[13469] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Micropayments finally taking off.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (James A. Donald)
Fri Jun 6 14:50:02 2003
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2003 19:09:31 -0700
From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>
In-reply-to: <3EDE1D78.2422.1B4777E6@localhost>
To: "Email List: Cypherpunks" <cypherpunks@lne.com>,
"Email List: Cryptography" <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
--
Over the past ten years there have been many attempts to get a
micropayment system working, all of which have failed dismally,
leading to a widespread attitude that internet micropayments
just do not work, and never will work.
In the past 24 hours, e-gold has done fifty thousand
micropayments, of which thirty thousand were one milligram of
gold or under (about one cent or under) These are non
anonymous, in that e-gold can link payer to payee, but
anonymous in that it laborious to link e-gold account numbers
to true names.
e-gold has no knowledge what they are being used for. If they
gathered that much information, it probably would not be
worthwhile for their customers, but I would guess these are
mostly per-click-through payments for ads. Some proportion of
these payments must be e-gold's own referral scheme, but the
majority have to be other people's schemes, perhaps other
people's similar schemes.
The fact that e-gold does not know what is going on suggests
that past attempts to support micropayments failed by putting
too great a burden on those seeking to participate.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
bXT+Ssbr8YwqxmGU48nKVUNmy/V5W9MrCY8AJ1iu
4JjvpESYIz/nh/OrZvLSSq8INjokq5UGC2eACxupI
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