Sunday, June 29, 2008

Electronic Currency

Electronic currency also called E-micro payment which is the digital equivalent of paper currency and coins which enables secure and anonymous purchase of low-priced items. It also refers to the money or scrip which is exchanged electronically. Normally, it involves use of computer networks, the internet and digital stored value systems. It also a collection term for financial cryptography and technologies enabling it.

Electronic currency has been widely used throughout the world on an institutional level for more than two decades. Today, nearly all of the deposit currencies in the world’s banking systems are handled electronically though a series of computer network.

E-micro payment systems include BitPass, Firstgate’s Click and Buy, PayLoadz, Paystone, Peppercoin, Beenz, Digicash and also Flooz. Thus, I’m choosing Peppercoin to be discussed.

Peppercoin is an innovative payment platform allowing consumers to use credit or debit cards for small transantions. Peppercoin’s systems are designed to be deployed as part of the banking and payment processing infrastructure. It is a small and micro payment processing solution that is highly compatible with existing payment products.

Peppercoin system was developed by Silvio Micali and also Ron Rivest. It was first presented on 2002 at RSA Conference. Peppercoin itself is not in the business of distributing content to users. It has developed the Peppercoin Small Payment Gateway a payment system that enables digital content distributors to sell content to users profitably at very low price.

Peppercoin solves the problem of the financial cost of transactions by dramatically reducing the cost of processing low-value transactions, thereby enabling new, financially sustainable, content distribution models, including those for the college and university marketplace.

Through a patent-pending process of cryptographically secure selection of digital payments, Peppercoin processing low-value transactions, reducing the volume of transactions that must be processed by a third-party payment processor or financial institution. Peppercoin states that their approach requires far less overhead than traditional transaction, based on RSA digital signatures to process and protect customer payment.


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