Micro Payments

Micropayments are small payments. The current payment infrastructure (credit and debit cards, electronic funds transfers, etc.) imposes too much overhead for people to buy and sell very inexpensive goods and services. Micropayments are an attempt to solve that problem.

For example, one idea is that people should pay royalties for the time their CPU spends executing code written by a particular entity, the way a radio station pays royalties based on whose song they play. Some trusted monitor would count how many cycles are spent in which modules, and then the user might eventually get a bill demanding they send $5 to this company and $10 to that. Alternatively, the total could be payable to a "trustee" who would pay amalgamated totals to the appropriate entities.

You can add various layers of complication, but it ultimately amounts to paying for cycles on your own machine.