Slashdot Mirror
The March Towards Micropayments
MattW writes "It's been well over a year since Ron Rivest's company Peppercoin was introduced on Slashdot. Now, the AP is reporting that Peppercoin 2.0 is here. Peppercoin's website indicates that version 2.0 pays merchants exactly what they charged, instead of with cryptographically signed tokens which may or may not sum out to exactly the expected charges. This looks like the technology that will enable credit card acceptance in vending machines and video games, but may not solve the need for truly "micro" payments, like paying $.005 for a page view."
The biggest obstacle to using credit cards for micropayments is the cost of transaction processing
I wonder if the folks at Microsoft are considering Passport as a micropayment vehicle for subscription-based websites? Micropayments lower the threshold and do not require a big decision before users get their initial benefits: thus users will be encouraged to view more pages and spend more. Of course, there will almost certainly be discount schemes for frequent users of a site such that nobody would end up paying more than they would under a subscription plan.
Also, although a closed initative, the W3C Micropayments Working Group provides some interesting info.
Sigs cause cancer.
I'll pay you $0.0002 to think up a more clever reply than this!
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
..will be big money rather than chump change.
Seriously, pay-per-vid might be something that could take hold.
Plus, a click is one thing, but when someone PAYS for a clickthrough to watch, then the tracking can be better recorded.
Don't we usualy see the Pr0n ind. testing out stuff like this early on anywayz?
Might happen..
the first post guys will go bankrupt!
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
The acceptance, or maturity, of a technology can not occur without there being a desire or perceived need for it by the consumer. If there is no need, infinite supply (as is theoretically possible with such a thing as digital services) is meaningless, as people will still not use it.
.01 or so for every slashdot article which someone gets before the rush/premium members.
That said: what's the desire, or demand, for micropayments in general? I can see how they would appeal for use in vending machines or game payments, but for per-view payments online?
The largest, and potentially only, source of income I can see for such a product would be through the porn industry. That way they might be able to more easily be able to meter out their 'service' in a commodity type fashion: "You 'used' X megs, so we charged you for that much" - as opposed to the blank service fee model, where the customer might frequently cancel the $5/month subscription, as "they didn't use it" *cough* and there'd be little/no incentive to pay for it.
Personally, I would stop going to most sites I currently visit if I had to pay for them. I already pay for internet access; why would I want to, or should I have to, pay for something which is currently free? "Premium" service on sites, however, might benefit - it would be easier to do a per-view billing model, again. For instance, on slashdot: charge $
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Micropayment, macropayment, blah, blah, blah. Some things are worth paying for, others are not. Until and unless MC and Visa get into the act, these things are unlikely to bear much fruit. Some, yes. Enough to get all giddy about? Hardly.
What is the problem this is trying to solve? Why not group together (as a somewhat poor example) all of the OSDN content sites. You then pay, say, $5 for a certain number of page views across the entire spectrum. Each view is tallied and attributed to the appropriate site. Similarly, you can have organizations of news publications, technical publications (I'm thinking game and/or computer mags), entertainment of various sorts.
Look, as always, the porn industry is ahead of the game. Get one of those memberships to twenty different sites. They don't bill you by the page view, they let you hit all the sites. Look, if porn ain't looking at it, it's not going to work.
Finally, who the hell wants to type in a 16 digit credit card number, 4+ digit expiration, name, address, etc, etc, to view a web comic?
Oh, you can just buy 'points' and redeem them at various sites? What's flooz.com up to these days?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I don't think will work on a grand scale. It's technically feasable and probably would work great if everyone's mind-set was different. However, I think most people will instantly find them annoying and feel they are being "nickeled and dimed". I would rather sign up for an unlimited service on a monthly charge than a micro-payment based system. Even if under micro-payments I would spend say $3 - $5 / mo and unlimited would be $10-$15. Then I wouldn't feel the need to be jewish with what I'm doing and could do it at my leasure.
I'm wondering if this psychological aspect has been concidered or not.
Ah, which ignores the two biggest obstacles to using micropayments:
a)People HATE getting nickled and dimed- hence the very origin of the term!
b)For websites and the like, people will simply seek out free content which is available in quantity. Bob starts charging micropayments for his webcomic. Bob witnesses most of his readers disappearing into the woodwork. Jane, Sally, and Joe notice little bumps in their traffic logs.
People just can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that some stuff just isn't considered by the public worth paying for, at any price.
Oh, not to mention, the micropayment guys seem to like charging as much or more than the credit card companies, the money is not very accessible, and so on.
Please help metamoderate.
...the obligitory "Office Space" quotes amount micropayments.
i could see this working if prepaid low limit debit cards became common. I would love to use prepaid $100 cards to pay for stuff online just for the added safty. You can't have your credit rating messed with if your not risking it. Plus it would make micropayments not a big deal. You could keep a $10 or $20 card handy just for that purpose.
Many gambling websites such as http://www.onlinegambling.com/ and http://www.partypoker.com/ allow users to gamble using credit and debit cards. They also provide other methods of payment such as paypal - which uses a savings/checking/credit card account anyways. The online gambling industry is thriving.
I think micropayments would work very well for people who want to download music, do research, or gain the benefits of some other inexpensive transaction.
http://tomgould.com/
My boss has talked a bit about trying to find a way to make some small amounts of money coming in constantly through micro payments... the only problem is, what could you truely market to make people pay micropayments for?
When I go to a site and they want me to pay to see content, even if a small amount, I always go elsewhere because (a)I font want to go through a hassle of paying to see a damn site and (b) I doubt right away that whatever lies within isn't worth my dollars.
One idea my boss had was perhaps people could come to a site and find a simular question they have, and pay to see the answer. I also fail to see how this would work either, as a little googling usually reveals the answer to any technical question I have. I dunno though, seems alot of people are always asking questions on irc without even trying google.... like they say:
"Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but tell him to RTFM and he'll keep asking questions!"
Clay Shirky makes a strong case why micropayments haven't taken off, and probably won't in the forseeable future. In short, the difference between "free" and "only $0.005" is much larger than only half a cent - it's a change in the mindset of the reader. The article also references more academic papers describing the weaknesses of micropayments.
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
This will put a whole new spin on Nigerian email scams! I can't wait!
Do we really want to go towards a cashless society. I agree this micropayment system is far from it but this system will lead to the owners of VISA to have an awesome amount of power. Imagine , what would happen in a cahsless society where Visa get a percent of every transaction taking place.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
but wouldn't a micropayment be something like $0.0000001 per page view.
There are three parties to a micropayment transaction:
- The party receiving the money.
- The bank, credit card company, or other intermediate party facilitating the transaction.
- The party paying the money.
The way it works is relatively simple. Party 3 does something which requires a micropayment. This could be $1.00, $0.10, or $0.001. Either way, the procedure is the same:When the transaction takes place, a record goes into a database on Party 1's side, showing that a certain amount is expected to be collected. Party 1 would only have to keep track of the total amount it expects to collect from each Party 2 it uses to facilitate transactions. Therefore, it would not take tremendous resources on Party 1's part to keep track of an enormous number of tiny transactions. If Party 1 uses 4 different Party 2 providers, it would only have to keep track of those 4 numbers. Party 1 could elect to keep track of each individual transaction for real-time management purposes, but this would take tremendous resources and expenses.
Two records go into a database on Party 2's side. The first shows that an amount is being collected from a certain Party 3. The second shows that an amount is being paid to a certain Party 1. Because Party 2 facilitates the transaction, it does business with many Party 1's and many Party 3's, so each of these two records would point to the other for reporting purposes. Party 2 would need an enormous storage system and enterprise class databases to keep track of this information. Also, the database would need to organize the information hierarchically so that Party 1 or Party 3 could log in and see a list of all transactions they are paying or receiving, and to/from whom. Party 1 and Party 3 would need to trust Party 2, but micropayments are small, so the risk of error is in the 10's of dollars.
Party 3 could receive an electronic statement of total amounts paid to each Party 1 with whom Party 3 did business. This would probably cost extra, so Party 3 could elect to receive a cumulative total for all transactions less than a certain amount, say, $0.10, and individual records for all transactions above that value.
Finally, here are the mechanics of the micropayments: Party 3 sets up a maximum amount of micropayments being made in any period of time before a special notification occurs to authorize additional micropayments. Suppose this amount is $30.00 in any 30 day period. Immediately, Party 2 would receive the $30.00 through an electronic transfer from Party 3's bank account or credit card. These $30.00 go into a huge pot of all money Party 2 is holding on deposit from all Party 3's. As time goes by, Party 3 does things that cause transactions to take place. Party 2 knows the total amount it, Party 2, not Party 3, owes to each Party 1, and the total amount still on deposit by each Party 3. These two values are kept track of separately. When the amount owed to a Party 1 exceeds a certain value, say, $100.00, or whatever Party 2 decides based on the level of service Party 1 elects, that amount is electronically transferred from Party 2's big pot to Party 1's bank account. When a micropayment transaction takes place, essentially only two things happen: A numeric value is incremented in each Party 1's account, and decremented in each Party 3's account.
Party 3 does not pay anything for these services. Party 1 may or may not pay depending on the terms of its agreement with Party 2. Party 2 makes a profit by earning interest on the $30.00 that it is holding in advance, and the $100.00 that it does not pay until that amount is reached.
suppose you haver been making micropayments on your credit card adding to $xxx.xx5 , then pay the credit card bill w/your bank account, then want to withdraw your complete bank account in cash. Does the bank round up; there by taking a loss, round down; cheating you, or slice a penny in 1/2?
The problem with micropayments is the "micro". Payments are payments.
I consult for an organization with a billing system that sends out bills for as little as $0.01 and as much as $5-6 million for a quarter. If the app supported it, they could probaly bill to the tenth of a penny if need be. The system doesn't care.
The only difference between MasterCard and a micropayment system is scale and profit. Given a scalable global system, an transaction is a transaction. Each transaction has a distinct cost associated with it, which is really not relevant to the value of the transaction. The cost of a $15,000 transaction is nearly the same as a $0.015 transaction.
And therein lies the problem. In order to make micropayments affordable, you need to drop highly profitable fees on small transactions... plus your customers will start to question your high fees on larger transactions.
The banking system makes far too much on "macropayments" to scuttle the whole thing to accomodate small payments.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
From the article: The cost reduction is possible, he said, because of a patent-pending method of lumping together individual transactions into one transaction to reduce the cost to the merchant.
Are they applying for a patent for adding several numbers together? I have prior art! Specifically, I added several numbers together while in Rivest's class! (Did he steal this from me?)
Paying doesn't necessarily mean "transfer of money", it can also mean giving some content back. YMMV.
Micropayments = Microvisits
I'm sorry but if your business strategy requires collecting $0.005 per page visit you don't have a business strategy. Sure $0.005 is nothing but in order to play that you have to register, log in, etc... I'd rather spend those few seconds finding an alternative free site or if that doesn't exist flat out stealing your content from whatever on easily found source is hosting it. It's the principle of it. Offer something of real value and people will pay for it. Do nothing and try to skim off as much as possible without people noticing.. don't expect me to blink as I shoot that one down.
Whose need? Certainly not mine. Most web pages I visit should be glad they got a hit, much less my nickel. Say goodbye to "surfing" when everyone realizes they can charge-- I'm not going to pay to browse unknown sites.
Something else that hasn't been mentioned, you can also say goodbye to any semblance of anonymity when your credit card company keeps an enormous tally of every page you paid five cents to visit. And of course, they won't use that info. for market research, will they?
Then I wouldn't feel the need to be jewish with what I'm doing and could do it at my leasure.
What does being of a Jew or their culture or religion have to do with being niggardly? No wonder you posted AC.
But BOY, if the spammers had to pay two cents (or even $0.0002 as a previous poster mentioned) per Email, that would sure get rid of a LOT of crap we see in our mailboxes.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Obligatory Penny Arcade Link
Do not read this sig.
I agree, but I deal with people every day that have trouble turning on a computer and using basic e-mail, let alone trying to figure out some crazy new fangled micro payment system in addition to outlook.
Or god forbid... several competing crazy micro payment systems specifically designed for e-mail. I just don't think the Joe user demographic is anywhere near ready for this.
But if you could come up with something that's as widely used and accepted as Paypal, you might be on to something. Otherwise, you're just asking for Tzurus, brother.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
searching for fixes to a problem is frustrating if you can't find it quickly. If it's already there to find, then that's that, you can't charge for it, micropayment or not.
BUT, searching for a fix, not finding it, but finding a place that will provide a solution to a problem, by them getting paid micropayments for it, to actually come up with a solution, just might work. Basically a variation on the bounty system. Or shareware in advance.
Anyone know how well slashdot does with micropayments?
http://www.windmeadow.com/
If you think your content isn't worth changing a worthwhile amount of money ($1.00 or more) for then you should just put up ads (AdSense). Or if you just don't want to charge visitors for access. Nothing is worth the hassle of doing an electronic transaction for a few pennies. Google AdSense is built for doing very small transactions and it requires no work on the visitors part except to be interested enough in an ad to click thru.
I'm not going to go to a web-site and whip out my credit card just to spend a few pennies. The effort isn't worth the "reward." But if an ad is interesting enough and the site isn't vomiting ads in my face I won't hesitate to click on the ad. They get their "micropayment" with no hassle on anybody's part.
Content owners need to take a hint from Costco et al and sell in bulk. Digital Blasphemy charges for access to some of their new material and access to the archive.
Charging per comic or per page is just silly. Would you pay a penny for a single page out of a book? Have the most recent X days of strips free and charge for access to older strips. That gives visitors the ability to get a good idea if your work is of any quality and the fans the ability to support the author in a reasonable fashion.
Someone needs to take this micopayment horse out to pasture and put it out of its misery. The only people making money on this scheme are the people who come up with these cheesy products that alledgedly handle micropayments.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
I can't believe they patented this.
I think that parts of Amazon's loathesome "1-click" ordering is actually prior art. If you have 1-click turned on, it will not process your order for a couple of minutes. This allows you to order several items - one after the other - and they will be combined into a single order. This way you only pay for credit card overhead and shipping on the entire order (and not for overhead & shipping on each individual item).
I think the 1-click patent is absolutely worthless in the first place - a patent on combining transactions, doubly so.
Other uses for the method are in network transactions - specifically Doom 1.0 -> Doom 1.1 update back in 1992 (or 1993?). Doom 1.0 sent tiny packets (sometimes one packet per *bullet*) and was known for choking networks because of the overhead. The update combined tiny packets into larger ones so that the overhead was less. This is a logically identical technique, just applied to data rather than money.
Don't you have enough decisions to make in your life? Have you tried to buy toothpaste recently? How many options do you need before the cost of evaluating all those options exceeds the benefit of the best solution?
Micropayments force me to make another decision every time. It may not be a lot of money, but its another decision.
Not for me.
As much as I like it, I also fear it. I fear the end to the vast amount of free resources the internet has to provide. Yes I'd be great to be able to easily tip and contribute to projects and good resources ... but, what will a day of surfing cost when everyone is asking for $0.25 ?
... If it catches on to any extent they will be there to dominate it..
Lets hope this can cut into the Visa / Mastercard Manopoly???
Yahh right
Security Cameras
Gamblers Forum
The cost reduction is possible, he said, because of a patent-pending method of lumping together individual transactions into one transaction to reduce the cost to the merchant.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't iTunes Music Store already do this? I've sometimes bought a song and then bought another one a day later and had them show up on the same invoice (and the same resulting credit card charge). Doesn't seem like a big innovation... and doesn't Amazon do the same thing with 1-Click also? (which Apple licensed) So now we could have two companies with silly useless patents for pretty much the same thing - with any luck they'll spend millions in litigation and end up appropriately punished for their patent-mongering.
I don't see how useful this would be in arcades anyway - most of the newer ones (Jillian's, Gameworks, et al) already have their own micropayment systems in the form of stored-value cards. Maybe in free-standing video games, but those are getting less and less common these days, and your neighborhood pizza parlor isn't going to have room for a cockpit-sized racing simulator anyway (or even a DDR game for that matter) - nobody's paying $1 to play a round of retro Pac-Man these days.
"The cost reduction is possible, he said, because of a patent-pending method of lumping together individual transactions into one transaction to reduce the cost to the merchant."
How in the world is that patentable? Apple has been doing that with iTunes since the beginning. Google also doesn't handout checks for AdSense until you have $100.00 or more accumulated.
People have also mentioned Wal-Mart dropping a charge from their credit card because it was such a small amount that lingered for too long.
This company is patenting something companies have done for a very long time and then calling their product 2.0. Pretending this is going to translate from video games (anyone who's worked or played in an arcade knows how fast quarters fly completely obvlivious to how much has been spent) to the web is just ignorant. Nobody is going to be sitting on a web-site dropping "quarters" for hours. There's not enough "excitement" to distract visitors from how much they're spending.
It's a whole different paradigm from playing games at an arcade.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Basically two memes need to be injected into the mainstream psyche before we can win the hearts and minds of the interwank surfer:
Meme 1) A marketing scheme needs to be formulated wherein persons utilizing micropayments are portrayed as being young, fit, sexually active and desirable. At the same time, persons outside this class (fat/ugly/old/antisocial etc) should be portrayed as against the micropayment paradigm.
Meme 2) Any resistence encountered to Meme 1 (above), or against the micropayment infrastructure in general, should be dealt with by establishing another marketing scheme in which those persons against micropayments are linked to terrorism, or perhaps in some other way portrayed as unamerican--against "family values", an atheist or homosexual, etc.
Careful application of these memes will insure the success of the micropayment infrastructure. Such a strategy has worked countless times in the past to promote ideas that seemed undesirable at the outset.
One of the reasons that "tokens" for micropayments are unpopular is the same reason that everyone hates those coupons you have to buy when you go to the local fair. You know, every vendor takes only coupons, so if you want to eat, drink, ride a ride, take a crap, or do anything, you've gotta buy a coupon.
But think about the business model of these coupons: people buy a large chunk of them (more than they acually need, so they won't have to go back and get more), and then don't spend all of their tickets. However, you paid for $20 in tickets, and only bought $15 in food, so they've already raked in $5 without any spending but for cheap coupons.
However, fairs and the internet are two totally different venues. At a fair, there is a monopoly run by the owners, and you can't exactly warez some popcorn off of bittorrent. The internet allows for alternatives. For example, if the NYTimes decided to require microcash payments instead of microsoul payments, I'm pretty sure that slashdot and other similar sites will be devoid of links to the NYTimes site. This is survivable because we have things called mirrors and caches.
...would I pay to look at websites when ... I'm already paying to look at websites?
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
This looks like the technology that will enable credit card acceptance in vending machines and video games
Erm, MMORPG mean anything to you? There are several that already use in game payments, such as Project Entropia
If the idea of selling ringtones had been posted here on Slashdot, I am pretty sure we would hear the same arguments : "won't work, no one will pay money for something like this"
Selling ringtones has turned into a multi-million dollar market.
The Internet as most of us have come to know it, is constantly changing (big news). So do our consuming habbits (really now?). After all, we are creatures subjected to evolution.
While the aeroplan was being invented, the common person had the same argumentation: who will want to fly?
Or befor cable was introduced, many of the common folk suggested, it would be impossible to get consumers to pay for something, they are already getting for free.
I am not willing to subscribe to a site, though I would be willing to pay to view certain articles/content. Now not every article will be worth while to pay for, and this is the point where a business plan comes in. Enough said....
I hate when I get those stuck in my teeth!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think we are missing an important way that Micropayments can be used.
The user can Earn money though Micropayments as well as spend.
Example:
Lets say you are a Meteorological organisation and you would like to get finer granularity of your barometric readings. You sell a mini weather station to a user, and the software provided captures the weather data for their location and uploads it to the Meteorlogical Bureau. The user earns Microcredits for this, cheaper than putting in your own weather stations.
I think Microcredits can be used both ways.
You can be paid for Rendering Images for a movie, performing 'Human Only' tasks for other companies, and have web sites that list all the things you can do to earn Microcredits.
Why can't I get paid in Microcredits to fold Protien Molecules for some Research Lab...
I perfer to deal in Cash (A goes to B, B is happy, A takes away goods, all sorted), rather then have a credit card and mess around with intrest and all that bollocks.
Does this mean I cannot view my websites now? Business today does not want to accept that it takes 1p to earn 2p, when you start to try and cut costs that much you start to piss people off and they turn their backs so you get nothing.
All I hear now is "The internet is dangerous" or "It's all porn" and I'm starting to wish it was because then idiots who come up with stupid ideas to make money (Spammers, pop up users etc.) would fuck off and leave us alone to have our peaceful society of nerds, cross dressing men and crappy sprite comic arists.
I like muppets.
Suppose I'm charged $0.005 per pageview.
It's not inconcievable I could be charged a dollar a day, $365 per year. Can I afford that? And how about the stuff which charges whole cents per pageview, such as maybe news sites?
People recognize instinctively that small stuff adds up, and that small stuff for which you can't easily do the math in your head will wind up biting you.
This is why micropayments are DOA.
look at their webpage and their cute diagrams. one look is enough to tell me this is pure bs.
please.
"hey look we have mission critical vortals!"
In order to view this site, you must be running Some Crappy Plugin so we can steal money from you for reading. Yeah.. this is going to catch on.
I'll just go elsewhere if sites ever start requiring this.
Peppercoin's website indicates that version 2.0 pays merchants exactly what they charged, instead of [...] which may or may not sum out to exactly the expected charges.
NEWSFLASH: New payment method actually pays the charged amount!
How on God's green earth can this be news? Much less, how can this be presented as revolutionary and patentable?
Exactly what are these people smoking?
Did I suddenly wake up in 1999 without anyone telling me?
When micropayment is here, what will happen to proxies?
Call me up when he can get credit cards to work with drug dealers and prositutes.
Open Source Sushi
FOr micropayment to gain wide acceptance, there needs to be an integration within the browsers. I researched that for a while because my website has some value but not enough to warrant pulling a CC out. Imagine if you get to a site and you have a little icon on your task bar that start flashing a bit for attention. You pass your mouse above and it asks: "do you agree to pay 0.005$ per page while you visit this site ?" With an optional cgi being called back on the site in case you aswer yes. And somewhere within the browser options lie the CC reference (or paypal or whatever). It would make it convenient to use, which is the main things missing from all current micropayment choices. The time it takes to enter registation, value, references, etc... is not worth 0.005$.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
A system similar to this is already operation in six countries. It is called Fundamo, and was originally developed for mobile payments across the GSM network. The architecture, and an implementation, developed by Fundamo are licensed to network operators who partner with banks to offer this service on their networks. The company was founded in 1999 in South Africa, is backed by two of the biggest financial institutes on the continent, and has numerous patents to its name. Its system will be rolled out in another six countries this year, under various brand names. See www.fundamo.com.
(Yet another, as if there weren't enough already, reason why micropayments won't ever catch on. Much to the chagrin of content providers.)
sulli
RTFJ.
It seems like micropayments are a solution looking for a problem. Others have gone over the difficulties (mostly PR) that Rivest has; let's step back and take a look at why micropayments are meant to be exciting.
The idea, essentially, is that it allows people to make money off of their content in a new fashion. Instead of advertising or subscription, people pay, per use, to get content ad-free.
The web comics world is all very excited about this. Imagine! Cover your bandwidth and make money just for your art! No need to build a subscriber base for print copies, no need to get big enough to be ad-supported, no need to whore out on the side. Instead, get everyone to pay a tenth of a cent every time they want to read your page. Or maybe five cents for your monthly magnus opus.
Does this ever happen in the real world? When was the last time you paid five cents for anything other than a stick of gum from the General Store? Newspapers are the closest you get, but they are mostly ad-supported anyway, and your 75 cents is not coming close to defraying the cost of production. Perhaps giving money to buskers, but it's hard to imagine people would feel the same way about tossing a quarter to some anonymous fancy webmaster that they do about giving the same to some ragged hipster they see every day.
Meanwhile, except for a few self-promoters who also handily want you to deposit $10 in their micropayment system, web comic people are going with the old -- and apparently very function -- methods. They get advertising banners, they promote their hard copies, they do promotional work. Comics not big enough to hit this put up a paypal donation button, sell t-shirts, &c to the hard core fans who want to feel like they're supporting a cool indie artist. Meanwhile, musicians go out and give concerts; their mp3s and even their hard copy albums are mostly around to draw people in to hear a live performance.
So what is the big deal? It's an interesting intellectual problem, and this is a clever solution, but the idea of making scads of cash off of it -- and revolutionising internet content distribution -- seems to me to be a lot of hype, and something only those totally out of touch with how the various "worlds" of content have already solved this problem.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
When web pages start changing you micropayments to use them, we'll start to see, (for example):
... on bittorrent and other p2p.
2004-06-29-slashdot.org.rar
graspee
Why do people have to waste so much time and
energy on building "micropayment systems"
($0.005 for page reads, come on!) and other
such garbage? This obsession with money has
gotten way out of hand. Why can't people put
more time and energy into actualy creating things
to better mankind than fuguring out new ways
to funnel more money into rich people's pockets?
Mod this down as a troll if you want, but I'm
fed up and sick of this increasingly one
dimentional society of ours.
...just imagine easy (micro-)payment for the average user by a click of a button - of the internet explorer!
I am almost certain you work for one of those shitty companies rushing to catch the last gold of the Fools Rush.
/. , any more and I would not be bothered.
Ringtones companies sell you a very specific thing: a ring tone for your damn annoying mobile phone.
What is a website selling you? Pageviews? What is a pageview? How can make sure I am billed failry?
In short I can't, and it would take only a few unescrupulous indivicuals to milk the uncertainity about this for all what is worth.
Do people publicizing website want to charge for it? Then go ahead, but bill me something I can understand.
I would gladly pay $1 or $2 a year for accessing
If you have 1000 loyal fans, that would pay the operation costs of a site serving such user population (shared hosting or very cheap colocated one).
If you have 100000 users or more (like this site) colour me stupid but 100000 bucks a year seem like something reasonable.
But no, websites owners wnat to charge 5, 10, 15 a year for their services (I just can imagine the beancounters faces: what??? 1 buck a year? Are you mad?).
Actually it should be more like 0.99 a year to make marketoid types happy...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Try something on the order of $0.000005. There, that's now acceptable.
By using a terrible word many, many times, its meaning is somewhat trivialized. Witness "Motherfucker".
Anyway, that slur is not completely without merit either. WASPs tend to be a bit hipocritical, jews tend to be good with money, blacks like to think of themselves as victims (sometimes rightly so) - at least in my limited experience and many hours of indocrination by the entertainment industry.
Why not be a bit honest and say that some stereotypes hold merit, but not on a personal scale?
Stop the brainwash
A lot of people here are complaining about paying for something being too much of a hassle. Indeed, I don't think micropayments are going to work if they require user interaction. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Consider phone charges work. You pick up the phone, dial the number, and you can talk as long as you want. The bill is calculated and sent automagically.
There is no reason micropayments couldn't work the same way. You get to use the web exactly like you do now, except that you don't have to log in for pay sites, but the money is automatically charged to your account when you use them.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The reason they can do this is not because of their system, its because they are in near full compliance with the credit card companies security policies.
The per transaction rate for a credit card purchase isnt just a set in stone fee for each merchant, it is determined by the merchants compliance with the policies set forth by the credit card companies themselves.
Basically, in being in full compliance with the regulations, the per transaction fee can basically be cut to such low levels. Peppercoin itself is just a transaction house that sits in between the merchant and the bank. What they are providing is just a system that allows full or near full compliance, so therefore the transaction fees are next to nothing.
For example, the company Shift4 Inc Is a processor that forces competition between banks for fees, and enables customers to sustain a transaction rate at about $.06 plus 2-10% per authorization. They can do this because they are fully compliant with all security procedures/systems the CC companies require, and each of their merchants are as well.
If you want more information about how this works, or you will be attending defcon...check out my partner and I's talk this year. Info can be found at hackajar.com
Speaking at Defcon 12 - Credit Card Networks Revisted: Pen
$.005 is not a micropayment, it's a millipayment!
I'm not familiar with the details of micropayments, but it occurs to me if you cannot charge somebody $0.005 cents, can you shift to another currency where their smallest unit is approximately equal to $0.005?
Surely $0.005 would be a milli-paymentsince it is 5 thousandths of a dollar. An example of a "true" micropayment would be 5 x 10^-6 dollars? Yeah, I know I take things too literally. What you gonna do?
Paying for individual page views scares me.
I think everything should be 'free', or do the animals and insects have to pay a toll for crossing the road.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Micropayments to view web content will not work. The thing is, how would you know that something is worth paying for until you have read it???
The future is here now. Slashdot and PocketPC Thoughts and any others have ads. When you subscribe, these ads can be turned of is you so desire and you also get extra benefits. This is the way to run your site. I don't know how succesful somesites are, but PocketPC Thoughts had a bigger response then most did. One other thing that PPCT did was make mobile posting available to their subscribers as well. They also added a new subscriber widget which you can turn on or off to show your support to the site. It's been pretty cool. Do you loose functionality when the subscription goes away? Some, but the basics are still there. This makes it possible to fly a month or so with out the subscriprion and still be able to read it and post it. Provide extras that cost you nothing and people will pay. SLashdot has done this as well. Micropayments will be unsuccessful because most people don't want to have the same thing they have on their cellphone as they do on their internet connection. They are already sick and tired of being nickeled and dimed to death on their cellphones. Ask the local pots telephone companies how many people have unlimited local calls? I would say about 90 percent of them do.
Gorkman
But the half-penny isn't what the parent poster is saying the problem is. The problem is that to charge the half-penny, the user is going to have to register, set up an account, and log in. Today, when I come across a site that requires _free_ registration, I usually give up and look somewhere else. It's not a money or privacy concern; it's just that it's not worth my time to register, and keep track of another username and password. (No, I don't think Passport-like centralized registration is the way to go, either...)
I would prefer a semi-universal tipping system based on micropayments. I hate subscriptions and have only subscribed to maybe one or two sites and I would hate to think that everytime I visit or refresh a page, I'm being charged for it.
But, if I read a good article or blog post, or find a really useful website, or even a funny or creative one, I would definitely use a service that allowed me to tip.
There are problems with this, of course. The big one being that unless everyone agreed to use the same tipping system, then there would be chaos and users and content providers would have to subscribe (aargh) to several different tipping services.
If the systems were compatible, I could provide content on my page, hopefully accumulate tips, then use the tip money in that account to tip other sites, only recieving the actual cash upon request or when the amount reached a certain level. Then it become something like whuffie (sp?) from "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom".
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
I've heard of "death by a thousand cuts", but this will turn into "bancruptcy by a million micropayments"
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
I also didn't like the way that you were expected to find this out after you'd given them your credit card details.
Even without tying the banking system into your electronic coinage system, there might be uses for cash as a resourse allocation system. Resources on a network could 'charge' for their use, and high priority processes would be able to pay more, ( where high priority is defined by how much service they provide the network, and hence how much 'cash' they have on hand. A service that serves up millions of clients would be able to pay more for it's data than each one of those clients.
Electronic coinage might be used to prevent leaching on P2P networks, with storage, or CPU cycles, or bandwidth earning your computer 'profits' that can be used to spend on bandwith/storage/etc from other nodes. Instead of funding supernodes with GATOR revenue, individuals with bandwidth to spare could set up nodes that charge for their services, and then sell their 'ecash' for real cash on e-bay.
Users with dialup, or with heavily download biased connections could buy the coins on EBay, or subscribe to ad servers which would let advertisers pay them ecoins to view their ads, taking a small percentage from the advertisers for themselves as a service fee. Then if you didn't want prono ads, you could subscribe to the 'Christian Ad Service' instead and get ads for glossy posters of Jesus in a revealing loincloth doing a hardcore S & M crucifixion fetish spread.
You have targeted advertising plus an incentive for people to subscribe to it.
The people writing the software should choose the following business model: People download the software, and agree to a eula that gives them a debt for the price of the p2p network software payable in ecoins. They would be charged interest only automatically by the p2p software ( like a credit card ) as their 'account' accumulates coins to collect from ( maybe obtained from some Folding@Home type thing, or for viewing tons of ads ) unless they choose to pay off the debt in full with collected ecoins. That way the 'skimming' or 'taxation' is limited to the 'price' of the software or to interest payments on it. The author becomes rich in 'valueless' ecoins that they can sell to businesses or individuals that want services from p2p network nodes for real cash.
Taxation would be one legal problem such a scheme would face. Even if you say the ecoins are valueless logical entities used merely to perform the logic required to efficiently manage p2p network resources, the truth is, that they are NOT valueless. Governments would want a piece of the action. Also, keeping track of these cash-like things that are not 'officially' cash might mean your token account database must conform to all the legal morass of being a bank. Wouldn't it be silly to end up in jail for years because Juan Valdez laundered his cocaine money as ecash or Osama bin Larden smuggled funds to his terrorists through your ecoin 'banc'?
It would certainly be wise to hide any connection these ecoins had to legal tender behind many layers of obscurity. Just show the funds as a green bar, and call it mojo or something... Maybe you'd be rich and have sold the company before the feds understood what you were doing and cracked down. Some other sucker can go to jail for banking violations or tax evasion.
Also fraud would be a problem. What do you do to prevent people from taking your money and not providing you with service, or using your service and then not paying up? Payment schemes should limit the amount per transaction and increase the number of (smaller) transactions if possible to keep losses down, but there would inevitably be service debts and ecoin debts unpaid. If you make IDs easy to get, then reputations become worthless, and if you make them hard to get, you end up doing 'collections' - expensive. Maybe some kind of mutual trust networks could be designed, but it would be complicated, and disputes would still arise, that would be a pain in the arse to resolve.
Eat at Joe's.
Add it to the DNS like MX, but PA (Payment Authority) server of the recipient.. so I can connect to your DNS and see (ohh, their PA is...)
meh
If an ecash bank wants to get his ball rolling(?) then I reckon the first and best use for micropayments is to include them in email. I can then ignore any emailler who doesn't think his message is worth paying me $0.005 to read. Yes, I will need to stop malware emailing all my loot to nigeria, but it will kill a lot of spam.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Also wouldn't the businesses spend more money on processing these micropayments than the payments are? This system can only work on a truly large scale. This may force businesses to find a way of redcuing the costs associated with the internet, so it might actually work to our slight advantage.
--
Registered .sig quotient : 1337
Witness gas station air pumps. It used to be common to have free air for your tires, which simply tapped off the compressor used by the repair shop. When gas stations stopped hosting repair shops and shifted to convienience stores, free air was often provided, but then this free air hose often fell into disrepair. The solution: coin-op air hoses.
As for myself, I would rather pay a quarter to get an air hose that works than hunt around for a free one.
Is anyone getting bizarre behaviour reading this thread?
The text isn't autowrapping at the edge of the browser so I'm having to scroll horizontally, as if some 'tard has coded a table width in pixels or something.
Other threads seem OK though, so I doubt it's a browser problem.
The post anonymously option you are [not] attempting to use is one that isn't available to your user.
If it came down to that, I don't think micropayments would make much economic sense. The increased power usage would probably cost you more than you would earn. It would be nice to defray the costs, if you're going to be running these programs anyways, but it's unlikely to make money, unless somebody is willing to pay a serious amount. But if they're willing to pay that much, it might be cheaper for them to just buy more hardware for themselves, rather than renting time from Joe Public.
Better to just keep it volunteer...
Why can't I get paid in Microcredits to fold Protien Molecules for some Research Lab...
That's a real missed opportunity by the micropayment promoters. By offering a downloadable compute server that paid you money when you ran it, that could bring back the days of give-people-stuff-to-promote-a-new-business of the tech-boom. But this time around, it won't be investor money being gvien away, but an actual business. Larger payouts can be a check or whatever, but smaller amounts can be barcoded cents-off coupons, e-stamps, credit to e-gold (whose minimum fee is $0.002), or donations to a charity. A pioneering micropayment provider can then go to merchants touting thousands of consumers with money in their accounts ready to spend, enticing merchants to sign up. With more places to spend more consumers will sign up, and so on up the path to critical mass.
All this assumes, of course, that compute serving is worth more than $1 a month, or no one would bother.
I've just joined allofmp3. You basically pay $0.01 per MB you download. (Aside: it's great! Pretty good range of stuff, great site, and you can choose the audio format and bitrate you want.)
I also buy the odd ebook &c from Fictionwise. Prices for short stories are only a few cents.
In both these cases, it's simply not feasible to pay for each purchase by VISA or whatever, so each one maintains an account for me; I can fill the balance on this account in large enough chunks via VISA or whatever, and can then use it to pay for music or books as necessary.
This is a workable solution; however, it's hassle for the web site keeping track of everyone's accounts &c, and it's hassle for me remembering that they hold a certain (small) amount of my money. It'd be much better all round if I could pay small amounts straight from my CC or whatever.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
There is an old saying that a new technology has to be at least one order of magnitude better than anything exsiting to gain acceptance. Peppercoin fails the test.
If you wander through many stores, you'll see items all over the place with micropayment prices, such as ".79c". (c means "cents symbol" here.) (Yes I do mean with the decimal point.) That means 79/100 of a cent, not 79 cents. You might not like it, but [.79 !== 79], regardless of whether or not there's a cents sign following the digits. /. to accept a cents sign, even when using the "& # 1 6 2 ;" notation.
Argh! I can't get
Such prices as ".79c" are really in centicents, hundredths of a cent.
Some people get really bent out of shape when I point this out. Nevertheless, I talked with one retiree who was willing to consider the matter; he thought that ".79c" was quite OK. When I politely pinned him down intellectually, he finally concluded that the decimal point, only when combined with the cents sign, was essentially decorative and had no effect on magnitude.
Apparently, as a legal matter, such prices are actually what they mean. I have fanciful daydreams of that information becoming generally known to teen-agers, who would drop a penny on the counter, then walk out the door with the item, and be legally in the clear.
Mills:
Quoted from [http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/2To quote:
To myself, I refer to pennies as "interpolating coins".
All this brings to mind that one lira and one yen have quite-low values, so that prices in lire and yen are integers only.
Enby in Waltham (nbodley{att] theworld{dott] com)
Yet, deep down inside, we know that micropayments must work. Like the first farmer who experienced frustration when he tried to pay for some wood with a cow, only to be told "Sorry mate, I can't change that - have you got anything smaller?", we know there must be a way of making transactions more efficient."
Can Peppercoin work?