6 ms·

Electronic lottery tickets as micropayments (1997)

85 points by mrleinad 5y ago

satya71 5y ago
I'd take this over BAT.
yboris 5y ago
"In 1997, Ron Rivest (one of the inventors of Public-key cryptography) proposed the use of digital lottery tickets for online micropayments. In this scheme, a lottery ticket for a $10 prize with a 1/1000 chance of winning could be used to pay for 1 cent" https://twitter.com/fermatslibrary/status/1409945504474140675 https://twitter.com/fermatslibrary/status/140994550447414067...
Robotbeat 5y ago
That’s basically what cryptocurrency Mining is. You get paid for mining with a digital lottery.
- sidpatil 5y ago
  A similar interest payment structure exists for conventional savings accounts as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize-linked_savings_account https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize-linked_savings_account
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Huh, when you mentioned that, it made me think this was a way to allow frequently compounding interest even when the amount of interest earned is smaller than the precision of the account (ie 1 cent). If you earned 0.01 cent of interest, instead of trying to keep more digits of precision, the account just gets a 1% chance of being increased by 1 cent. It seemed like a really clever workaround to not having enough digits of precision (whether explicit or hidden), but now I see it’s just a regular sized lottery, a psychological tool to encourage investment. :)
- nivertech 5y ago
  No, most so called "cryptocurrencies" are using lottery-based Proof-of-Work (puzzle solving) as a leader election mechanism for Byzantine consensus over the state of the distributed replicated ledger of transactions. What described here is a simple probabilistic micropayments. Since the payment transactions are expensive, you amortize the cost of many smaller "virtual" transactions over a single large real transaction. This scheme is frequently used in the API billing, or even for all-inclusive costs in hotels (i.e. you charge for the buffet instead of for each meal separately) and you hope that probabilistically it will end up OK.
ezconnect 5y ago
PDF link https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv97b.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv97b.pdf
petermcneeley 5y ago
How is double spend avoided? EDIT: My bad I thought this was a currency.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  it's not (self-protecting) transferable / decentralized currency. It's same as a paper lottery ticket.
- nightpool 5y ago
  I don't understand the question. Each lottery ticket is made out to a single "recipient"—in what situation do you imagine a double spend?
- saurik 5y ago
  Your question is not without merit, as these lottery tickets end up feeling a bit like "checks" (the paper kind you give someone as an IOU against your bank account), which makes it subject to the same general "kiting" attack of writing multiple checks that would all have to pay off at the same time in order to not overdraw your account. In case this isn't obvious how it applies to this case--as the probabilities might be obfuscating things somewhat, and I have now seen multiple replies to you make it sound like your question is invalid, despite being the key question for how to use this technology (as someone who works with it daily and has for years)--imagine if you send four people 50% tickets for your entire balance. In this scenario, you would expect two of them would win; let's just assume this is the actual concrete result. Even if you decide that people who receive a winning ticket will commit their ticket before accepting it, two of these people got losing tickets and a third will succeed in claiming their winner... you just managed to get 1.5x the value of your account, by handing out more (probabilistic) checks than you can (probabilistically) pay. The only protection from it not being a true 2x overdraft was that two of the participants had a naive way to verify they got paid... but really, participants in this system usually accept money from low-probability losing tickets; this then becomes a form of off-chain settlement that is subject to scenarios where people can "double-spend" some of their money if you aren't paying attention, in a way that is actually very analogous to blockchains (such as Bitcoin and Ethereum) that experience routine chain reorganization: you need to have some kind of scheme in place to not only decide a single valid result but also a scheme to feel comfortable with the "finality" of that result (the whole "wait for six confirmations" jazz). The usual solution to this is to have the spender put money down into an on-chain contractual "escrow" that gets "burned" (destroyed) as part of any overdraft, to make it so you hopefully lose more money than you are capable of overspending in any reasonable period of time (which I would argue has at least some parallels to mechanisms in proof of stake blockchains, with the understanding that every single lottery payment account is effectively its own blockchain at this point). Honestly, I find much more inspiration in this much later paper, which extends this scheme to zero-knowledge coins and does some of the math required to understand the bounds on the escrow required to manage this risk. https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1033.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1033.pdf
thinkloop 5y ago
Why would transacting lottery tickets be cheaper than transacting money? EDIT: Who pays for the lottery ticket transactions that the bank is saving?
- jaywalk 5y ago
  Because the bank only has to process/pay out the winning tickets instead of every single micropayment.
  - thinkloop 5y ago
    Yes, I understand that, but that is only for the bank, society still has to pay for the 999 of 1000 transactions that the bank saved. Who pays for those, why would they be cheaper given that they are essentially money again.
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      The whole aim of this scheme is to try to allow micropayments in a world where banks want to take a $0.20 fee on each transaction. If you could persuade all banks to make all fees be percentage based or nill, such a scheme would be unnecessary.
    - saurik 5y ago
      Everyone pays them, but only probabilistically: the cost of a single commit gets spread out over the cost of all 1000 of those transactions (in the same way that costs of doing business that you can't track to a single customer still get paid by all customers simply inflating your price just a bit). As an example, if the cost of your product is $0.01 and the cost of a bank transfer is $0.25, and you receive tickets at 1/2500 probability, then you tack on to everyone's receipt "their share" of that fee, charging them $0.0101 instead of $0.01, for a claim value per ticket of $25.25 (as $25.25*1/2500==$0.0101), which you can see includes the $25 for the 2500 products people bought and the extra $0.25 to pay the banking fee. So: the recipient paid that fee, but passed it on to the sender, who ultimately paid that fee... but a much much lower fee ($0.0001 instead of $0.25).
saurik 5y ago
We are using a scheme based on this premise as part of Orchid, a decentralized market for Internet resources such as bandwidth. https://github.com/OrchidTechnologies/orchid https://github.com/OrchidTechnologies/orchid In the current end-user client--which you can currently download from the iOS/Android/Mac application stores--we use this to pay for VPN service "as you go" in rather small units (the size of these chunks in our case feels limited by bandwidth overhead of sending signatures and CPU usage for signing tickets, as opposed to by the reasonable size of a transfer). https://www.orchid.com/download https://www.orchid.com/download
- thinkloop 5y ago
  Where do the savings come in? If you know how to securely send lottery tickets why can't you use the same system to send the money instead?
  - saurik 5y ago
    See my response to your other question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27681781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27681781 (but like, the idea is that you can spread the cost of an underlying transfer--which costs money to perform and potentially permanently store on the underlying blockchain--across all of the people making probabilistic payments, which you can make very small if the people involved are willing to tolerate the variance on a resulting purchase and have a high enough principal to still have a reasonably high efficiency after paying for the amortized fees).
saurik 5y ago
Prior discussion of this same link can be found at this other thread (which I had in my list of links below but it felt useful to surface it). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15700718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15700718 So, something maybe-fascinating to people is that Rivest--who designed this scheme--helped start a company to use it on the web to pay for things like news articles and generally replace ads. It was called Peppercoin, and was sufficiently before its time that not only did it fail (well, in the usual YC-sense: it got acquired by something boring and failed to change the world) but a lot of the people working on this technology today have never heard of it ;P. Here are a million references I have in a note I was collecting back in December on the rise and fall of Peppercoin (which I intended to show to my team at Orchid--where we are trying to apply this technology to a decentralized market for bandwidth and other Internet services: see orchid.com--and then honestly never have as I have been busy; and I considered that, maybe even "best case", this was likely to be a distraction to them as much as it was to me ;P). background https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=989020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=989020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17533350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17533350 papers https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.44.757&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.44... https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv97b.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv97b.pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.5.1010&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.5.1... https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv04c.slides.slides.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv04c.slides.slide... wikis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercoin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercoin https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Peppercoin https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Peppercoin https://ebrary.net/88179/business_finance/micropayments https://ebrary.net/88179/business_finance/micropayments funding http://web.archive.org/web/20031002123349/http://www.paidcontent.org/pc/arch/2003_09_23.shtml#003273 http://web.archive.org/web/20031002123349/http://www.paidcon... https://www.buyoutsinsider.com/peppercoin-banks-on-4-3m-in-coin/ https://www.buyoutsinsider.com/peppercoin-banks-on-4-3m-in-c... http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Item/Peppercoin-Raises-425-Million-Appoints-President-and-CEO-5543.htm http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Item/Peppercoi... https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB112430543406915783 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB112430543406915783 launch https://bizwest.com/2003/10/31/peppercoin-solves-download-payment-processing-pickle/#djPop https://bizwest.com/2003/10/31/peppercoin-solves-download-pa... https://www.technologyreview.com/2003/12/01/233570/the-webs-new-currency/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2003/12/01/233570/the-webs-... https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/07/technology/circuits/a-virtual-cash-register-rings-up-tiny-transactions.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/07/technology/circuits/a-vir... https://nextbillion.net/cashless-transactions-at-the-bop-peppercoin/ https://nextbillion.net/cashless-transactions-at-the-bop-pep... "2.0" https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/1492/peppercoin-releases-version-20-of-small-payments-system https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/1492/peppercoin-releas... 2004-2005 https://www.digitaltransactions.net/peppercoin-scores-another-online-song-merchant/ https://www.digitaltransactions.net/peppercoin-scores-anothe... https://www.digitaltransactions.net/moneris-signs-up-peppercoin-for-pint-sized-pos-and-web-payments/ https://www.digitaltransactions.net/moneris-signs-up-pepperc... https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass-high-tech/2005/02/peppercoin-picked-by-music-industrys-official.html https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass-high-tech/2005/... https://thepaypers.com/payments-general/peppercoin-small-payments-processing-suite-available-to-first-data-channels--725173 https://thepaypers.com/payments-general/peppercoin-small-pay... banking https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20050112005057/en/Peppercoin-Small-Transaction-Suite-First-to-Complete-Visa-CISP-and-Other-Credit-Card-Data-Security-Compliance-Validation https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20050112005057/en/Pep... https://thepaypers.com/payments-general/chase-merchant-services-and-peppercoin-sign-referral-agreement--724887 https://thepaypers.com/payments-general/chase-merchant-servi... mastercard https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/14621/peppercoin-and-mastercard-forge-micropayments-partnership https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/14621/peppercoin-and-ma... https://www.cbronline.com/news/mastercard_and_peppercoin_to_promote_card_use_for_small_payments/amp/ https://www.cbronline.com/news/mastercard_and_peppercoin_to_... https://www.insidearm.com/news/00025887-mastercard-supports-micro-and-small-payme/ https://www.insidearm.com/news/00025887-mastercard-supports-... https://www.networkworld.com/article/2316448/mastercard-teams-to-ease-small-cash-transactions.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2316448/mastercard-team... https://www.pressreader.com/usa/san-francisco-chronicle/20051212/282613143188458 https://www.pressreader.com/usa/san-francisco-chronicle/2005... "3.0" https://www.digitaltransactions.net/is-peppercoin-eyeing-opportunities-in-hot-contactless-market/ https://www.digitaltransactions.net/is-peppercoin-eyeing-opp... https://www.digitaltransactions.net/peppercoin-3-0-debuts-with-prepaid-and-subscription-capabilities/ https://www.digitaltransactions.net/peppercoin-3-0-debuts-wi... operations https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2006/04/24/charles-caserta-joins-peppercoin-as-vice-president-of-sales/ https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2006/04/24/charles-casert... https://www.securetechalliance.org/secure/events/20061003/T08b_Stone.pdf https://www.securetechalliance.org/secure/events/20061003/T0... 2006-2007 https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2006/07/24/story10.html https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2006/07/24/story1... https://www.insidearm.com/news/00015050-suntrust-merchant-services-and-peppercoin/ https://www.insidearm.com/news/00015050-suntrust-merchant-se... https://www.allwirelessnews.com/features/heartland-payment-systems-partners-with-peppercoin.html https://www.allwirelessnews.com/features/heartland-payment-s... acquirement https://www.americanbanker.com/news/peppercoin-sold-to-oregon-loyalty-software-vendor https://www.americanbanker.com/news/peppercoin-sold-to-orego... https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20070416005392/en/Chockstone-Acquires-Peppercoin-Strengthens-Its-Leading-Position-in-Real-Time-Loyalty-Marketing-Programs-for-the-Restaurant-and-Convenience-Store-Industries https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20070416005392/en/Cho... https://mashable.com/2007/04/17/peppercoin/ https://mashable.com/2007/04/17/peppercoin/ postmortem https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070417/012124.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070417/012124.shtml

85 points by mrleinad 5y ago

I'd take this over BAT.

"In 1997, Ron Rivest (one of the inventors of Public-key cryptography) proposed the use of digital lottery tickets for online micropayments. In this scheme, a lottery ticket for a $10 prize with a 1/1000 chance of winning could be used to pay for 1 cent" https://twitter.com/fermatslibrary/status/1409945504474140675 https://twitter.com/fermatslibrary/status/140994550447414067...

Robotbeat 5y ago

That’s basically what cryptocurrency Mining is. You get paid for mining with a digital lottery.

sidpatil 5y ago
A similar interest payment structure exists for conventional savings accounts as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize-linked_savings_account https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize-linked_savings_account
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Huh, when you mentioned that, it made me think this was a way to allow frequently compounding interest even when the amount of interest earned is smaller than the precision of the account (ie 1 cent). If you earned 0.01 cent of interest, instead of trying to keep more digits of precision, the account just gets a 1% chance of being increased by 1 cent. It seemed like a really clever workaround to not having enough digits of precision (whether explicit or hidden), but now I see it’s just a regular sized lottery, a psychological tool to encourage investment. :)
nivertech 5y ago
No, most so called "cryptocurrencies" are using lottery-based Proof-of-Work (puzzle solving) as a leader election mechanism for Byzantine consensus over the state of the distributed replicated ledger of transactions. What described here is a simple probabilistic micropayments. Since the payment transactions are expensive, you amortize the cost of many smaller "virtual" transactions over a single large real transaction. This scheme is frequently used in the API billing, or even for all-inclusive costs in hotels (i.e. you charge for the buffet instead of for each meal separately) and you hope that probabilistically it will end up OK.

ezconnect 5y ago

PDF link https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv97b.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv97b.pdf

petermcneeley 5y ago

How is double spend avoided? EDIT: My bad I thought this was a currency.

alisonkisk 5y ago
it's not (self-protecting) transferable / decentralized currency. It's same as a paper lottery ticket.
nightpool 5y ago
I don't understand the question. Each lottery ticket is made out to a single "recipient"—in what situation do you imagine a double spend?
saurik 5y ago
Your question is not without merit, as these lottery tickets end up feeling a bit like "checks" (the paper kind you give someone as an IOU against your bank account), which makes it subject to the same general "kiting" attack of writing multiple checks that would all have to pay off at the same time in order to not overdraw your account. In case this isn't obvious how it applies to this case--as the probabilities might be obfuscating things somewhat, and I have now seen multiple replies to you make it sound like your question is invalid, despite being the key question for how to use this technology (as someone who works with it daily and has for years)--imagine if you send four people 50% tickets for your entire balance. In this scenario, you would expect two of them would win; let's just assume this is the actual concrete result. Even if you decide that people who receive a winning ticket will commit their ticket before accepting it, two of these people got losing tickets and a third will succeed in claiming their winner... you just managed to get 1.5x the value of your account, by handing out more (probabilistic) checks than you can (probabilistically) pay. The only protection from it not being a true 2x overdraft was that two of the participants had a naive way to verify they got paid... but really, participants in this system usually accept money from low-probability losing tickets; this then becomes a form of off-chain settlement that is subject to scenarios where people can "double-spend" some of their money if you aren't paying attention, in a way that is actually very analogous to blockchains (such as Bitcoin and Ethereum) that experience routine chain reorganization: you need to have some kind of scheme in place to not only decide a single valid result but also a scheme to feel comfortable with the "finality" of that result (the whole "wait for six confirmations" jazz). The usual solution to this is to have the spender put money down into an on-chain contractual "escrow" that gets "burned" (destroyed) as part of any overdraft, to make it so you hopefully lose more money than you are capable of overspending in any reasonable period of time (which I would argue has at least some parallels to mechanisms in proof of stake blockchains, with the understanding that every single lottery payment account is effectively its own blockchain at this point). Honestly, I find much more inspiration in this much later paper, which extends this scheme to zero-knowledge coins and does some of the math required to understand the bounds on the escrow required to manage this risk. https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1033.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1033.pdf

thinkloop 5y ago

Why would transacting lottery tickets be cheaper than transacting money? EDIT: Who pays for the lottery ticket transactions that the bank is saving?

jaywalk 5y ago
Because the bank only has to process/pay out the winning tickets instead of every single micropayment.
- thinkloop 5y ago
  Yes, I understand that, but that is only for the bank, society still has to pay for the 999 of 1000 transactions that the bank saved. Who pays for those, why would they be cheaper given that they are essentially money again.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    The whole aim of this scheme is to try to allow micropayments in a world where banks want to take a $0.20 fee on each transaction. If you could persuade all banks to make all fees be percentage based or nill, such a scheme would be unnecessary.
  - saurik 5y ago
    Everyone pays them, but only probabilistically: the cost of a single commit gets spread out over the cost of all 1000 of those transactions (in the same way that costs of doing business that you can't track to a single customer still get paid by all customers simply inflating your price just a bit). As an example, if the cost of your product is $0.01 and the cost of a bank transfer is $0.25, and you receive tickets at 1/2500 probability, then you tack on to everyone's receipt "their share" of that fee, charging them $0.0101 instead of $0.01, for a claim value per ticket of $25.25 (as $25.25*1/2500==$0.0101), which you can see includes the $25 for the 2500 products people bought and the extra $0.25 to pay the banking fee. So: the recipient paid that fee, but passed it on to the sender, who ultimately paid that fee... but a much much lower fee ($0.0001 instead of $0.25).

saurik 5y ago

We are using a scheme based on this premise as part of Orchid, a decentralized market for Internet resources such as bandwidth. https://github.com/OrchidTechnologies/orchid https://github.com/OrchidTechnologies/orchid In the current end-user client--which you can currently download from the iOS/Android/Mac application stores--we use this to pay for VPN service "as you go" in rather small units (the size of these chunks in our case feels limited by bandwidth overhead of sending signatures and CPU usage for signing tickets, as opposed to by the reasonable size of a transfer). https://www.orchid.com/download https://www.orchid.com/download

thinkloop 5y ago
Where do the savings come in? If you know how to securely send lottery tickets why can't you use the same system to send the money instead?
- saurik 5y ago
  See my response to your other question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27681781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27681781 (but like, the idea is that you can spread the cost of an underlying transfer--which costs money to perform and potentially permanently store on the underlying blockchain--across all of the people making probabilistic payments, which you can make very small if the people involved are willing to tolerate the variance on a resulting purchase and have a high enough principal to still have a reasonably high efficiency after paying for the amortized fees).

saurik 5y ago

Prior discussion of this same link can be found at this other thread (which I had in my list of links below but it felt useful to surface it). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15700718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15700718 So, something maybe-fascinating to people is that Rivest--who designed this scheme--helped start a company to use it on the web to pay for things like news articles and generally replace ads. It was called Peppercoin, and was sufficiently before its time that not only did it fail (well, in the usual YC-sense: it got acquired by something boring and failed to change the world) but a lot of the people working on this technology today have never heard of it ;P. Here are a million references I have in a note I was collecting back in December on the rise and fall of Peppercoin (which I intended to show to my team at Orchid--where we are trying to apply this technology to a decentralized market for bandwidth and other Internet services: see orchid.com--and then honestly never have as I have been busy; and I considered that, maybe even "best case", this was likely to be a distraction to them as much as it was to me ;P). background https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=989020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=989020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17533350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17533350 papers https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.44.757&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.44... https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv97b.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv97b.pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.5.1010&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.5.1... https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv04c.slides.slides.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv04c.slides.slide... wikis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercoin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercoin https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Peppercoin https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Peppercoin https://ebrary.net/88179/business_finance/micropayments https://ebrary.net/88179/business_finance/micropayments funding http://web.archive.org/web/20031002123349/http://www.paidcontent.org/pc/arch/2003_09_23.shtml#003273 http://web.archive.org/web/20031002123349/http://www.paidcon... https://www.buyoutsinsider.com/peppercoin-banks-on-4-3m-in-coin/ https://www.buyoutsinsider.com/peppercoin-banks-on-4-3m-in-c... http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Item/Peppercoin-Raises-425-Million-Appoints-President-and-CEO-5543.htm http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Item/Peppercoi... https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB112430543406915783 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB112430543406915783 launch https://bizwest.com/2003/10/31/peppercoin-solves-download-payment-processing-pickle/#djPop https://bizwest.com/2003/10/31/peppercoin-solves-download-pa... https://www.technologyreview.com/2003/12/01/233570/the-webs-new-currency/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2003/12/01/233570/the-webs-... https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/07/technology/circuits/a-virtual-cash-register-rings-up-tiny-transactions.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/07/technology/circuits/a-vir... https://nextbillion.net/cashless-transactions-at-the-bop-peppercoin/ https://nextbillion.net/cashless-transactions-at-the-bop-pep... "2.0" https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/1492/peppercoin-releases-version-20-of-small-payments-system https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/1492/peppercoin-releas... 2004-2005 https://www.digitaltransactions.net/peppercoin-scores-another-online-song-merchant/ https://www.digitaltransactions.net/peppercoin-scores-anothe... https://www.digitaltransactions.net/moneris-signs-up-peppercoin-for-pint-sized-pos-and-web-payments/ https://www.digitaltransactions.net/moneris-signs-up-pepperc... https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass-high-tech/2005/02/peppercoin-picked-by-music-industrys-official.html https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass-high-tech/2005/... https://thepaypers.com/payments-general/peppercoin-small-payments-processing-suite-available-to-first-data-channels--725173 https://thepaypers.com/payments-general/peppercoin-small-pay... banking https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20050112005057/en/Peppercoin-Small-Transaction-Suite-First-to-Complete-Visa-CISP-and-Other-Credit-Card-Data-Security-Compliance-Validation https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20050112005057/en/Pep... https://thepaypers.com/payments-general/chase-merchant-services-and-peppercoin-sign-referral-agreement--724887 https://thepaypers.com/payments-general/chase-merchant-servi... mastercard https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/14621/peppercoin-and-mastercard-forge-micropayments-partnership https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/14621/peppercoin-and-ma... https://www.cbronline.com/news/mastercard_and_peppercoin_to_promote_card_use_for_small_payments/amp/ https://www.cbronline.com/news/mastercard_and_peppercoin_to_... https://www.insidearm.com/news/00025887-mastercard-supports-micro-and-small-payme/ https://www.insidearm.com/news/00025887-mastercard-supports-... https://www.networkworld.com/article/2316448/mastercard-teams-to-ease-small-cash-transactions.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2316448/mastercard-team... https://www.pressreader.com/usa/san-francisco-chronicle/20051212/282613143188458 https://www.pressreader.com/usa/san-francisco-chronicle/2005... "3.0" https://www.digitaltransactions.net/is-peppercoin-eyeing-opportunities-in-hot-contactless-market/ https://www.digitaltransactions.net/is-peppercoin-eyeing-opp... https://www.digitaltransactions.net/peppercoin-3-0-debuts-with-prepaid-and-subscription-capabilities/ https://www.digitaltransactions.net/peppercoin-3-0-debuts-wi... operations https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2006/04/24/charles-caserta-joins-peppercoin-as-vice-president-of-sales/ https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2006/04/24/charles-casert... https://www.securetechalliance.org/secure/events/20061003/T08b_Stone.pdf https://www.securetechalliance.org/secure/events/20061003/T0... 2006-2007 https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2006/07/24/story10.html https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2006/07/24/story1... https://www.insidearm.com/news/00015050-suntrust-merchant-services-and-peppercoin/ https://www.insidearm.com/news/00015050-suntrust-merchant-se... https://www.allwirelessnews.com/features/heartland-payment-systems-partners-with-peppercoin.html https://www.allwirelessnews.com/features/heartland-payment-s... acquirement https://www.americanbanker.com/news/peppercoin-sold-to-oregon-loyalty-software-vendor https://www.americanbanker.com/news/peppercoin-sold-to-orego... https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20070416005392/en/Chockstone-Acquires-Peppercoin-Strengthens-Its-Leading-Position-in-Real-Time-Loyalty-Marketing-Programs-for-the-Restaurant-and-Convenience-Store-Industries https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20070416005392/en/Cho... https://mashable.com/2007/04/17/peppercoin/ https://mashable.com/2007/04/17/peppercoin/ postmortem https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070417/012124.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070417/012124.shtml