Interesting bit of history about attempts to do internet payments from the early 1990s (pre-Digicash).
I had never heard of any of these before.
Some interesting notes:
For transactions under $10, they introduced a product called Cybercoin. People could prepay and buy packages of “coins” directly from the company. This money would be held in a proxy escrow account, separate from both buyers and merchants, which could then be used for small paments, amounting to $10, $1 or less
There are elements here that sound eerily similar to Bitcoin adoption woes:
If you wanted to buy something from NetMarket, you had to download their tailor made browser. At the time, that wasn’t necessarily an easy task. For one thing, the software only worked on Unix machines, and it had to have PGP set up and configured properly.