Micro-payments Based on Ikp Micro-payments Based on Ikp

LIMITED DISTRIBUTION NOTICE This report has been submitted for publication outside of IBM and will probably be copyrighted if accepted for publication. It has been issued as a Research Report for early dissemination of its contents and will be distributed outside of IBM up to one year after the date indicated at the top of this page. In view of the transfer of copyright to the outside publisher, its distribution outside of IBM prior to publication should be limited to peer communications and speciic requests. After outside publication, requests should be lled only by reprints or legally obtained copies of the article (e.g., payment of royalties). Abstract: Micro-payments are payments too small in amount to warrant the overhead costs of current nancial 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 IBM's Internet Keyed Payment Systems (iKP).