On Dec 2, 1:22am, John Levine wrote:
}
} Ah, my spam is OK because I stole the postage from Citigroup. Well,
} it's an interesting idea.
At the moment it's hard to get real enforcement because nobody can
attach an obvious direct cost to spam (despite all those estimates
of billions in lost productivity) and there are neither hordes of
voters nor big effective lobbies with holes in their wallets calling
for action.
} I get the impression you aren't familiar with transaction systems or
} large databases. Or for that matter, why the double spending problem
} is a killer for micropayments.
I apologize to everyone for allowing the conversation to get steered
back to this, because part of the point was to try to stop framing the
problem as one of micropayments. Maybe that's in itself impossible.
Anyway, you're correct that micropayments are not my area of expertise.
Since this is a research group, here's a pointer to some research done
by someone else:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.0832
The crucial observation is that it may be impossible, or very
expensive, to prevent every possible double spending of a coin
(i.e., a deterministic approach), but that it may very well be
possible to prevent that a particular coin is double spent many
times, using efficient randomised techniques. Even such a weaker
guarantee limits the damage an adversary can do. In other words,
the main paradigm shift is the realisation that double spending a
single coin twice is not so bad, but spending it a hundred times
should be impossible. Of course, such a probabilistic and limited
security property may not be strong enough for the protection of
'real' money. It may, however, be quite workable for currencies
used to enforce fairness among P2P users.
} How much revenue do you expect your postage system to generate?
I don't know, and that's actually where I come back into agreement
with you and disagreement with Barry: I'm not convinced that it
can produce enough revenue to interest anyone in deploying it. It
was Gerald, I believe, who indicated an interest in separating the
discussion of a workable design from the assumption that no design
could possibly be worth the costs.
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