WWW: Beyond the Basics

Chapter 8. Commerce

8.3.1. Digital's Millicent Proposal

Millicent (Digital Equipment) is a payment system designed for microcent transactions by Digital Equipment Corp. It uses the idea of 'scrip', which is currency valid for only a certain vendor. Instead of users trying to keep track of many different kinds of scrip for many different vendors, Millicent uses 'brokers' to buy many different types of vendor scrip and sell broker scrip to users. Thus users buy a few kinds of broker scrip which can be paid to the broker, who then exchanges it for a specific vendor scrip.

The main goal of Millicent is to lower the cost of each scrip transaction. By lowering the cost of each transaction to the broker and vendor, the minimum payment can be lowered. If the cost per transaction is extremely small, then microcent transactions can be supported. An initial implementation of Millicent has transaction costs consistent with microcent transactions (handling about 1000 Millicent requests per second (Glassman)).

In a later section, a discussion of usage-based pricing leads to the conclusion that microcent transactions may be inevitable.

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Copyright © 1996 Patrick N. Brooks
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Patrick N. Brooks <pbrooks@vt.edu>