Communications of the ACM
A Secure, Anonymous, Easy Way to Pay for Online Content
Researchers have developed a way to pay for online content without making cash payments.
Credit: patterbuzz.com
Researchers at the University of Luxembourg have developed a new way for readers, viewers, and gamers to pay for online content without making cash payments.
Every time users like the content, they can choose to donate a small amount of their PC's spare computing power. Bitcoin and other virtual currencies can use the spare processing power to perform the billions of calculations they need to build and maintain their virtual ledgers. The donation would generate virtual currency payments to the content providers. The virtual currency could then be converted into standard fiat currencies to remunerate authors, artists, and other content generators.
To address the issues of security and privacy, a verifiable proof of work certificate is generated and sent to the content provider using an anonymous network when the computation is completed. The content provider is paid in virtual currency for the amount of computation performed by the user.
"Each transaction would only be a micro-payment of a fraction of a cent, but this could become an important source of revenue for very popular content providers," says Luxembourg professor Alex Biryukov.
From University of Luxembourg
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Abstracts Copyright © 2015 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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