NetPay: An off-line, decentralized micro-payment system for thin-client applications

Micro-payment systems have become popular in recent times as the desire to support low-value, high-volume transactions of text, music, clip-art, video and other media has increased. We describe NetPay, a micro-payment system characterized by de-centralized, off-line processing, customer anonymity and relatively high performance and security using one-way hashing functions for encryption. We describe the motivation for NetPay and its basic protocol, describe a software architecture and two NetPay prototypes we have developed, and report the results of several evaluations of these prototypes.