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Comment by thinkmassive | Hacker News Reader

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thinkmassive·

Why try to use the base layer for micro payments? Lightning Network allows amounts down to the msat (millisatoshi).

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And it’s only eighteen months away!

It should get here just before cold fusion and AGI!

It works today.

last I checked LN channels must be pre-loaded with funds, which would seem to kill the incentive to use them for spontaneous one-off BTC transactions between otherwise unaffiliated parties, which would be most of the transactions taking place. Who wants to put up $100 just to transact $10?

Sounds like a good opportunity for a hub to connect micropayments merchants and consumers. Consumers can open a $10 channel, merchants open larger channels based on volume, and the hub provides rebalancing services for a tiny fee.

well sure, why not. this decentralization thing is mostly a fiction anyway, might as well re-centralize our superficially p2p money network back into a p2h2p model, since that actually works.

The handy thing about LN is that we can have that model without having to trust the hub in the middle. If there's a disagreement of the state of the funds in the channel it falls back to regular bitcoin transactions to resolve it.

If such a hub does this too much then they'll have trouble getting others to commit funds to a channel to them.

You don't need to have a direct LN connection with the content creator, just a path through intermediate nodes.

More likely users won't have to deal with all that because there will be micropayment wallet providers that can aggregate the transaction costs of buying bitcoin and maintain large value LN channels.

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