Forwarded with Andrew's permission... Cheers, Bob Hettinga --- begin forwarded text Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1998 09:15:48 -0400 (EDT) From: Andrew Odlyzko <amo@research.att.com> To: rah@shipwright.com Subject: Re: Cypherpunks defeat? Bob, Concerning the recent posting by Jim Donald about micropayments, let me say that as a co-inventor of a micropayment scheme (presented at the FC'97 conference) I do see a role for them. However, I do think it will be a limited role. The reason is economic. It is not just that people don't want to be "nickeled and dimed." A more substantive reason is that in most situations the content producers can get more money from aggregating content. I have analyzed this in papers such as The bumpy road of electronic commerce, in "WebNet 96 - World Conf. Web Soc. Proc.," H. Maurer, ed., AACE, 1996, pp. 378-389. and Fixed fee versus unit pricing for information goods: competition, equilibria, and price wars, P. C. Fishburn, A. M. Odlyzko, and R. C. Siders, First Monday 2(7) (July 1997), http://www.firstmonday.dk/. Also to appear in "Internet Publishing and Beyond: The Economics of Digital Information and Intellectual Property," D. Hurley, B. Kahin, and H. Varian, eds., MIT Press, 1998. Both are available at http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/eworld.html Best regards, Andrew ************************************************************************ Andrew Odlyzko amo@research.att.com AT&T Labs - Research voice: 973-360-8410 http://www.research.att.com/~amo fax: 973-360-8178 ************************************************************************ --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'