
Ask HN: Does Bitcoin solve the micropayment problem? - Capira
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&#x27;t do this directly on the blockchain because it is too much overhead, too slow and too expensive, right?<p>There are &quot;micropayment channels&quot; 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?
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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!

[1] [http://dev.blockcypher.com/#microtransaction-
api](http://dev.blockcypher.com/#microtransaction-api)

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Capira
I kinda like that they are crazy enough to think about the "Security vs
Convenience" tradeoff when it comes to sending private keys over the wire.

