Three kinds of markets arise for electronic payments:

• Medium and large purchases: These include items that customers normally purchase with credit cards at stores. They can range from under $10 up to thousands of dollars. This market will most likely be dominated by credit cards. The purchases are large enough to warrant the relatively high cost-per-transaction of a credit card. Security concerns are being actively addressed by both Master Card and Visa. In autumn of 1995 Visa and Microsoft teamed up and released the Secure Transactions Technology (STT) encryption standard. At the same time Master Card , Netscape, CyberCash , GTE, and IBM introduced Secure Electronic Payment Protocol (SEPP). In February of 1996 they teamed up and released a joint draft standard Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) which should be completed by summer of 1996.
  
  
• Small purchases: These include pay-per-view articles and information, one-time access to commercial websites, or a download fee for a piece of software. These charges may be on the magnitude of a dollar or less. These purchases are too small to warrant the costs of a credit card transaction. First Virtual is the real leader in micropayments. Recent developments in this area include the release of the Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) standard from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on November 22 1995.
  
  
• Private purchases: These may include everything purchased for some people who are very concerned about "Big Brother", or special gift items that a customer doesn't want his/her spouse to see. There are a variety of reasons and times that people may want to keep their purchases private. Under these cases an electronic form of cash provides the required anonymity. Most of the proprietary systems out there right now are privacy oriented.