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Suppose that your Napster engine has a built-in micropayments client. Not a "You must pay or we won't let you use this music" - no, that just invites piracy and totally screws things up. No, just something where a PGP-signed payment URL is encoded with the document.

Then your client displays a button which says "pay this artist" and you click it, select the amount, and the money is transferred.

As for the how, you would need either a digital currency, e-gold or a balance held on-line by the company, probably funded with a credit card interface.

Why not?

The guys at e-gold don't fuck up like this, except under hugely weird circumstances.

And when they do, they do right by you.

Wells Fargo... should!

nerds, Nerds, NERDS!!! All of these feeble-ass 'billPay' systems are based on the same feeble-ass stuff. Take three seconds to ask yourself one simple question: "What is a US dollar?" It is NOTHING. Backed by a promise to repay... a dollar. They might be loud-mouthed assholes with bad haircuts, but the dimwads at e-gold have been offering third-party bill payment services for ages. Every stinkin' Bob's Bank is offering online this and that. Dub... helllllOOOOOOOO!!?!?!?!?!?!!!!!!

I'll volunteer to supply a non-theoretical payment system option (no, not imagining ours would be the only one out there, but it works!). It's already possible to make sending e-mail cost something (only a proof of concept there, but it works!) and -- once again -- I'll click any Slashdot reader who asks me a small spot of e-gold to play with, so it's free (at first) and if you don't like it, you can ignore it. Last time nobody asked, but the offer is real.
JMR

Try a FREE account (no obligation, and we don't sell, trade, or give away information.)

Was this worth $.02? (Yep, this one works, too.)

(This is going to be unpopular, but) I agree. The judge (from the looks of things, I couldn't hit the ruling) is probably right for the wrong reason(s). Spam is an insoluble jurisdictional issue because Spam is an ECONOMIC issue. Many (not all!) in the anti-spam community might be described as a bit economics-challenged. This is not to poke fun at them, but just to say that follow-the-money applies when it comes to a group of lawyer-politicians proposing a nice-sounding anti-spam law (effectiveness be damned! It employs more lawyers!!!) just as when it comes to a spammer sending nasty ol' spam (and I agree, just about all people dislike UCE, including me).

The question becomes, what can be done that's actually effective? Plenty of laws can be written to sound good and they obviously don't work! (Disclaimer: Warning, the following is going to sound crass and commercial -- spam, if you will -- even though I'm about to offer to GIVE AWAY MONEY!! and I'm not imposing on anyone's e-mail bandwidth, so moderate me down and see if I care.)

Well, after last year's FC99 in Anguilla, and a number of conversations, we came up with The Flying Rat Project (the name comes from an old joke about never seeing baby pigeons, combined with the idea of pigeons carrying messages in ancient times). Yes, right now it only uses e-gold (that will change, this is a kludgy proof-of-concept, not what we have eventually planned) and yes, I dream about eventually making some money on the damthing (horrors! I'm not a lawyer who wants more laws just to make money for the chattering-class, I'm an evil-greedy-capitalist-Firengi-pig who wants there to be a market in e-mail and thinks that economics might -- just might -- work better than yet-another law!). Anyway, it works, and has for a while without much notice.

For now, I'll give anyone in the /. community who asks for it a bit of gold to try the concept out. (I've made this offer on Slashdot in the past, with surprisingly few takers, but now there's a casino and a lottery) so I expect better results. Think about it, with a "stamp" that pays you, you might not mind spam so much. If you keep a Flying Rat e-mail address secret and "blocked" it will never get unpaid spam. The Flying Rat software will be open source, AFAIK.

Thanks for listening, you can create an account Here (please choose a good passphrase and remember it!) and then just e-mail me the account number and I'll click you a bit. For free (but try to play around with Flying Rat some, before you gamble it away). Thanks.
JMR

Disclaimers:
1. I'm not a very political person anymore, and even back when I was I wouldn't have been much interested in Al Gore (or any Republicans).
2. I don't speak for my company, this is just me being curious.
3. This might be a better question to ask of the FEC than of you, keeping in mind that what backs certain alternative currencies might fluctuate in dollar value over time and that political contribution limits are denominated in dollars.
4. Right now, no alternative web currency, including ours, stores enough value to be of much interest to a political campaign, anyway.
5. I probably seem self-interested in posting this, so moderate me down -- see if I care. :)

How do you feel about the idea of accepting instantly settled payments of an alternative currency, say one denominated in grams of Au, Ag, Pt, or Pd? Note: we have account holders all over the world, and this brings up questions of identity-verification (just spend back to suspicious accounts, I guess) but those questions come up with the current system when a campaign encounters, for example, suspiciously-wealthy Buddhist monks. Do you think this is a possibility for the future.

I'll include my standard /. offer to show anyone who creates an account and sends me the number a small e-metal spend to show how the system works, just email me your account number and PLEASE remember your passphrase.

Anyway, I look forward to your answer. Thanks.
JMR

Check out E-Gold. You can trade in gold, electronically. You can use it, among other places, at the Anonymizer.com.

(Unable to resist a blatant, albeit tasteless, self promotion opportunity, Jim Ray steps up to the plate, fully clothed head-to-toe in Nomex.)

Create an e-gold account (you won't quite be a Doe, but we'll never sell or give away information on customers like credit card companies do). Do an InExchange to buy some of the e-metal of your choice. Do a spend to account number 102948. Wish they had an e-gold option on their page. (Wait, no, that's my department, sorry.) Tell EFF you spent to their account, and that they can either use their e-gold or go do an OutExchange and get a check.

Feel good about yourself. Find other ways to have fun with our currency. :) There are lots of other good causes with e-gold accounts who actually have implemented our shopping cart on their pages, for one thing, and I keep offering to click a spot of FREE e-gold to members of the /. community who simply ask me for some. So far, no takers...Oh well.
JMR

(Unable to resist a blatant, albeit tasteless, self promotion opportunity, Jim Ray steps up to the plate, fully clothed head-to-toe in Nomex.)

Create an e-gold account (you won't quite be a Doe, but we'll never sell or give away information on customers like credit card companies do). Do an InExchange to buy some of the e-metal of your choice. Do a spend to account number 102948. Wish they had an e-gold option on their page. (Wait, no, that's my department, sorry.) Tell EFF you spent to their account, and that they can either use their e-gold or go do an OutExchange and get a check.

Feel good about yourself. Find other ways to have fun with our currency. :) There are lots of other good causes with e-gold accounts who actually have implemented our shopping cart on their pages, for one thing, and I keep offering to click a spot of FREE e-gold to members of the /. community who simply ask me for some. So far, no takers...Oh well.
JMR

Exactly. The article mentioned that internet purchases are easily trackable since they're done with credit cards. Better dig through your Visa statements, NC folks. You get audited, they'll catch you. Now, if you were using e-gold or e-cash, it would be a different story...

Droplets(TM) is a capability environment for web based applications. Most of it is covered by the Mozilla license.

On the waterken.com site, you'll find a running demonstration application and tutorial, as well as a live shopping cart application for making purchases using e-gold.

The Droplets(TM) environment includes an open source interface to the e-gold Shopping Cart API, so that anyone can quickly setup a web storefront.

Confinity is a new interface to credit card transactions. As such, it suffers from the same old credit card problem: anyone who knows your credit card number can move money out of your account. This is a total show-stopper.

The best information-as-payment system i've seen was DigiCash. Unfortunately it doesnt look like that's going to be available in the near future.

The second best system is e-gold. It'd be straight-forward to write a PalmOS application that lets you "beam money" (in the sense of Confinity).

I offer $20 worth of e-gold to the author of such a program, provided it uses digitally signed contracts to avoid reputiation of beamed-but-not-synced payments.

Has anyone but me heard of e-gold? Has anyone used the service or is everyone doing what I'm doing... waiting until everyone else is using it?
--

E-Gold is an electronic precious metals broker with a twist. It's free to open an account. You can deposit money to them and it gets converted into Gold, Platinum, Paladium or Silver.


Users can perform or receive payments easily. They even have an online payment system, that you can use on your e-commerce site as a replacement or addition to credit cards. I use it and they're pretty cool. You can even use it to pay your bills, where they convert it into a check and mail it for you.


Their URL is http://www.e-gold.com/. I can definitely recommend it.
-Pelle