It's becoming obvious to everybody that technology for these new payments methodologies is easily in the grasp of most - even the "new" P2P stuff. The issue - and I believe it to be insurmountable in the short term - is how do we unleash this new technology without breaking the judicial underpinings of value exchange.
The new technology can be spread as a veneer over existing funds xfer methodologies (ACH or other bi-lateral mechanisms). The only barrier here is the banks willingness to exposed their proprietary mechanisms to a common market. However, to take these same technologies and turn them into a "negotiable instrument" (like eCheck originally tried to do), is to open the doors of federal and state regulations - banking, UCC, Dsig, etc. The veneer - well maybe it will happen, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I think that any new widely adopted means of negotiable exchange are at least 10 years away, maybe much further. FWIW, David -----Original Message----- From: Todd Boyle [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2003 6:29 PM To: David Smith Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Solving the problem of micropayments In an age of ubiquitous networks and advanced SANs, NAS and BI and other technologies, settlement can be effected much cheaper than today's banks, credit cards and settlement infrastructure. Today's infrastructure is maintained only by the protections and regulation of governments who are, in turn, dependent on those infrastructures for tax collection. Todd At 06:29 AM 2/23/2003, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >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 To remove yourself from this list send a message Unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
