1. A payment processor for users to turn money into tokens
2. A payment processor for news sites to turn tokens into money
3. A software provider to handle the actual microtransaction part of this (unless they want to learn how to become software developers themselves)?
It seems to me like all the blockchain does here is to make it so this transaction needs 3 software providers instead of just one!
The argument I had originally heard was "the transaction costs of credit cards is so high, we need a system that works for many tiny payments. But of course, most of the cryptocurrency transaction fees are still pretty high, and a dedicated "tiny transaction" company would presumably be able to offer the same service for less cost than a distributed equivalent.
Transaction fees for bitcoin sent via the lightning network (which is a layer 2 solution) are in the "less than a cent" category and are settled in a few seconds. This is not fiction, this is i.e. how Trump made his for-the-cameras bitcoin payment during his campaign.
Lightning isn't even a good solution for most diehard bitcoin users. It's a failed project.
It would take 27 years to onboard every internet user to the lightning network unless you start adding level 3 aggregators and then at that point you lose all the benefit of it being on chain at all.
It would take almost 2 years just to onboard every American assuming during that time there were zero other bitcoin transactions. Then you need to add the fees for the on and off ramps to the individual transaction fees to get the real cost per transaction noting that these would go up quite a bit as the competition between lightning and non-lightning uses of the transaction space would drive prices higher.
The throughput is arbitrarialy limited by bitcoin's current block size, which hasn't been increased since satoshi's era.
Most cryptocurrencies have an adaptive block-size mechanism which allows the blocks to grow to a reasonable size which could facilitate such an onboarding of users. So it isn't a technical problem, it is just a question of bitcoin's current leadership, which is controlled by companies like blockstream.
People have been debating the blocksize for a very long time now and there doesn't seem to be any large desire to change it so while the ability to increase it exists changing anything that fundamental about bitcoin seems to be a non-starter and while that is true lightning is pointless as a solution for the masses.
Even if you increase the block size 100x though you're still not improving the numbers much since my very generous numbers ignore activity outside of lightning and assume a single on chain transaction for every user and a perfect network.
You mistake is, you overestimate the amount of people who want to be self custodial. You don't need to onboard every human being in the world on-chain.
Given the US example that would be several years in the absolute best for lightning case to onboard even 5% of individuals. Lightning is doomed from the start.
And if you don't care about self custody then the overhead of using a blockchain is a waste.
It is not black/white. It is okay to have the freedom to become self-custodial anytime, but not everybody needs to transact in self-custody all the time.
Taproot was another major step that enables lightning upgrades in future versions (such as zero-fee channel opens) that is barely discussed. The number of X years for onboarding Y amount of people is not accurate, as it disregards all major developments of the last 5 years.
You can't do transactions with just a database. You'd have to add a payment processor. Now things are getting wildly complex.
x402 is designed with agentic AIs in mind. AIs make mistakes. Having an immutable record that can't be tampered with is a nice layer of security.
And while I haven't worked with it personally, I understand x402 to be extremely straight forward for devs to implement.