[Mac_crypto] Re: Peppercoin Raises $4 Million in First Round Funding, Appoints CEO

[R. A. Hettinga]

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Status:  U
Delivered-To: fork@xent.com
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 23:21:38 -0500
From: Adam L Beberg <beberg@mithral.com>
To: FoRK <fork@xent.com>
Subject: Re: [Mac_crypto] Re: Peppercoin Raises $4 Million in First Round
	Funding, Appoints CEO
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On Tuesday, September 23, 2003, at 09:37  PM, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

> --- begin forwarded text

Sorry to FoRK for the coming shitstorm.

I must have left a non-FoRK list on the cc: because my spam filters 
just caught a pile of it and deleted it for me *happy Mail.app dance*. 
FoRK's member-only rule should get most of it tho.

> I think you'll find that when the transaction value is small the
> merchant rates from all the credit card companies are substantially
> higher than that.  It's common for the marginal merchant rate to be on
> the order of 2-4% for online transactions but there is usually a base
> charge of 25 cents or more as well as the marginal rate. On a $2
> charge for a song the merchant could well be paying more than 30 cents
> in fees, which is more than double the rate for Peppercoin.

So sorry, you can get 6c + marginal, much less fixed fee in quantity.
Which works out to:
<shock_and_awe>
   Less then peppercoin
</shock_and_awe>.

But, you knew that already, because you have shopped around for 
merchant CC processing.

I'll spare you piles of research on pricing things high enough to cross 
a psychological value threshold, preferences for long term (and thus 
non-pestering) subscriptions, the fact that micropayments have been 
tried 100 times before (do you think maybe it's not a technology 
problem), and everything else that is related because this thread is 
now dead.

- Adam L. Beberg - beberg@mithral.com
   http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/

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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'