Before microtransactions, there was debt.
Every service - power, gas, water, software - required someone to go first. Either the user prepaid, and the provider carried the liability of owed service, or the provider fronted the cost, and the user carried owed money. That was the model. Always a ledger. Always a risk.
Because value couldn’t move fast enough.
Settlement took time. Minimums imposed by Visa, PayPal, Stripe. Transaction fees too large to justify anything smaller than a bill. So we made bills. We made accounts. We made user IDs. We made friction.
Now: we don’t have to.
A connected embedded system, hard-wired to a wallet. No account. No middleman. Just a connection. Lightning or eCash. Instant settlement. Micro to the point of indivisibility.
A kilowatt-hour? Sold per watt. Propane? Per cubic meter. Per fraction of a cubic meter, aligned to a thousandth of a satoshi - so even rounding errors vanish into the noise floor.
The device itself enforces payment. The wallet itself sets the budget. No invoice. No overdue. No data broker scraping your usage pattern to sell you back your own profile.
The user sets the cap: "Only pay for 80% of peak daily consumption. Never go over 50 cents per hour. Cut service if the wallet hits zero." Fine-grained control. Real limits. Automated enforcement. Budgeting becomes mechanical. Predictable. Cash-based.
This isn’t utopian. It’s executable.
No service rep. No billing system. No call center. Just a box on your wall that meters fuel and speaks Lightning.
For the provider: zero bad debt. Zero collections. Minimal fraud exposure. Hardware becomes the enforcement boundary.
For the user: no late fees. No lock-in. No overspend. Just the comfort you pay for, in exactly the amount you choose, no more.
The business model shifts. Debt gets deleted. Trust gets automated. Risk becomes a configuration setting.
And the whole system runs under your wallet’s authority - not theirs.