Ron Rivest Suggests Probability-Based Micropayments

Karl J. Smith writes "Rivest has solved the micropayments problem with encryption and statistics. You throw away some transactions so that you don't have to pay bank fees, and process the rest. Hiawatha Bray has written an article and Rivest's new company is PepperCoin."

Comments

Cool !

[RyoSaeba]

That's cool, it'll be a new way for a company to justify high losses: 'no sir, our product isn't crap, we are selling many many; we just are unlucky with Peppercoin, only getting useless tokens...'

What about the bill?

[warrior_on_the_edge_]

Micropayments are ok

But what we REALLY need are micro bills

Re:EEtimes has a slightly better clarification

[MadKeithV]

Quote: "Just my $0.02US"

Is that in peppercoins, or real payment?

Re:that's exactly my question too

[tevman]

especially most (ALL?) financial software rounds to the cent.

and it just throws the rest away... so we take these fractions of a cent and have it deposit to a bank account... its like superman 3

hot women

[frostman]

what's up with all the hot women on the peppercoin page? it's like i'm supposed to be able to buy them with peppercoins.

you mean like this one?

or a little buddha-devil maybe?

i get the feeling both merchants and consumers are going to root around in the hype for a while and then just turn their backs on this.

slashdotters will hate them anyway because they obviously use windows in the office.

Re:My understanding...

[cr@ckwhore]

I make an assortment of purchases.. PepperCoin keeps an account with me and pings my CC with the total aggregate sum of my purchases through them on a monthly basis

[root@computer root]# ping 4533 7648 6632 7812 exp 12/04
5 cents from 4533.7648.6632.7812 (exp 12/04): icmp seq=1 ttl=51 balance=78.13
5 cents from 4533.7648.6632.7812 (exp 12/04): icmp seq=2 ttl=51 balance=78.18
5 cents from 4533.7648.6632.7812 (exp 12/04): icmp seq=3 ttl=51 balance=78.23
5 cents from 4533.7648.6632.7812 (exp 12/04): icmp seq=4 ttl=51 balance=78.28
^c

Why stop with randomizing individual transactions?

[ccady]

Why stop with randomizing individual transactions?

Why not just randomize *all* payments for a particular supplier? Either they get paid by Peppercoin that month, or not. Better yet, Peppercoin can randomize their entire set of payments. Either: "Hooray! Peppercoin paid all its bills this year!" or "Sorry. We went bankrupt."

Until I see otherwise, I expect the latter.