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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

Why bitcoin?

Why not 'regular money' that more people have?

The general assumption is that real money means subjecting your business to the percentages and per-transaction fees taken by banks and payment processing companies, making micropayments unprofitable.

Bitcoin also has fees. Also delays. Also wildly fluctuating price. Something like flattr seems like a much better idea.

I think to help decentralised it so that there is no "signing up" by any party involved.

It's easy to charge 5 cents to read an article using Bitcoin. With processing fees, this isn't super easy using credit cards.

Look up the current fees for bitcoin transactions; they're more expensive. Also much slower.

Yeah, but I think that largely depends on the degree of security you want to have in your blockchain. For example you could use something of a multi-party signing-scheme for consensus that regularly stamps hashes of it's own table into the bitcoin blockchain - this kind of scheme would be significantly less expensive to implement since you could pack thousands of transactions into a single bitcoin transaction. I'm not really sure micro-payments are the answer to add blocking to begin with though -

Are you kidding me? You have no idea what you are talking about. The bitcoin transaction has to come from the sender. You are dreaming

You can have multiple inputs / outputs per bitcoin transaction, so presumably that's what he's talking about.

> You can have multiple inputs / outputs per bitcoin transaction, so presumably that's what he's talking about.

Actually that's not it. What I'm saying is that you can have any normal multi-party signature scheme, where every N signing-rounds you ensure some measure of canonical ordering by publishing the hash in the bitcoin blockchain. I think sidechains are probably formulated in a similar fashion but it's been a while since I've looked at exactly what they are doing, the trickier parts if I remember correctly are transfers of value on and off the original chain.

The general solution to this is that you buy credit in a single service and then it allocates that credit around. At the end of a billing period, that service converts credit to dollars for the content producers.

Correct. And that's what webpass does.

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