Bitcoin and the Revolution of Micro Payments

Bitcoin isn’t money for the internet, it is the internet of money. No existing form of money can compare because Bitcoin is programmable money. Bitcoin is money that has the potential to provide use cases humanity cannot even imagine because they are not currently possible.

One of the most revolutionary use cases for Bitcoin is the concept of micro payments. Recently, an artist named @cryptograffiti held an auction where participants could only bid through Bitcoin Lightning Network micro payments. The first bidder to pay the smallest amount would win the auction. The final winner was selected after paying with several 1 millisatoshi bids (one hundred billionth of a bitcoin). Currently, this amount equates to approximately $0.000000037.

When we use dollars, we pay for things in lump sum amounts. Perhaps you get paid twice a month in two large amounts. This has been the concept of money since the beginning of time but Bitcoin may have the potential to change this concept forever. In an educational lecture, Andreas Antonopoulos, author of Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain, uses the analogy of a clock to compare the impact of micro seconds and micro payments. Before the industrial revolution clocks did not exist. When you planned a meeting, you showed up, and that meant plus or minus an hour. Before the construction of clocks, humanity could not understand the concept of a minute. The idea that a second could be measured in nano seconds and micro seconds was unfathomable. Now we measure microseconds when using high frequency trading algorithms and programming autonomous vehicles to make reactive decisions in real time.

For Reference:

1 Micro Second: 0.000001 sec
1 Satoshi: 0.00000001 BTC

Bitcoin’s divisibility provides the infrastructure for micro payments and the concept of streaming money. Today, employees get paid hourly and typically receive a paycheck twice a month. In the future, Bitcoin’s micro payments may enable employees to be paid by the micro second. Instead of receiving lump sums every two weeks, a constant flow of micro payments could be streaming into an employee’s mobile wallet. When we begin to examine money in the form of micro and nano seconds, the applications become unimaginable. Two autonomous vehicles could be negotiating a lane change in real time based on millisatoshi payments. An Uber driver could be paid per second on each trip. When a customer enters an Uber, they could stream an additional service such as insurance coverage for only a 3:21 minute ride.

With reliable payment processors and a relatively stable currency, it is hard for Americans to clearly see future use cases for Bitcoin. This is also because humanity cannot accurately predict which technology will be developed and adopted. We can guess like many venture capitalists, but ultimately we cannot be certain. Often times critics will claim that we don’t ‘need’ Bitcoin. This is true, but we didn’t ‘need’ the internet either. Now people have the ability to be a part of history by merely writing a tweet while being in the right place at the right time. When the internet was first created no one could have imagined these kinds of use cases because they were not something that humanity inherently needed.

So what will it mean for Bitcoin to become mainstream?

“It means the ability to create applications that were not previously possible, for people who didn’t know they needed them, until they discovered they could use them to do something new.”

– Andreas Antonopoulos

Disclaimer: This article is not financial advice, please do your own research and make objective decisions. The purpose of this article is to speculate on future use cases for Bitcoin which are not currently possible. The author of the article owns cryptocurrency.