Making Payments on the Internet

A review of these efforts reveals the importance of security, authenticity, and privacy, which are often overlooked or taken for granted in other instances of making a payment. Money is an ancient human artifice. For approximately 3000 years coins have been minted in India and Greece. Minting coins for use as media of exchange was a significant improvement over the alternative: exchange of metals by weight for purchases. Coins made a particular amount and quality of metal easily recognizable and hard to counterfeit. Milling the edges of coins made the practice of removing small amounts of metal from the coins very easy to detect. The creation of banks of deposit and their vaults made safeguarding coins easier. The Internet has begun to make the idealized marketplace discussed in economic textbooks seem more plausible. It allows low-cost, speedy, convenient, and informative communication across the world. However, to become an active market in goods and services the Internet must overcome a fundamental hurdle: a way must be devised for buyers and sellers to securely and conveniently exchange payment over the Internet. Software companies and financial institutions are now developing methods that will allow people to pay on the Internet.