Some critical thought as to why a particular model which supports an
objection might just be a bad model would be useful also. Straw men
and all that.
I entirely agree. But there are bad models all around. I also understand
that a lot of the details of any e-postage system are not interesting to
you or to a lot of other people (frequently including me), but boring
isn't the same as easy or cheap. When I write someone a check, I don't
care about the details of how the check gets from his bank back to my bank
(or the check's picture more likely these days) or how the money goes out
of my account at my bank through some bank version of cyberspace into his
bank and his account, and all the other things that happen if there isn't
money in my account to pay the check. But someone had to work it out, and
there are large, expensive, complex back office systems making it all
happen.
Since an e-postage transaction does basically the same things as any other
financial transaction, if you're going to claim that it's not like all the
other kinds of transactions, you really have to do more than wave your
hands. Even the simplest kind of transactions, where you hand me a
quarter to buy a paper, have to be backed up by a credible issuer of the
quarters and some way I can turn the quarter into money that's useful for
something else.
Maybe there are no settlements, who told you there have to be
settlements?
You did. You said that we need an e-postage system to rebalance the costs
of e-mail. Settlements are the way that the money gets from the senders
to the recipients who bear the costs. In the absence of settlements, only
the senders' ISPs or maybe the banks who sell them the stamps make any
money.
I gather from the rest of your message that you have a model of e-postage
that doesn't do settlements, doesn't have double spending problems, and
will work fine in the face of floods of mail with fake postage. Don't
leave us in suspense. Tell us about it. If you know how to prevent
double spending of stamps without checking with the issuer, I know a whole
lot of micropayment researchers who'd like to talk to you, since that's a
problem that they've been thinking about for at least a decade.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
"I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.
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