On Nov 20, 6:59am, Gerald Klaas wrote:
}
} > What's the economic incentive for the recipients to expend the
} > resources necessary to generate a stamp for anyone who asks for one?
}
} Better control of their incoming mail stream.
That's not an incentive. It's just exchanging one cost (applying spam
filters) for another (generating cryptographic postage tokens plus
the added cost of maintaining the postage generator). If anyone can
request a stamp, then someone who wants to send a million messages (or
someone who wants to DoS the recipient's stamp generator) can ask for
a million stamps (or ten each from 100k different places).
There has to be an exchange of value between the sender and recipient,
and the value exchanged has to (1) be high enough to dissuade abuse,
(2) be low enough for senders (the ones you "want" to hear from, as
opposed to the spammers) to consider their messages more valuable than
the stamps, and (3) at least pay for the stamp generator plus any
transaction costs of passing around the stamps.
Don't get too worked up over (2). Of course you can recognize Grandma
and give her free stamps. The postage doesn't have to be the same for
everyone -- although with "net neutrality" an ISP who acts as a postage
vendor might be forced to have uniform pricing.
Note that unless the ultimate arbiters of stamps are the end users (a
scaling problem), I don't see what prevents this economy from becoming
a pay-to-spam scheme, which is effectively what bulk snail mail is. In
the physical world bulk postage subsidizes first-class delivery. Here,
it's hard to imagine that "first class" is costly enough to need any
subsidy, so anything beyond the cost of running the stamp generator is
pure profit; which is quite an incentive to sell more stamps, or to
charge the "owner" of the target mailbox to offset the lost income if
the mailbox owner doesn't want the junk.
Like "free" web hosts put their ads on your pages, but paid hosts don't.
} Yes, a stamp is proof of payment, but that "payment" isn't necessarily
} cash. It may be proof of passing through various checks, such as
} having established a connection to a stamp-generator (and leaving your
} real IP address behind in the logs).
That *might* succeed in reducing abuse of the SMTP stream, but it
doesn't dissuade abuse of the stamp generator. Only something with a
real and up-front cost to the sender will accomplish that. I agree
that it doesn't have to be money, but I have yet to imagine the
alternative.
In case you can't tell, the questions I want someone (perhaps Barry) to
answer are: What have I got wrong about this economic model? And if
I've imagined it correctly, can you argue convincingly that it's enough
better than the current situation to be worth the costs of bringing it
into existence?
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