BitPass

» see bitpass.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i was in engineering school in ankara through bitpass's whole life. the digital-content micropayment category was a us-coded category in those years, priced in dollars, billed against a credit card a turkish student did not yet have. i read the trade press writeups about scott mccloud selling webcomics by the page through a bitpass wallet. the wallet was not something i could fund from a ttnet billing address.

kurt huang and gyuchang jun set up the company in mountain view in 2002. garage technology ventures led a $1.5 million seed in late 2002. the first product test shipped in june 2003. the pitch was straightforward in retrospect: prefund a bitpass wallet by credit card or paypal, then spend it across participating sites in chunks from a quarter up to a few dollars at a time. the publisher avoided the credit-card minimums on every individual transaction.

the customer list that grew around the wallet looked legitimate. disney showed up. microsoft showed up. first data was on the payments-rails side. royal bank of scotland was a partner on the european push. a $11.75 million series b closed in late 2004 on the back of that traction. the press treatment around the round was that micropayments had finally found a working model after the 2000-era flooz and beenz failures cleared the field.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ mperia ~

bitpass launched mperia in 2003 as the in-house demo for the wallet. it was an indie music store where unsigned artists uploaded tracks directly and set their own prices anywhere from twenty-five cents to a dollar fifty. the artist kept seventy percent of each sale, which was unheard of against the major-label deals of the era. cd baby ran a 2004 partnership integration.

mperia never displaced itunes for casual music buyers. but for indie acts looking for a non-itunes selling surface in 2003-2006 the store delivered. the catalog grew to tens of thousands of tracks. it was the only customer page anyone could name without checking, which became the problem the next year.

~ the postmortem ~

google checkout launched 28 june 2006. the model was: a payments layer where google absorbed transaction fees on the first batch of merchant volume, and afterward charged a rate that sat below the existing card-network minimums. for a publisher comparing google's free tier against a bitpass wallet that required users to prefund through bitpass first, the answer was already written.

january 19 2007 the bitpass team sent the shutdown email to customers. operations closed january 26 2007. the techcrunch deadpool writeup that day named google checkout directly as the proximate cause. mperia went down the same week, its catalog frozen and then archived. the publishers who had built bitpass paywalls into their pages had a week to switch over to a different rail before the wallet stopped honoring redemptions.

~ what survived ~

the technical case for micropayments did not die with bitpass. the cryptographic randomization model peppercoin was working on in cambridge for the same problem got acquired by chockstone the same year. the broader 2002-2007 micropayment-1.0 wave gave way to a quieter category split: ad-supported feeds on one side, monthly subscription on the other. the per-article quarter was deferred for almost two decades until the substack tipping model and the crypto streaming-money attempts of the 2020s, neither of which inherited from bitpass directly.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »