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."
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.
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
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.
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
There is always the issue that something can go wrong in between you and the merchant that can make that 1 view paid for content just disapear never to be seen again, eating your credit and not getting your content. I'm trying to strike up the similarity of like, putting your money into a vending machine and not getting what your paid for when the chocolate bar gets stuck.
Its hardly a wallet breaking scenario, but it is annoying and reduces a persons confidence in using such a system. If people are willing to use such a system with those risks its fine, but I hope that there is going to be additional effort in ensuring that these small transactions are done reliably.
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 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...
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 ?