Removing the financial incentive to cheat in micropayment schemes

Micropayment schemes usually do not provide fairness, which means that either the payer or the payee, or both, can cheat the other and gain a financial advantage by misbehaving in the protocols. The authors propose an extension to a family of micropayment schemes that removes the financial incentive to cheat. The proposed extension does not provide true fairness, but it renders misbehaving practically futile for both the payer and the payee. This is achieved without any substantial loss in efficiency in most practical cases