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This sucks. I thought one of the killer apps for bitcoin was going to be micropayments. Oh well maybe the world will switch to litecoin.

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Bitcoin was never intended for raw micropayments. The blockchain is just too expensive to maintain for such transactions. Litecoin doesn't provide any advantages over Bitcoin in this respect.

Some types of micro-transactions can be supported. Mainly, transactions where you have an ongoing relationship with the other party. For instance, paying for Wi-Fi access, one kilobit at a time: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_7:_Rapidly-adju...

Micro-transactions can also be supported through other centralized systems built on top of the main bitcoin system. For example Open Transactions: https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions

It's been revealed before that bitcoin doesn't really do micropayments.. Not completely sure why. Block reward is also still far larger than transaction rewards, yet miners still enforce pretty large transaction fees.

It's particularly interesting given the extreme fractionizability of the btc. One would expect transactions in the extremely small range, especially as the precision can be increased even further if btc increases in value.

It is designed to support micropayments, but with the inefficient blockchain, the implementation does not support them.

Funny, I always thought of it as a near perfect store of value and nothing more.

The fact of the matter is that this is all Bitcoin has been used for so far (no company has used Bitcoins thus far for micropayments) so I think it will continue to evolve into an even more perfect store of value as time goes on.

Why do you think it's such a good store of value?

Mainly because it is impossible for anyone to take your bitcoins without your consent (if you know what you're doing, of course).

It's not like you can place a password on your gold to prevent authorities from seizing it as they have done in the past.

I'm not sure it's any more resistant to rubber-hose attacks ("What's your private key/passphrase?" vs "Where did you bury your gold stash?"). Perhaps a little more convenient, though.

There is no such thing as a perfect store of value that is nothing else. A store of value must have real value - for use as a material or as a medium of exchange. Otherwise, there is no value to store.

By this logic, any cryptographically strong series of bits is a perfect store of value.

Check out http://bitvisitor.com -- they pay out hourly in > 10^-5 BTC increments (~$0.0012 at current prices). There are totally legitimate reasons to allow micro-transactions.

No this is awesome. Only transaction smaller than about half a cent is blocked. There's no good reason to make a transaction that small on the blockchain. Satoshidice sends thousands of transactions of one satoshi each every day and it adds gigabytes of data to to millions of computers worldwide. What a waste of resources.

But true micro payments do need to be a lot smaller than that. It's kind of the idea if every web browser could load a dollar a week into their browser and have it evenly paid to each site they visit.

It doesn't seem like a lot of money but if everyone did it I'm guessing it would probably beat Adsense.

There are hundreds of other applications as well for micropayments.

You can aggregate those and pay them out when they become big enough. Bitcoin stores every transaction on every computer on the Bitcoin network. It's not suited to transactions that small, you're just wasting everyone's resources.

>here's no good reason to make a transaction that small on the blockchain.

You don't have the right to say that, it should be my right to decide whether my transaction size is appropriate or not. This sounds like regulation to me.

When your transaction size affects my bandwidth and my hard disk, it becomes my business. Essentially you are acting like a spammer: wasting a disproportional amount of other people's computational resources for your gain.

But that's not his fault. That's Bitcoin's model's fault.

Let's just have the model pay for the transactions, then?

That's like saying I have no right to stop email spammers and that they should have the right to decide if their email volume is appropriate or not.

Making sub-cent transactions is a waste of MY resources because every transaction gets duplicated to everyone's copy of the blockchain. That's spam. If we don't stop this then the blockchain will become so unwieldy that it makes Bitcoin all but useless for everyone, and that's not good for anyone.

No we do have the right, as these are our computer resources being wasted. This is not a protocol change of bitcoin - you can still make and include your tiny transactions. You'll just have to mine your own blocks if you want them on the chain. All this change does is give nodes the ability to set thresholds on which transactions are relayed and included on the blocks they mine.

No its not. When faced with a scalability problem, they decided to ban certain uses rather than fix the root cause. Bitcoin isn't going to be able to grow beyond a niche currency if Satoshi Dice's level of activity causes such large problems.

I don't see any suggestions from your side?

The parent didn't claim to be a proponent or supporter of bitcoin. He may not know of any improvements. He may not believe any fundamental ones are possible. That does not detract from the point.

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