to Bitcoin if you are so worried about fees?

Good technology takes time. That's why Lightning and Rootstock have taken so long. But now they are coming to fruition. It's better to introduce new systems with different risk/trust models that can integrate with Bitcoin than to contentiously hard fork at this point.

[Cryptotradenz]

I just dont even bother with micropayments nay more, just liqui into eth and send value that way, faster and cheap

[shield132]

How to do micro payments with bitcoin? The transactions need to be verified on the blockchain, but need to minimize the fees.

Nowadays it is impossible.
Do you know how much fees today? It's very big amount.
I tried btc accelerator too, not working at these days

Btc transaction accelerators not working? Hmm, I was going to suggest it right now. No they work, tu be fair only one works and that's viabtc's free transaction accelerator which is so spammed that it makes nearly impossible to include your transaction in 100 free tx list. But op if you can to do everythinf in less than a second, just send any transaction with 0.0001 btc fee and it will get confirmations by helping of viabtc. There are no other chanses if you don't use wallets with local offchain transfers.

[cellard]

Lightening network takes care of that. This is how you will do micropayments or anything under 100$ with basically no fee.

Here is LN wallet, check it out https://htlc.me/

Yes if you buy a coffee each day from the same shop for a month and can spread the $30 cost over the month
as a type of surcharge on top of a $1.50 drink plus pay the fees of the hub/bank who you opened a
channel too.

What you are saying is not correct at all you have been mislead and micro payments are going to often be a few cents sent
to a web site needed to view VIP pages which i am sure we will start to see a lot of these soon.

From a development perspective LN is a hack job and from an economic perspective it could well
push fees even higher unless your doing 50 transactions a month and the hub you use has all the
right channels open and lets not forget that Hubs need to commit there transaction to the main
block-chain when doing inter bank settlements which is nothing new.

Please debate these guys if you feel that my description is incorrect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g   (Short version)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpfvhiqFw7A (long version, skip to 6:10 for the meat)

if the public block-chain was such a fantastic concept then how come they want to go off block now
and how did we ever mange to build scale-able system in the past (link web farms) without CPU wars for
mining or PoW and no we didn't needed to deal with 51% attacks because our systems were better than
that but yes DDOS can bring most systems down.

LN introduces a degree of centralization which I can live with but they are fudging the problem
which will create more trouble instead of dealing with the problem at the right level and breaking down
the block-chain to become a block matrix or do you think they like running out of space in blocks, only just
found out that this BC would not scale and are simply loving ripping us off in fees and some vain excuse
about running out of block space.

oh did i forget to mention "Lock-Managers" just in case the process was not far to
complicated as it is which might just give some of the current 20,000 full nodes needed
to preform seven transactions a second some real work to do for once.

I think all they have done is added another wheel to to the slot machine with a few more
buttons so when it costs you even more to play then it must all be the punters fault.

Yes I could go on a lot more but hopefully some of the developers here will start thinking
for themselves instead of being pushed along

I also see a problem with the opening and closing of the different channels for each shop you buy at... this would incentivize opening a channel on a big merchant and always buy there (say amazon starts accepting LN payments, then most people would go there always and not give a chance to the smaller merchants just to save the money from opening a channel on other online shops). This would make it even worse for them.

The problem tho, is when we have total morons like the BCash herd pretending that having big blocks is an actual solution and not a disaster and completely retarded approach. At least LN engineers are trying not to centralize at layer 0.

[collapse]

I don't think that's what he did. He said we could increase the block size that way. He then went on to say that Bitcoin users might become increasingly tyrannical about blockchain size.

Where the "tyrannical users" text can be found ? 

[Carlton Banks]

I also see a problem with the opening and closing of the different channels for each shop you buy at

It's much cheaper just to leave it open as long as possible (channels can be left open permanently)

this would incentivize opening a channel on a big merchant and always buy there (say amazon starts accepting LN payments, then most people would go there always and not give a chance to the smaller merchants just to save the money from opening a channel on other online shops). This would make it even worse for them.

You don't need a Lightning channel for every person or store you send to. Money can be routed across multiple channels, so as long as the overall network is well connected, there's not much advantage to who you open a channel with. It's probably better to open channels with more neutral intermediate channel operators, they'll almost certainly try to gain some advantage from opening channels directly with big businesses (that's not going to be an easy business to be in when the barrier to entry is so low)

[squatter]

I don't think that's what he did. He said we could increase the block size that way. He then went on to say that Bitcoin users might become increasingly tyrannical about blockchain size.

Where the "tyrannical users" text can be found ? 

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

Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale.

Bitcoin and BitDNS can be used separately.  Users shouldn't have to download all of both to use one or the other.  BitDNS users may not want to download everything the next several unrelated networks decide to pile in either.

The networks need to have separate fates.  BitDNS users might be completely liberal about adding any large data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, 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.

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.

[tententen]

How to do micropayments with bitcoin? The transactions need to be verified on the blockchain but need to minimize the fees.

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.

[collapse]

"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://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg28917


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,...

[ihsanskanzaone]

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.

[onnz423]

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.

[cellard]

I also see a problem with the opening and closing of the different channels for each shop you buy at

It's much cheaper just to leave it open as long as possible (channels can be left open permanently)

this would incentivize opening a channel on a big merchant and always buy there (say amazon starts accepting LN payments, then most people would go there always and not give a chance to the smaller merchants just to save the money from opening a channel on other online shops). This would make it even worse for them.

You don't need a Lightning channel for every person or store you send to. Money can be routed across multiple channels, so as long as the overall network is well connected, there's not much advantage to who you open a channel with. It's probably better to open channels with more neutral intermediate channel operators, they'll almost certainly try to gain some advantage from opening channels directly with big businesses (that's not going to be an easy business to be in when the barrier to entry is so low)

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.

[Carlton Banks]

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?

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.

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.

"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.

[Ranker]

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

[squatter]

"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://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg28917

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,...

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.