Micro-payments based on iKP

Micro-payments are payments too small in amount to warrant the overhead costs of current financial clearing networks. Furthermore one can expect that content servers for the global information infrastructure (GII) will have to process so many of these low value transactions that computationally complex and costly cryptographic protocols will be impractical. This report proposes a micro-payment scheme that can be bootstrapped with the already well-known payment protocols for larger amounts, but does not depend on them for each micro-transaction. Special attention is given to its integration into IBMs Internet Keyed Payment Systems (iKP). 1 Introduction Micro-payments have a broad application area in the marketing of information distributed in an electronic form. Modern network information browsing tools (WWW 1) enable users/clients to wander arbitrarily through the global networks and obtain such documents. We assume that a specific client normally is consuming enough low-value docu...