You Can Now Send Micro-Transactions With Zero Fees On Coinbase

This only works between Coinbase accounts, which kind of defeats purpose of Bitcoin - because it requires both parties to be tied to a single company. Thus I don&#x27;t see anything revolutionary about this - many Bitcoin services already implement that feature for transfers between their accounts.<p>What I want to see (and I will try to develop in my upcoming service) is a protocol that lets you transfer Bitcoins between different services instantly. Right now it takes 6 confirmations in most services to receive a payment, but with a mutual trust between them the confirmation time could be essentially cut to zero. Mt.Gox tried to do something like that with their &quot;Green addresses&quot;, but it didn&#x27;t catch on.

I think that if Bitcoin is going to succeed it will be because of bank-like institutions using Bitcoin as the underlying protocol that the average consumer doesn&#x27;t interact with -- but could if they want to, so this is a fantastic first step. At present money in the bank is not &quot;money&quot; &quot;in&quot; the &quot;bank&quot;, it&#x27;s an entry in a database that is reconciled every so often, Bitcoin should be used in a similar way for it to be compatible with current consumer behaviours -- expectations of protections against fraud (chargebacks), human error etc.

This seems like a step in the right direction.<p>In ancient times before banks, people paid in gold or silver, but buying something like one apple that cost less the smallest coin presented a problem. The solution was, people left their gold or silver with a gold smith, and were given small denomination notes to spend at the market. Merchants could use the notes to redeem the gold at the end of the day.<p>It is fun to see 1000 year old ideas getting re-created for the modern world.

Coinbase has been doing cool stuff recently (fancy new hire, css tweaks, this story) but their base product needs work, and their support is weak.<p>I have yet to receive responses to two support emails I sent several months ago, one of which regarded a transaction that disappeared from my account, leaving me with less BTC than I had before.<p>Also, the last time I checked, their API callbacks were simply not functioning. No answer from support.<p>Furthermore, their transaction confirmation emails often send days late (and sometimes repeatedly, I think). It&#x27;s very startling to see that you &quot;just sent&quot; x btc, forcing you to go through your transaction history on the site.<p>There are other small bugs&#x2F;issues I have with the product as well, none of which seem like they&#x27;d be too hard to fix.<p>I hope they hire support and fix those bugs before they add the next cool features &#x2F; hires.

This is a great first step. The next one would be taking transactions between large wallet providers and batching them up to reduce those fees as well.

This is awesome, so very awesome.<p>Scott McCloud&#x27;s written a lot of real intelligent stuff about microtransaction&#x2F;digital currency programs, and implicit in that, why they haven&#x27;t worked out in the past. I&#x27;m hesitant to say bitcoin is The Answer, but it (combined with some other qualities of the internet and modern UX&#x2F;UI) presents a plausible implementation.<p>To paint with a broad brush: cost is both financial and temporal. A successful digital payment&#x2F;microtransaction system has to reflect this fact.<p>The time cost of paying some amount of money should not outstrip its monetary value. Having six options (or worse yet, having to type in an amount) for payment size and three confirmation screens is infuriating when you want to transmit the digital equivalent of a quarter or so.<p>My two satoshis: I&#x27;m not sure how it will ultimately be implemented, but I think bitcoin (and its subdivided units) is a good way to build low-friction payment schemes.

Oh hells yes. I&#x27;ve been waiting for something like this to make <a href="http://www.bitbanter.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitbanter.com&#x2F;</a> more interesting. Not sure how I&#x27;ll handle non-Coinbase microtransactions...but still, this is really, really cool. Thanks Coinbasers!

Cool blog post but I can&#x27;t get excited about &quot;micro-transactions&quot; when we&#x27;ve heard this same story so many times since the 90s. Zzzzzz. Few weeks of hype (1 cent to read my blog = $120,000!?!) and it never materializes.

Just like the Zero fees, this has zero thing to do with bitcoin. Here I go, party and counter-party are in my table and I flip a bit and it ZERO fees! wohooo!<p>Ahemmm! Things people do for PR!

How is it actually implemented? Is this like Ripple? Or are we once again issuing banknotes essentially, derivative money?

<i>&gt; Bitcoin is an incredibly efficient protocol for moving money with low fees. However, it does have a “miner fee&quot; ($0.05 - $0.01 at current exchange rates) if you want your transaction to be sent and confirmed quickly.</i><p>Should that be $0.01 - $0.05, or $0.005 - $0.01?

this look like a trivial step.. but the vision explained in the article are right, and this is quite revolutionary considering we could get into this reality (with widespread adoption of bitcoin)<p>think about the fluidity of value.. if people could use little cents, imagine what this can cause to donations.. for instance.. open source world..<p>things will get much more fluid, easy and fast.. money will flow not just for the big guy, that can pay for the big schemes.. but to everybody, anywhere..<p>this is indeed, a trivial step, with unprecedent consequences.. revolutionary &quot;triviality&quot; :)

The low cost of sending BTC (packets, I suppose) is one of bitcoin&#x27;s greatest strengths. I wonder if it that feature is strong enough?

I always assumed the entire point of online wallets would be the ability to do off-chain transaction clearing.

Does Coinbase do the equivalent of chargebacks in cases of hacked accounts?