> Bitcoin can't handle micropayments That is an inaccurate statement. Technically speaking, sending small amounts of Bitcoin from one source address to one or

> Bitcoin can't handle micropayments That is an inaccurate statement. Technically speaking, sending small amounts of Bitcoin from one source address to one or more destination addresses in separate transactions are inefficient, given the default size of the transaction(s) and the cost of processing. Depending on your use cases, there are solutions to this apparent limitation. To handle one-to-one micropayments, Bitcoin microtransactions can be done in a trustworthy manner by using rapidly adjusted payments between parties[1]. Basically, funds are held in escrow and the amount owed is adjusted in a variable off-chain transaction until either a) the funds are exhausted, b) the parties decide they are done, or c) a timer expires. Second, Bitcoin allows for making one-to-many payments in a single transaction[2]. You could send sub pennies (US$) amount of value to 1,000s of addresses in a single transaction. The cost of the transaction goes up as the size of the transaction goes up (more addresses == bigger transaction), but it remains a very economical way to send very small amounts to lots of addresses. I'm using the latter of the two methods to send coin to virtual appliances controlling OpenStack cluster based instances, which would have an analogy of feeding parking meters in the physical world. You need to trust the payment party (entity paying for all the instances/parking spots in a single transaction), so the plan is to make the payment mechanism distributed by deploying multiple payment nodes onto the network. Payment nodes deposit pennies into instances/parking meters periodically from wallets they create and control themselves. If someone hacks a single payment node's guest machine, and steals its private key, they'd only score a few bucks. Not worth the time or effort of hacking the hypervisor, in theory. An interesting side note here, payment nodes could also be aware of their own Bitcoin instance payment address, effectively allowing them to use a wallet they are carrying to pay for their own existence. [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_7:_Rapidly-adjusted_.28micro.29payments_to_a_pre-determined_party https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_7:_Rapidly-adju... [2] https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide#block-chain https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide#block-chain