Micropayments Revisited

Micropayments Revisited

Peppercoin Micropayments

We present the “Peppercoin” method for processing micropayments efficiently. With this method, a fraction of the micropayments received are determined, via a procedure known as “cryptographic selection,” to qualify for upgrade to a macropayment. The merchant deposits the upgraded micropayments as macropayments, and merely logs locally the non-qualifying micropayments. In this manner, the mercha...

On the Synergy Between Certificate Verification Trees and PayTree-like Micropayments

A substantial number of micropayment schemes in the literature are based on distributing the cost of a digital signature over several successive micropayments (e.g. Payword). Thus, a stable relationship between user and merchant is assumed: the micropayments validated by the same signature must take place between the same user and merchant. This stability is ill-suited for surfing on the web, a...

A Set of Protocols for Micropayments in Distributed Systems

Micropayments refer to low-value nancial transactions ranging from several pennies to a few dollars. A big portion of electronic commerce occurring in the Internet belong to the category of micropay-ments. The cost of micropayments should be kept as low as possible in order for the service provider (the merchant) to proot from the low-value transactions. We propose several protocols for micropa...

The Case Against Micropayments

Micropayments are likely to continue disappointing their advocates. They are an interesting technology. However, there are many non-technological reasons why they will take far longer than is generally expected to be widely used, and most probably will play only a minor role in the economy.