The future is micro transactions - The Lightning Network

Part of the scaling debate is the knowledge that at some point in the near future, a large majority of all transactions conducted on blockchains will be micro transactions. These will likely be in the hundreds of thousands per second, this is in direct comparison to what is already being achieved by traditional banking services like Visa, and Mastercard. ## What are micro transactions, and why do they matter? A micro transaction is an amount that can be as low as a single unit, for instance, on Decred and Bitcoin this is a single atom or satoshi 0.00000001. When you consider that most on-chain transactions have a mining fee greater than 1000 units, this is extremely difficult to achieve. For instance, if I sent one unit on the Decred blockchain, it would cost me approximately 2000 units to process this transaction. This fact alone makes on-chain micro transactions undesirable. Paying a 2000% markup for a single transaction is unacceptable. When you start to factor in other trade-offs including blockchain bloat, you’d be forgiven for thinking, this doesn’t work! Visit: * decred.org * cypherpunktimes.com