[mrweasel]

It can't really be Bitcoin, because the value isn't sufficiently stable, there has to be some credit card option. Given that a $0.20 credit card transaction doesn't make financial sense, you need someone to handle micro-payments, and who's that going to be? PayPal?

We've been needing a micro payment standard since 2000, and one has yet to materialize.

[lazyjones]

> We've been needing a micro payment standard since 2000, and one has yet to materialize.

Apple, Google, Steam, Sony (PS4 store) and others all have micro-transactions solved for their purposes (with credit cards, prepaid options and user "wallets"). So this isn't likely to really be an obstacle for Blendle.

[ultramancool]

> It can't really be Bitcoin, because the value isn't sufficiently stable

Why does that prevent it? Just exchange it immediately via an automated service (look at BitPay for an example), they take the minute to minute risk for 1% profit and you don't have to worry about it.

[mrweasel]

>Why does that prevent it? Because I would need to buy my Bitcoin in "bulk" and the publishers would need to set their price in USD, EUR, GBP or whatever, in order to be able to do proper financial planning.

Given that Bitcoin is as stable as say the USD, someone is going to win or lose money on the conversion between "real" currencies and Bitcoin. I won't be risking money becoming worth less, and neither are the publisher.

I don't know BitPay, but I don't assume that they the risk of devaluation of my Bitcoin for weeks or months. We're not talking about buying just the amount of Bitcoins I need for one article, say 20 cent, because fees attached to the credit card transaction your will want to buy at least a little more.

Agreeable there is a point to be made in the fact that the price of each article is so low that you would only need to buy something like $5 worth of Bitcoin, and at that point it doesn't really matter if you lose %20.

Still I don't feel like Bitcoin is the right option, but maybe it could be the backend to a micro payment system. I just don't want to deal with the Bitcoins or conversion to my local currency.

[ska]

   Given that Bitcoin is as stable as say the USD

That's a pretty, ah, strong "given".

[ska]

Can you get the transaction cost to be approx 1 cent, and the latency approx 1s or less?

If not, it's pretty hopeless for this application.

[edit] it's only the user experienced latency that needs to be that low, of course. And you might be able to get away with 10s. But not 100.

[return0]

It's pretty stable for the short time it takes for the payment transaction. It's crucial for having a certain level of anonymity. Besides, i can imagine there should be wallets that keep your money in USD or euro, and convert to bitcoin only when needed (edit: someone mentioned it: BitPay).

[mrweasel]

Okay, but at that point why would you need Bitcoin? Now Bitcoin is just a protocol, with no consumer protection.

[return0]

for limited anonymity

[ThomasRooney]

> It can't really be Bitcoin, because the value isn't sufficiently stable, there has to be some credit card option.

Perhaps not using purely bitcoin, but using it as a medium of exchange still makes sense with a volatile currency. As long as bitcoin is converted to/from a fiat currency within a short time period the risk of value fluctuations is pretty low.

This is the approach that coinetize (https://www.coinetize.com/) seems to be taking. They take bitcoin (among other payment methods), and convert it into credits which are valued at fractions of a dollar, and pay out bitcoin to the journalist when these credits are spent to access a page.

The transactional cost for bitcoin is too large to make 1:1 btc micro payments work right now.

[Retric]

Each of those transactions costs money. In the end Bitcoin can't do 25c transactions at any real scale. You have some token* backed up by bitcoin, but at that point you might as well just use Money.

You could even pretend the tokens where bitcoins, but individual 25c transactions are not going to show up on the block chain.

PS: Dogecoin can handle ~10x as many transactions as bitcoin so it might work better for this. But, even then you can't have millions of people doing several transactions per day.

[DennisP]

If Bitcoin ever gets Lightning implemented, this could be a good use for it. Something similar already works as an Ethereum contract [0]; EtherAPIs is using it for micropayments on API calls over HTTP. [1]

[0] https://github.com/obscuren/whisper-payment-channel

[1] https://etherapis.io/

[dave2000]

They exist but there's no single place like a PayPal or a Google wallet. Until then a service which consolidates them so you have to only make 1 sensible payment per month might be a workaround.

[ryan-c]

It says they're starting the account out with $2.50. I assume they'll bill in chunks when that is depleted.