I think the buy now pay later model is fundamentally different from sats streaming. Some items, such as shoes or a t-shirt cannot be broken down into pieces to be consumed. These all-or-nothing items are not suitable to be purchased via sats streaming. Sats streaming excel in buying items that are able to be broken down into fine, fungible increments; like billing on how many minutes or even seconds you stream a show, or how many oz of beer you poured.

Buy now pay later is debt consumption, and I don’t think it will work well on a bitcoin standard because of Bitcoin’s increasing purchasing power over time. Debt consumption only makes sense on an inflationary currency like fiat. Sats streaming is actually final settlement of incremental consumption of a good that can be broken down, in real time. Streaming sats for equipment rental might be a thing, but streaming sats to buy out an all-or-nothing item does not make sense to me. At least, if I’m the vendor selling an all-or-nothing item, I would not let you walk away with it until you pay me in full in sats.

I don't think services would want to do that. Not taking a flat fee would make it hard to project what the future income would look like as you can't easily predict how much time each user will use the service for in a 30 day period or even a 180 day period. I'd also imagine that they would earn less because of the uncertainty in how much they should charge each user to cover all the costs.

While I would very much like something like that to be where we are heading, I think the flip side to it is whether or not consumers actually want the mental burden of it.

Most merchants/services are incentivized not to do it and most consumers don't want to think about every single transaction they make in a day while power users scoff at the idea of paying much more than they are today for the same experience.

I see these subscription models as a lot like insurance. There's going to be a premium in there and I believe it's foolish to pay it. Streaming sats is a fun gimmick but it's not how I want to do everything.

The power of bitcoin is providing a fair foundation on which to try all these things without hidden interest rates and temporary licenses. That system is rotten and it's refreshing to v4v, tip, and purchase tchotchkies while opting-out of stupid fiat games.

Interesting, although I don't see why it's best to pay for energy as you consume it, rather than monthly 🧐 Same goes for beers etc.

imo micropayment models make sense in some cases but don't in many.

One way to think about this is to think about payments as commitments. The larger the payment, the larger the commitment, and the higher your certainty that you'll receive net value gain in the exchange.

So I think they make a lot of sense when our commitment may be low, but high enough that we're willing to pay something. eg Streaming payments for content from random creators makes sense, because I can bail out early and only pay for what I consume. But it doesn't make sense for something I know I'm going to 100% consume, like John Wick 4.

We all want the payment model that's the most efficient for our consumption strategy and efficiency isn't always one size fits all.

There was a wine bar in my college town that did this with prepaid cards and dispensing machines. It was novel but it didn't feel like a huge improvement iirc.

This makes sense imo.

So does this ... both of these are ordinarily trusted "afterpay" scenarios though which is kind of interesting.

Value 4 value is amazing and I'm sure the possibilities are endless but I'd speculate ways of paying like buy now pay later become a thing of the past.

I'm on the fence with the utility of streaming sats with existing services. I can see it being very useful - especially to people that consume little or are frugal. But for people that watch TV nightly, for example, it might be a better deal to pay a monthly fee. I see it a bit like a buffet - it's not totally worth it for a light eater but it might be a steal for someone that can pack it away.

I think something that'll be interesting to see is that directors/creators can make stuff and potentially bypass services like Netflix/Hulu/etc. If someone could make a TV show/movie and then get paid per minute streamed without needing to worry about merchant fees, user accounts, etc then that'd be interesting.

Of course, existing studios will have lots of money/power and will make a bunch of the big hits and those might stay on platforms like Disney/HBO/Netflix/etc but I could see artists trying to build a name for themselves.

In the far future maybe someone like Christopher Nolan directs an AI to make an epic movie or show. He then posts it to his nostr account and people stream sats to watch it (or just pay a flat rate up front).

I guess someone just has to make a decentralized video/music streaming protocol that streams sats to the authors and those hosting the files. One issue, though, is probably copyright/DRM. Christopher Nolan might not want to put a movie on this service if someone else can just copy it and sell it for cheaper.

I see a break down of subscription bundling eg instead of $10 a month for Netflix it'll be pay as you stream (eg per second). Creating products and content is getting easier everyday via AI so offerings will become more competitive to compete for scarce human time. In a competitive market for attention, prices tend to get driven down. In a sats driven world prices may be driven down to the smallest exchange rate (sats per joule, sats per second).

Then there's also programmable sat splitting that could change the cost structure of product/content offering which also allows pricing of smallest exchange rate to be more viable. A lot of pricing will be done in real time with live metrics like view time or user engagement. It's all just better, HD information that allows product offerers to be more competitive in their services and give a fairer price to consumers.