The crier is paid
for every retelling.

For as long as a payment couldn't be smaller than roughly thirty cents, there was no way to sell a five-cent article. The only move was to bundle a month and charge ten dollars.

Every subscription is a quiet admission that the real unit was too small to sell on its own.

The lepton was the smallest coin of the Greek world, a hundredth of a drachma, struck so ordinary people could pay for everyday things. The widow's two mites were lepta. Nanopayments are the lepton reborn: value as small as $0.000001, clearing in under half a second.