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Re: [Asrg] About that e-postage draft [POSTAGE]

2009-02-11 18:23:45

On Feb 11, 2009, at 2:45 PM, John Leslie wrote:

  "Banks" would be compensated by debiting a customer account more
than the amount of ePostage issued and/or crediting a customer
account less than the amount redeemed. Or, perhaps there would be a
per-transaction fee (in the thousandths of cents, presumably). I
see no role for IETF in saying which model a "bank" uses.

Just to throw some arithmetic onto this.

A large consumer ISP might send 50 million emails a day externally. Assuming that there isn't "one bank to rule them all" it seems reasonable to assume that
any given "bank" wouldn't handle much more than that. A thousandth
of a cent banking charge would be about $500 / day or $182,500 / year.

That's not a plausible budget for running any organization with the level of reliability and backing that would be needed, not by at least one order of
magnitude.

So "thousandths of cents" doesn't seem realistic language when discussing
a per-transaction fee.

Cheers,
  Steve

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