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The March Towards Micropayments

Posted by timothy on from the just-send-me-e-gold dept.

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."

1 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Micropayments the other way around... User EARNS by Calrain · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...