Have you read the taugh whitepaper? Some of the points it raises
apply to your sketched design.
No - do you have a link?
http://www.taugh.com/epostage.pdf - or at least that's where I found it
when I fetched it, and there's still something there now; I haven't
checked that it's the same, but have no reason to think it's not.
I'm afraid the micropayment argument doesn't hold water, because you
can always pay for blocks of, say, a thousand stamps at a time, and
exactly how hard is it to keep track of one counter per paying
customer?
It's a lot more than that that the stamp vendor needs to keep track of.
The first thing that comes to mind is that recipients need a way to
check that a stamp hasn't already been used - and even if the sender
sends them in order, the recipients won't necessarily check them in
order.
Furthermore, the money paid for stamps goes to the wrong place, ie,
not to the recipients. (Stamp vendors could in principle pay
recipients who get mail with their stamps. This involves creation
of _another_ micropayment infrastructure per stamp vendor.)
Good point. There's a way around this, though - how about the
recipient's stamp vendor collects a portion of the stamp's value from
the sender's stamp vendor, and credits it to the recipient's account?
Sounds superficially plausible, but what do you do for fraud
prevention (that is, how can each tell that the other is reporting
honest totals)? This gets an awful lot of regulatory entities
involved, especially when (say) one of them is in China and the other
is in Nigeria.
This ignores mailing lists and the like, however. [...]
Very true.
Another solution is to use a proof-of-work stamp,
There really is no such thing. Hashcash is not something that can be
attached to a message; it requires an interactive protocol. (There may
be some way to do proof-of-work in an open-loop form, but I haven't
seen it yet.)
Recipients can whitelist the trustworthy [stamp vendors] and
blacklist the others - which is a much easier problem than the
present practice of blacklisting individual senders.
For a little while, until spammers start creating throwaway stamp
vendors, the way they create throwaway domains now.
Still, it may be worth trying. Most of this - on both our parts - is,
fundamentally, speculation, at present. After all, none of this stops
people who mutually feel like it from continuing to use SMTP the way we
all have been so far.
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