It became obvious to us during 2013 that the kind of micro payments that we were wanting to do, was completely different than the way the entire industry was seeing the nature of micro payments… and the situation still has not changed. Most entrepreneurs in the alt currency space seem to be thinking of micro payments as tiny payments by ‘Consumers to Businesses’, but this is a very web-centric perspective.
The quickest way to describe the problem with the micro payments issue is that almost everyone is seeing micro payments as being payments made by end users to a web site, (or server, in fact) and typically it is seen as a way for end users to pay for things like page views on a newspaper web site paywall. We call this type of Micro payments Type 1. However, this is really the predominant view only because the in-built bias in almost everyone’s mind, due to the asymmetry of the WWW, (the web).
BitWall do Type 1 BTC Micro Payments, and Jeremy Liew is also talking about Type 1
The important fact to understand is that the web is not the internet… From a pure internet perspective it is just as valid to reverse the direction of the commerce.
Type 2 Micro Payments
We always conceived micro payments going in the other direction, i.e. from ‘Business to Consumers’. This is completely different to the popular usage of the term, so we call this: Type 2 Micro Payments.
Type 2 micro payments would be payments going from user to user, (or in some cases from server to client to use old terminology) in other words for services provided by those end users to each other (C2C), for example the Bittunes platform and network.
So, to distinguish these two types of Micro Transactions, there are two things to bear in mind… always ask yourself: Who is paying the micro payment?
a) Is the user paying to the business?
b) is the business paying to the user?
Then consider this: Which is more exciting for users in terms of adoption of Bitcoin? …the answer has to be ‘b’