[Cryptography] True Micropayments with Bitcoin — Medium

[Robert Hettinga]

I’m pretty much of the opinion that micropayments are for machines. Starting with “dust accumulators” developing the proper financial capacitance to execute a human-mediated transaction and ending, ultimately — in my feeble imagination at least — in routers auctioning bandwidth to each other, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria, &cet.

Of course, I also think that machines can do price discovery in the first place.

Which makes for interesting discussions. 

Financial people, especially the kind whose machines, um, do price discovery, say “So? What else is new?” 

Economists (and other political types) look at me like I’m from Mars, sadly some of them my pretty-much-Rothbardian ostensible-fellow-travelers, who fairly worship Human Action, using the proper Misean capitalization. Not surprisingly, J. Random Cypherpunk believes this as well. Or did, anyway. Uphill. Both ways. In the snow. 

That’s okay. Once The Right Economists figure out that machines are *discovering* prices instead of “calculating” them, they’ll sidle back up to me over here on the Group W bench and stop giving me the hairy eyeball… 


It’s not an unfamiliar feeling for me anyway. I suppose you can get used to anything if it happens enough.

Rodney Thayer, channeling Schopenhauer, or Gandhi, or somebody, used to say here, or maybe elsewhere, that if they’re yelling, you’re right. If they nod sagely, you haven’t said anything at all. 

Depends on who you’re talking to, doesn’t it? And whether they matter anymore. Finance people tend to write code, and economists tend to write law. We’re still sitting here, and elsewhere, trying to figure who’ll win that fight and it’s been more than 20 years now.

Cheers,
RAH