Re: Solving the problem of micropayments

[Alanslater]

Unfortunately, those nice things that banks have come with a significant cost infrastructure.  It is that infrastructure that makes micropayments cost prohibitive.  For example, suppose someone decided to compile a CD of the tunes he likes.  He downloads several hundred songs.  He would have to pay for each song (post Napster) and each song would generate a transaction.  Consider what would be required to post each micropoayment (think of lines of print on a checking account statement -- required, the additional number of pages, additional postage, additional disk space to support online lookups, etc.).  Then consider that the bank has to have the infrastructure to support investigations of each of the charges.  The cost adds up quickly.

The solutions we had worked on always involved aggregating transactions to minimize the number of transactions posted to a bank account.  A nonbank company has the legal ability to do this, a bank does not.

Alan