Peppercoin

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Peppercoin is a cryptographic system for processing micropayments. Peppercoin Inc. was a company that offers services based on the peppercoin method.

The peppercoin system was developed by Silvio Micali and Ron Rivest and first presented at the RSA Conference in 2002 [1] (although it had not yet been named.) The core idea is to bill one randomly selected transaction a lump sum of money rather than bill each transaction a small amount. It uses "universal aggregation", which means that it aggregates transactions over users, merchants as well as payment service providers. The random selection is cryptographically secure -- it cannot be influenced by any of the parties. It is claimed to reduce the transaction cost per dollar from 27 cents to "well below 10 cents." [2]

Peppercoin, Inc. was a privately held company founded in late 2001 by Micali and Rivest based in Waltham, MA. It has secured about $15M in venture capital in two rounds of funding. [3] [4] Its services have seen modest adoption. [5] [6] Peppercoin collects 5-9% of transaction cost from the merchant. [7] Peppercoin, Inc. was bought out in 2007 by Chockstone for an undisclosed amount. [4]

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References

  1. ↑ S. Micali and R. L. Rivest. Micropayments revisited Archived 2008-02-26 at the Wayback Machine . In B. Preneel, editor, Proc. Cryptography Track at RSA Conference 2002, pages 149–263. Springer, 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 2271.
  2. ↑ "2003 press release". 29 Sep 2003. Archived from the original on 16 Mar 2006.
  3. ↑ "Company history". Peppercoin.com. Archived from the original on 15 October 2006.
  4. 1 2 Micro-payment's Peppercoin Bought Out Archived January 19, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  5. ↑ "Peppercoin picked by Wurld Media for P2P payment system". Archived from the original on 2012-08-06. Retrieved 2012-09-09.
  6. ↑ "Peppercoin scoops up customer for loyalty program". Boston Business Journal. Archived from the original on 2017-03-02. Retrieved 2017-03-01.(subscription required)
  7. ↑ "Peppercoin, Inc. Response to the Request for Information By the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities Technology Task Force" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-10-05. Retrieved 2012-09-09.
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