I&#x27;m sorry, I have to disagree about micropayments.  For most people (including people in finance), micropayments are anything less than 1 dollar.  $0.25 is most definitely a micropayment.  The reason is simple: with any payment processor, your per-transaction fee is something like $0.30 + 3% of the transaction.  So a $0.30 sale nets you zero, because it&#x27;s all taken up by the fee, and anything less than that will cost you money.  For transactions under a few dollars, these fees are absolutely prohibitive.<p>So even for things worth a quarter, a real micropayment system would be a boon.<p>Now, the problem with things like Blendle, the iTunes store, etc., is that even with my definition of micropayments, they&#x27;re not that useful, because they lock you into that vendor: you have to have an account with them, and you basically have a &quot;tab&quot; with them (much like going to a bar) that you build up, and eventually get billed for and pay all at once, so that they don&#x27;t get socked with giant fees.  This, obviously, only favors large players: Apple can afford to sell you $1 movies and songs this way, because it keeps you coming back to their store, but this doesn&#x27;t help sellers who want to sell stuff on their own, outside of some giant player like that (who of course takes a gigantic cut of the proceeds for selling on their store).<p>A <i>real</i> micropayment system would let buyers and sellers exchange pennies at a time, with extremely low fees.  PayPal got us a little closer to this by letting small sellers easily establish an account and get money from buyers (using their credit cards), without having to pay huge fees for a traditional merchant account.  But PayPal gets socked with the same fees from Visa&#x2F;MC as everyone and passes them on, so you still have to pay the same $0.30+3% per transaction.  A micropayment system would have to bypass Visa&#x2F;MC altogether.  We&#x27;ll never have micropayments, or lower fees of any kind, as long as we&#x27;re stuck with the Visa&#x2F;MC cartel.