Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST: Our Planet Money team this week is taking a look at the lowly penny. People discard pennies in bowls by cash registers. They walk by them on the street without a thought of picking them up. In fact, a lot of us don't even pick them up when we drop them. NPR's David Kestenbaum reports that there is one place where people think pennies could really cause some change. DAVID KESTENBAUM, BYLINE: What if, as you were surfing around the Internet, there was a way to send really small amounts of money to the people who make things you like - all those cat videos, recipes, blog posts, news stories. In the early days of the Internet, people thought this idea of micropayments was going to be one of the ways the Internet paid for itself. Some programmers at Digital Equipment Corporation actually worked on it back in 1997. Did it have a secret code name, this project? RUSS JONES: It was always called millicent. M-I-L-L-I-C-E-N-T.
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