I keep waiting for some serious content creator to try a bitcoin micropayment system. From there it's a small stretch to envision a third party like this one to take care of SSO and varying pay rates per provider.
The set of people willing to pay for online content is tiny. Intersect that with the set of Bitcoin users and you're now targeting maybe twenty people, ten of whom are against SSO because it has the potential to track their access to multiple properties, and another five of whom require instant access but won't agree to significant transaction fees.
Maybe there's a hidden market waiting to be tapped, and I'll look like an idiot when BitPass™ reaches a one billion valuation, but it looks to me like you have a good reason to wait instead of doing it yourself: it's real damn risky.
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.
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 -
> 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.
Oh yeah, that'd be great. I can't wait until the day when I find a good article, click the button to pay to read it, and then wait around for an hour or two while the payment is "confirmed" before I can read it.
