Is it possible to do micropayments with Bitcoin?
There are many contradictory information about this.
I am interested in payments like at a grocery store. Say, $0.5 to $20.<p>You can't do this directly on the blockchain because it is too much overhead, too slow and too expensive, right?<p>There are "micropayment channels" for repeated micro-payments (i.e. pay for API calls), but they are not intended to be used for one-time payments, right?<p>Though you can build one-time payments on top of payment channels, by involving a third-party middleman, right?<p>This breaks most of the decentralized awesomeness of bitcoin, right?<p>Are there any altcoins that actually solve the micropayment problem?
It seems hard to do it directly, but I've been analysing [1] for an upcoming project, and they do some clever tricks to amortize the cost. If you get to try it out, let me know what you think!<p>[1] <a href="http://dev.blockcypher.com/#microtransaction-api" rel="nofollow">http://dev.blockcypher.com/#microtransaction-api</a>