Experiences in Developing a Micro-payment System for Peer-to-Peer Networks

Micro-payment systems are becoming an important part of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. The main reason is to address the “free-rider” problem in most existing content sharing systems. To address this issue we have developed a new micro-payment system for content sharing in P2P networks called P2P-Netpay. This is an offline, debit based protocol that provides a secure, flexible, usable and reliable credit service in peer to peer networks ensuring equitable participation by all parties. We have carried out an assessment of micro-payment against a non-micro-payment credit systems for file sharing applications. This paper finds that this approach liberates the “free-rider” problem through the evaluation of the proposed system and comparison with other existing systems. We report on the design of our experiment and results of end user evaluation. We discuss the performance of our model compare it to a nonmicro-payment credit model. We analyse the heuristic evaluation performed by a set of evaluators and present directions for research aiming to improve the overall satisfaction and efficiency of our model for peers.We have only prototyped the protocol and investigated its feasibilities for some cases. We need to find out the ways to overcome downloadable technologies which are installed on peer’s computer. Downloading and installing software is the issue that we need to deal with in future. We would like to investigate on a web-based peer-to-peer file sharing service using P2P-Netpay.