People have been thinking about micropayments for 15 years, and
transaction systems for 50 years (really), and you are assuming a
cheap solution to a long-term unsolved problem.
I'm assuming the problem is defined wrong if it takes 50 years
to solve. Once you separate token creation/redemption from _all_
other accounting (by journaling the creation/redemption) it becomes
much simpler. And once you move the token database into RAM, timing
problems pretty much disappear.
Sigh. There are lots of transaction systems that work well, and have
been since about 1964. But there are no transaction systems that
handle a very high transaction rate, most of which are rejected and
provide no revenue, at a cost of a tiny fraction of a cent per
transaction. We haven't even started to consider how the transactions
get in and out of the systems with the RAM, and I don't think it would
be productive to do so at this point.
That's why I really think it would be a good idea to figure out what
sort of performance and what sort of cost an e-postage system would
need, as a prototype or as a production system, so in the even that
someone came up with a concrete design, we could tell whether it's
within an order of magnitude of being workable.
R's,
John
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