At 04:04 PM 3/19/2003 +0000, Tony Finch wrote:
Frank de Lange <frank(_at_)unternet(_dot_)org> wrote:
>
>All this talk about 'handling rates' and charges and stamps and such...
>how will we make sure that this does not become just another profit
>center?
I like the Microsoft Penny Black idea of refundable stamps, which is
unfortunately not described on their web page. The idea being that
legitimate email is effectively free, but unwanted email costs money.
Having spend some time working on algorithms for proof-of-work systems
that take a comparable amount of time on all sorts of computers, they
also make the point that schemes like this are doomed by Moore's Law.
I think most all people agree that PoW is, at best, an initial stage to
test the postage mechanisms without requiring some sort of 3rd party
clearing methods. This is especially so if one assumes, and I do, that
anonymous email is a social good that aught to be preserved.
All widely accepted payment systems seem useless, AFAIK, for direct
anonymous postage. It seems that some of the best candidates use some sort
of blinded digital bearer certificates, though none are commercially
available. Here's a link to one which could be in the not too distant
future http://lucrative.thirdhost.com/index.php
Hence work on a mechanism that can provide a proper financial incentive
to use email responsibly or at least professionally.
http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/
Thanks for the link. I think Cynthia Dwork was a co-author on a PoW scheme
in the early 90s (Iwhile she was at IBM?). This idea was also,
independently, "discovered" by the Camram group http://www.camram.org one
member of which now works for MS (though I'm not sure if he's on the
PennyBlack project).
steve
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