It's much more difficult - if not impossible - with credit cards. With CCs you need to trust the receiver to not steal your cc details, and you have a chargeback risk.

Say you created an API that takes users' data and stores it on S3. Some random user then comes, pays you $10k to store his data, but a week later does a chargeback. You're left to pay the costs to AWS.

Finally, with CCs you need to strike deals with payment processors like Braintree. If you're a private developer it will be impossible. But even as a company - payment processors are not ready to process payments via command line. They will ask you where your terms of service are, what's your website, what's your refund policy and so on.

The corollary is that you consume an API that charges you Bitcoin. You don't notice right away, but something goes wrong, and API returns bad or null data for thousands of requests, meanwhile you are still micropaying Bitcoin. You ask for a refund, but the company running the API doesn't respond to your emails.

The threat of chargebacks disciplines the market to provide reasonable customer service.

This is why we'll be using ACs to pay for things. Load up an autonomous corporation with $5, make its job paying for API calls. If something goes South, it's last job is to pay an alert mechanism that triggers a human response.

These models turn existing models on their heads, so be aware of other pitfalls. Productive paranoia is good, but only practice it after you innovate first.

The short answer is: No. I don't see how Bitcoin fits into IoT. We are working on the exact same usecase at IOTA (http://iotatoken.com), only our solution is scalable, lightweight and most importantly: there are no transaction fees.

If you have some reference code for IOTA, I'd like to see it. I'm firmly against any type of closed source Infrastructure code, so I'm hoping that's the plan here. I would also mention that we're not QUITE there yet with this stuff, so over engineering solutions to be scalable to trillions of devices is probably overkill. Giving a simple IOT device a small wallet to pay for its infrequent API calls is probably doable with Bitcoin, even with transaction costs. For other use cases, I can envision proxy devices with keys that represent the smaller, low power, frequent transmissions.

Any cryptocurrency will do, but it obviously requires the customer be wired up to send you the transactions. I have several models kicking around in my head for when we're going to need it. You may want to check out Bitcoin's microtransaction support. As you mention below, Ethereum may be a good candidate for this as well, given it can auto post transactions at a certain date.

What else would it use? USD doesn't have it's own online transaction rails. You need a 3rd party to do that. Which requires a boatload of arbitrary fees.

Not sure -- I was asking in earnest (although competing cc's like ethereum come to mind). Just wondering if there is not a way to hook up payments to APIs using existing infrastructure and currencies.