How to do micro payments with bitcoin?

[taera249]

I can remember the days of totally free transactions.
Bitcoin (2009-2017✝) was intended for cheap transactions and micro-payments (P2P cash), you need something similar.

"I don't think the threshold should ever be 0.  We should always allow at least some free transactions." Satoshi Nakamoto.

I can sympathize with Satoshi's sentiment there, but he didn't build incentives for that into Bitcoin's design. The system relies on rational mining incentive: miners publish transactions because they are incentivized to mine for block rewards and collect the fees.

And for years, miners largely enforced node policy that reserved some space for "priority" transactions, including old coins sent with no fees. But miners are rational. When fee income became significant, they removed that node policy and started maximizing the fees they collect.

It's the mining incentive -- and therefore the protocol itself -- which resulted in this situation. This is the only way the system can guarantee block rewards in the future, once most of the 21 million coin supply is mined. And that's why Bcash will probably fail: when the block subsidy drops to zero, so will mining output, because fee income won't replace subsidy income.