Turns out you and me are on the same page. Ever since I heard of the concept of micropayments I've felt they were the way forward. Unfortunately, I feel that until somebody with the perseverance of the Collison brothers shows up to hack through the legal schlep, a usable micropayment processor that does real micropayments (I could pull out a quote from Theodore Nelson here about fractions of a cent, but I won't bother.) won't materialize.
I think it'd be quite a market for easy integration of an internet-wide micropayment system using BitCoin, if BitCoin continues its growth and acceptance. Seems like a really good fit.
Bitcoin is entirely unsuited to micropayments because it takes a long time to verify it (~20 minutes, rather then <1 second) and it's already having issues with the ballooning size of the blockchain. Putting another few million transactions a day through it will make it completely unsustainable.
