Quote from: cryptopunk on June 30, 2013, 04:05:56 PM

This is a trust-free incremental settlement system

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But in that case I really don't see Bitcoin's edge. Paypal could cover that market much better since they are better positioned in terms of market and mind share.

TLDR: Hey middle-man! If you show me that you increase the producer's balance by 1ct. referencing my transaction of 1.01ct to you, you may keep the 0.01ct for your service as with this I can request the service to unlock the paid content.

Long version:
Paypal is not trust-free. They are known to freeze your money just for you trusting them to hand it over to somebody else.
The system proposed here almost allows a middle-man to set up a gateway that is trust free although it would need some more bits:

Think paypal. How would it work with Bitcoin and trust free?
You could have one micro payment channel going from the consumer and one to the producer. These could be linked through a similar contract, so the transaction update consumer -> paypal also references another timed transaction that gets only valid if any other paypal -> producer transaction also gets updated.

My browser would increment my payment to a gateway address only if they show me a transaction that references my unsigned transaction in increasing the earnings of the website I'm just surfing.

This way I would have two transactions charge and finalize per month with some middle man and the middle man would have such two transactions with producers and would never hold any party's money.

Oh, we need a standard for something like that

I want something similar to bitcoin:.... adressses that cover this:
bitcoin:middleman=[address]&middlemanfee=50&target=[address]&targetfee=50000.

now the website would have a service running that sees the transaction from the middleman referencing the transaction that I can show them to authorize my access. I would not show the full transaction as I wouldn't want it to be published yet but that should not matter for that fact.

(I'm afraid this does not come over very clearly as it's only now forming in my head but I'm 100% sure you can extend the micro-payment channels to some two step scheme that works trust free multi point to multi point. As non-public transactions are involved you need a middle-man to keep track of these and sign them and of course such a middle man would want his share for keeping the box running but it could be standardized and made available with the standard client, so a lot of competition minimizes the profit they can aim for. Sure, producers and consumers alike would not want to use yet another such middle man but as each such middle-man relation apart from the fees they charge on top only costs 2ct for the two transactions per month, it's not much of a deal to integrate 10 of them if you want to micro-pay 10 pages that all picked distinct such services. The bigger problem would be the money that's locked up for a month like that but I guess this will all be very seamlessly handled by the clients in the future.)

The producer would in fast succession sign that each of these consumers' transactions actually increased his balance and to finalize the deal the middle man could even remove the last consumer as the producer would happily sign this finalization again. Same with the consumers, as they might not want the public to know even the last service they consumed, the middle-man could cut out this bit of info and update the transaction to a wiped version. The public would know that the middle-man got money for no apparent reason and likewise sent money to the producers for no apparent reason and apart from the middle-man (and the parties themselves) nobody knows who consumed what in which quantity.

(P.S.: Regards to all that put the TLDR in the end of their posts hoping people read their long post first. For me a TLDR is an abstract people should read to decide if they want to read the full article, not a summary to sort stuff after reading a long article.)