>If its useful for that, then presumably it would also be useful to giving traceless donations to criminals,
One would think that, but these sorts of tricks don't always scale down to the level of paying someone a buck to get a copy of this week's Nature. When you pay a Senator $6million in bitcoin to get something through committee, there's also the unspoken truth that you can pay someone else $150,000 to go suicide the pesky journalist poking his nose into that business... not so with microtransactions. Though bitcoin still has fractional amounts small enough (looks like 1 satoshi is about a tenth of a cent?), it seems as if the fee for sending that is nearly a dollar itself. The only people who would be rewarded would be ASIC miners siphoning off stolen electric power from some third-world hydroelectric plant.
Theoretical bitcoin from 2009 is not the same thing as real world bitcoin in 2025, and hasn't been for a long while.
payment channels and the "lightning network" present solutions to the micro-transaction problem for bitcoin. They are worth looking into. However on bitcoin, they wouldn't be sufficient alone to scale up the network.
The problems of bitcoin go back to the 2017 block size wars. I think it is possible to scale the network up through a combination of measures (bigger blocks, payment channels, atomic swaps). But for better or worse, the current (BTC) developers have prioritized maintaining bitcoin's legacy and have split off from the other group of developers (BCH and others) specializing it into an efficient payment network. So BTC itself is a bad example of what cryptocurrency is capable of today, it has old network parameters that sort of gimp it. Those $1 fees you're seeing are not representative of the current state of technology.
You make a good point that bitcoin isn't really divisible enough, with the current prices. The floor of 0.1 cents is prohibitive for a lot of micro-transactions. It's not hard to imagine a world in which 1 satoshi is worth a couple dollars or something, which would pretty much eliminate the use case of micro-transactions altogether.
>You make a good point that bitcoin isn't really divisible enough, with the current prices.
I don't know that it's a divisibility problem in general... I would say that the USD conversion ratio is instead just insane. If it had kept to something reasonable in that regard, then divisibility wouldn't be an issue. It's something like 1 millionth of a bitcoin, more than enough. When I looked it up just before posting, I thought "I'll have to delete this comment before I finish writing it out, because you can still send small enough dollar amounts". And it kind of does work, the only thing I know of that's marked in tenths of a cent is gasoline. But the transaction fees are just absurd. $1 per just isn't low enough for anything smaller than buying a new car. If it is truly meant to be a currency, then I should be able to buy anything I can buy with the dollar at any retail store. Without thinking "Hey I need to buy more stuff so my transaction fee isn't wasted."
I wish bitcoin could've worked. But not only did it flunk out hard, it's just sucking up all the air out of the room so that newer, better solutions could get a foothold. If I was only a little more paranoid, I'd see conspiracy in all of this.
One would think that, but these sorts of tricks don't always scale down to the level of paying someone a buck to get a copy of this week's Nature. When you pay a Senator $6million in bitcoin to get something through committee, there's also the unspoken truth that you can pay someone else $150,000 to go suicide the pesky journalist poking his nose into that business... not so with microtransactions. Though bitcoin still has fractional amounts small enough (looks like 1 satoshi is about a tenth of a cent?), it seems as if the fee for sending that is nearly a dollar itself. The only people who would be rewarded would be ASIC miners siphoning off stolen electric power from some third-world hydroelectric plant.
Theoretical bitcoin from 2009 is not the same thing as real world bitcoin in 2025, and hasn't been for a long while.