Remove mention of micro payments

[luke-jr]

Bitcoin is not a micro-payment system. Until someone creates one that works with Bitcoin reasonably, it probably shouldn't be mentioned as a feature.

[gmaxwell]

Part of the problem here is that people don't have a definition of "micropayment".

E.g. I've seen people involved with payment processing systems— with a straight face— refer to payments under <$5 a micropayments.

Many people mean payments on the scale of $0.01 to $1 in equivalent value as "micropayments".

Other people think a femto-cent, — the kind of thing where your wearable computer gives a fraction of a penny to everyone whos shoes you like as you pass them on the street as a "micropayment".

There are probably seven orders of magnitude that this word may cover... some would fit in Bitcoin the payment network, some would not.

Oh, and also— Bitcoin the valuable asset is fine for any definition of micropayment (moreso than some other assets perhaps, due to their nature they're harder to build low overhead payment networks for) even when Bitcoin the payment network is not.

[saivann]

I agree with gmaxwell that the definition here is problematic.

There is two mention of micro payments, the first can be just replaced by something like "small transactions". The other one is a text dedicated on the subject. I actually think this one is worth keeping because it covers an interesting use case. However, I think it would be worth giving a more explicit definition of practical transaction size in the text. How about:

Bitcoin offers the lowest payment processing fees and usually can be used to send and receive as low as a few pennies in value. This means that it can be used to design new creative online services that could not exist before only because of financial limitations. This includes various kinds of tipping systems and automated payment solutions.

FWIW, the Wikipedia page on micro payments mentions PayPal and Visa definitions of micro payments and they are both in the 5-10$ scale. I think that the average visitor generally don't think of a micro payment as something under 0.01$ . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment

[luke-jr]

Well, once the value is under $1.25, there is a ~7 cent transaction fee. So it probably would be best to explicitly say "micro payments as low as $2" IMO.

[saivann]

That's fair, let's use "as low as a few dollars in value". Given that the size of the economy can unpredictably grow, being conservative is probably a good thing. If transaction fees are more predictable in the future, we could revisit this.