Friday, June 27, 2008

Electronic Currency

Electronic currency is also known as e-money, electronic cash, electronic money, digital money, digital cash or digital currency. It is refers to money or scrip which is exchanged only electronically. Typically, this involves use of computer networks, the internet and digital stored value system. Bit Pass, Payloadz, Digicash, Peppercoin are some examples of electronic currency. While electronic money has been an interesting problem for cryptography to date, use of digital cash has been relatively low-scale.

Peppercoin, Inc. was a privately held company founded in late 2001 by Silvio Micali and Ron Rivest, it was a company that offers services based on the peppercoin method. Peppercoin is a crytographic system for processing micropayments which is especially important to companies with low-priced digital content or physical goods. The core idea of Peppercoin system is to bill one randomly selected transaction a lump sum of money rather than bill each transaction a small amount. It uses "universal aggregation", typically means that it aggregates transactions over users, merchants as well as payment service providers. The random selection is cryptographically secure, means 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."

Peppercoin, Inc. was bought out in 2007 by Chockstone, a provider of stored value loyalty services to merchants, for an undisclosed amount. The company's PCI-compliant services are now used by restaurant brands to tie customer loyalty programs to credit and debit cards at the point of sale. Peppercoin provides merchants with secure access to their customers' payments data so they can increase the effectiveness of loyalty schemes. Merchants using the system are also provided with real-time reporting and customer analytics tools to develop offers based on business needs and consumer response.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_money

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercoin

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