Payed 0.01 € tx costs
Received it within 3.5 hours.
So what's the big deal?
The transaction amount was a 'massive' 13970 Satoshi, or 0.00013970 BTC. While it cost 143 Satoshi to send. It was set a 1 Satoshi per Byte manually in the CoinOmi Wallet. The transaction got added to a block at 1:25 last night. It arrived in a Bluewallet, to be used in the Lightning Network {LN}. So I can buy a cup of coffee with it. At the LN a payment gets settled instantly, a kind of like paying with cold hard cash, the modern way.
"You can buy a cup of coffee for 1 €uro...!?", no that was once upon a time. Already there is a bunch of Satoshi available in the Bluewallet. Yet, it might be a bit too small still for a cup of coffee. Could try to get one at Panini's, € 2.15 for a cappucino. Might send another € 0.38 worth of BTC for 143 Satoshi. That is almost at 3% transaction cost. And another couple of hours waiting before it gets added to a block. Not because it makes sense for me to do so, but to proof a concept, that it can be done. That was the point to make, how useless even.
One cappucino please
If I were to buy a cup of coffee and pay with BTC, meaning using the main Bitcoin blockchain, then I could go for 1% transaction cost, or a slight bit more. So I'd set it to 3 Satoshi per Byte. Adding up to 429 Satoshi for such a transaction. Where there is a trust idea that the payment will get through. Probably somewhere between 3 to 6 hours. Bitcoin BTC could become worth more or less in the meantime. Yet it could be done. Would not mind selling a cup of coffee for 1 €uro BTC myself. Even if it only got confirmed after 6 hours.
But it does seem impracticle to me to do so. How many times would you just go out for one cup of coffee, by the way? Still, if so, then I would recomment to use Cryptos like Steem or EOS. Payed in jiffy at no transaction cost. Or use a smart Bitshares stable Token like bitEuro, only costing a low amount of BTS for a transaction. Using an expensive valuable main POW {Proof Of Work} mined blockchain Crypto like Bitcoin BTC to buy a cup of coffee, does not make any sense what-so-ever to me.
The Lightning Network does
Although it is still at an early stage, the Bitcoin BTC Lightning Network functions as it should. Well, as far as I have experienced it. And I am not interested in how it works anymore, I just want to use it. Therefore, the less I am confronted with things like setting up a channel and so on and so forth, the more I will probably use it. Already I earned some Satoshi doing some image checking online. Just to see if it functions with the Bluewallet, and it did. Where I would like to see that I could set an invoice using €uro and it calculated the amount of Satoshi for me.
Anyway, there is room for improvement. Yet from my own experience with the Bitcoin BTC Lightning Network {LN} I can state that it has a lot of potential. The same goes for the Litecoin LTC version of LN and many others that adopted it so far. And with the MimbleWimble protocol added things might become even more exciting in the near future. For smaller payments, up to a few hundred €uro perhaps, LN is the way to pay. Using the main Bitcoin BTC blockchain for the purpose of sending and or receiving small value transaction seems like a waste of time and resources to me. (Even though it can be done.)
Bitcoin BTC to € 100'000'000
The more expensive one Bitcoin BTC becomes, the more value it holds, the cheaper the transaction cost per Byte. And yes, you have read it right, I believe Bitcoin BTC could go to a 100 million €uro in value. Meaning 1 Satoshi would represent a value of 1 €uro. Crazy? Would you still bother to buy one cup of coffee with BTC on the main blockchain? It would cost you at least a 143 €uro in value to be able to do so. But, with so called 'fiat money' devaluating extremely fast, who knows, we might end up paying € 250,- for a cappucino any day soon...
Miners would not mind 1 Satoshi going at 1 €uro. They would offer 1 Satoshi per 10 Byte maybe by then, or some would take even more. It is the market that will decide and settle for a certain deal. But the main payment system will be a second payment layer, maybe a sidechain that is DPOS {Delegated Proof Of Stake} based, like Bitshares, Steem and EOS. Or it is several intertwined subsystems, with LN {Lightning Network} and MW {Mimble Wimble}.
Only that will make it possible to keep Cryptos as a free and substantive decentralized payment and value holding system. So, it can be done, making a small value transaction at the cost of one €urocent on the Bitcoin BTC main blockchain, yet I think it is useless to do so. That is what LN is to be used for. Or Cryptos like EOS, Bitshares and Steem. As they were build from the start to be able to do so.
May the Cryptos be with us
A Tunnelvision will hold back innovation
Photo cc-by-sa @oaldamster
NOTE: In the BleuWallet (Bitcoin HD part) it is also possible to set the transaction cost per Byte at 1 Satoshi. Yet, it somehow seems to set a limit. Meaning a minimal transaction will cost 970 Sat(oshi) instead of 143 using the CoinOmi wallet.
This article is published at the Steem and Whaleshares blockchain.