So what kind of scale are we looking at for transactions per second if micro-transactions are really going to become viable? You say orders of magnitude greater than the current transactions we see via Visa, so what are we talking about here exactly?
And is such scaling and speed really viable on chain in a future coin (without the need for miners to conglomerate into a few large pools)?
I have some ideas not yet written down on that the key on scaling is a protocol for the way pools can cooperate to contain both the orphan rate and the transaction scaling. I believe this is the way to reduce transaction delay to less than a minute (perhaps lower than 30 seconds) and also scale volume by orders-of-magnitude. Remember one of my assertions is we must have a mechanism to keep pools small enough size that they can't easily collude to do evil.
Just to get some concept of how many micro payments might occur over the web, 4 billion youtube videos are watched per day. That is roughly 50,000 per second.
Once you put the decentralized micro payment paradigm out there to compete with the advertizing (i.e. spam!) funded website model, I believe it will skyrocket beyond all fathomable calculations due to the NxN scaling of networks as I explained upthread in the discussion of Reed's (Metcalfe's) Law.
alxs, I am not ignoring you, just a wait a bit for your answer while I catch up on a few unstated matters.