Peppercoin, a much-hyped micropayment transactions service which launched at about to same time as Bitpass (but with no Scott McCloud connection, so we didn’t hear about it quite so much in the comics world), has been sold to some company that sells “customer loyalty marketing incentives.” Whatever that means. What it probably means is that the technology will be stripped out of the Peppercoin system in order to achieve new and very different goals than those originally intended by the company. Maybe some sort of online equivalent of air travel miles. Except micro. Or something. I don’t know. Either way, what I do know is that Peppercoin, much like BitPass, failed to set the world on fire. So BitPass’ failure wasn’t necessarily just an implementation issue. If I remember correctly, Peppercoin worked very differently from BitPass, aggregating payments from many people into larger, less-frequent actual credit card transactions, then spreading the billing out over time, somehow — it was very complicated, but the whole point of their system was to avoid the “three dollar drink minimum” problem that so many people have blamed BitPass’ demise on.

Via TechDirt

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