Electronic Currency--E-micropayment systems: Peppercoin

Today, ecommerce is certainly nothing new. People purchase online newspaper, digital images, games, CDs, and many other products and service every day. All of these online payments were small, typically under $5. Credit cards or debit cards do not work well.

Peppercoin(peppercoin.com) was founded by Ron Rivest and Silvio Micali with a vision to enable convenient and profitable credit and debit card use for small payments. The users do not require to deposit credit in advance. all of the things they need to do, it is just enter their credit or debit cards information with the merchant online as usual. The Peppercoin software will process the payments.

How Peppercoin works???

When a users purchase a product or service from a merchant, the transaction passes through a small-payment gateway to the payment service’s system. The gateway provides payment information into the system’s service for aggregating multiple payments by users to merchants. The user aggregation service authorizes consumer spending, integrates with credit cards or other payment instruments, and presents a summary aggregated bill. The merchant service handles the sellers’ end of the transaction. The banks that handle the money transfer have their own aggregation services.

Reference:

http://www.geercom.com/r8019.pdf
http://net.educause.edu/elements/attachments/rfi/rfi_2/Peppercoin_summary.pdf

http://www.schwartz-pr.com/case_studies_pages.php?ind=19&id=43