As far as I'm concerned Micropayments as appealing to me as Data Mining. I certainly see how my wallet would benefits from being on the receiving end of the money and/or information, but I can also clearly see the detrements of being the one whose money and information was "automagically" being appropriated. The technical concerns are many, any secure system can be broken by someone with enough skill and resources, but the social concerns are more difficult to address. For example, it's great if the browser logs client side transactions that can't be spoofed because the wallet knows where it sent money, but try convincing a vendor who is already suspicious of 'all this computer stuff' that you really sent them some money and a savvy hacker pilfered it all - log or no log. Setting a micropayment enabled web browser to automatically grant approval to payments of $.02/action may seem reasonable, but it depends on what the vendor has decided constitues an action. If somone charged $.02/nanosecond for retreiving shareware from an FTP library, and my browser was set to accept this as reasonable based on the fact that it was $.02/action, I would have no idea what an exhorbitant rate I was paying for access until my 'wallet' was emptied by downloading the README file... this kind of rate swindling already goes on in the telephone industry and would be even easier on a system like the internet where people habitually connect with unknown parties to check out the offerings. This doesn't happen with phones (well, not as much). The virtual nomadness of wandering the net leaves a lot of people - even otherwise careful people - vulnerable to rate traps. Micropayment proponents are incredibly fond of the proposition that software could be leased on a usage time basis from a centralized server, and people could also rent time on the servers' CPUs. Sounds an awful lot like the mainframe days to me. I see plenty of ways in which this benefits the vendor (greater control over distribution, centrailzed revision/upgrade distribution, greater profits over one-time sales, etc.), but no ways in which this benefits the user. Especially the power user. I'm certainly not going to rent time on a compiler or image editing program every single time I want to do some work. It took the industry long enough to get PCs and workstations to the speeds they're at today so people could do their own work on their own machines to go back to waiting in a queue for time on a centralized system so you can have the honor of paying someone a lot of money to run your job. As a programmer, I can see how I could make a fat chunk of change by bilking people through metered software usage, but as a software consumer it seems like a rotten idea. One effect it would have, however, would be an exponential increase in the quality and quantity of software available from the Free Software Foundation and other similar groups as people like myself fled en-masse from commercial software to a system where we knew what we were getting into ahead of time. The other rotten part of this idea, of course, is the irritating lag times involved with trying to run distributed software (especially poorly distributed software, and especially on an overloaded network infrastructure). Looking at micropayments from the (economically) conservative element viewpoint within certain industries make them seem a lot less appealing, as well. Take television. If people had to purchase every TV show they watched, there would be a lot less TV production going on because there wouldn't be as much random TV watching. No matter how stupid you may think your customers are, if you change their pay structure they think about it - even if only briefly. It would also be harder to sell TV advertising, because if nobody was watching a show everyone would know because this would be metered even better than current rating systems. The nature of the TV advertising industry would change because instead of the archetypal/statistical sampling of Nielsen ratings, you'd know *exactly* who was watching what. Both micropayments and data mining require that the user give the vendor a level of trust which most vendors are not willing to repay with similar trust and customer satisfaction. Customer-users are expected to give vendors greater access to and control over their money and personal information, yet at best they can expect the same poor customer service and bureaucratic attitudes encountered when dealing with traditional transaction processing companies and at worst can expect to be swindled out of piles of money and/or have their privacy violated as a matter of course. Working where I do, everyone around me is on the side of the vendors - who make up part of our client base. On cypherpunks, of course, I'm largely preaching to the converted. There can be a middle ground, however the middle ground that's been offered so far still leaves the consumer with the sort end of the stick and I'm not convinced they're ultimately what's best for business - especially if you cling to seemingly outdated ideas like good customer relations, good public/social relations, and long range growth relationships over short term profit pumping. ttl Stephan ------------------------------------------------------------------- This signature has been kidnapped by space aliens. If you find it you can call (415) 703-8748. I work for Studio Archetype, and they don't find any of this funny.