Whatever Happened to Micropayments?

prostoalex writes "Remember Flooz? Or Beenz? With a few notable successes (PayPal, and that's about it) online micropayment industry is saving its success stories for future generations. New York Times reports about two nascent micropayment systems, one coming out of Stanford, one out of MIT, that are supposed to help the content producers and Internet users to engage in less-than-a-dollar financial transactions without huge overhead costs, so typical of credit card payments. BitPass requires you to purchase a virtual debit card with a certain amount on it to pay for products and services, and PepperCoin consolidates numerous micropayments into one bill that is then split between the content providers that managed to sell their product to the Internet user." I still believe that single penny transactions will revolutionize the net.

Comments

Re:Missing the Obvious

[araven]

THANK YOU! It is obvious, and it's been a problem for a while now. Online transactions aren't the only problem. We have a plastic currency society now, paper money is all but obsolete (though IMHO there will always be a place for it). In order to function now, it is arguably necessary to have a credit or debit card, yet private companies control who can and can't have one, and on what terms. It's just the same as if one person could use a $20 bill free of charge because they're "good" at using money, but another person had to pay $1 out of every $20 to someone else because they're "bad" at using money, and then there's the person who simply isn't allowed to use money at all because he doesn't have much to start with and he's been very bad at using it correctly in the past!

Governments should absolutely be moving with the times and providing transaction-fee-free plastic money and online money. Currency should be as neutral and transparent as possible, in order to facilitate a smooth and efficient marketplace. We've always supported the overhead required to create and manage the paper money, we should do the same for modern currency.

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