One objection to email fees is related to email viruses: if every email you send costs a cent, and you get a virus that sends out 20,000 emails you’ve just lost $200. That sucks. Fortunately, that’s straightforward avoidable by limiting the amount of money your computer can access without your authorisation (by way of password, [...]
The Gnu Hunter writes: Yahoo and Microsoft are looking at ways of imposing a postage fee for emails as a way of reducing the ever increasing number of junk emails or spam. No, Yahoo and Microsoft are looking at ways of making more money by charging for something that was previously “free” and are using [...]
Some more thoughts on this topic. Ecash is actually something of a distraction in the description; there’s no particular need for people to be able to do anonymous transactions, or to transact without talking to a central market — so you can do this just as effectively with market accounts. In that case, it makes [...]
Martin notes that: One fairly silly argument sometimes advanced against Linux is that by reducing towards zero the cost of getting a good operating system, it is somehow communist or anti-capitalist. He’s right: people do make that argument, and it’s silly. It’s especially silly because people already do it for a profit, and even sillier [...]
One risk of solving spam (by doing cool ecash stuff, or by any other means) is that you might be attacked by people who don’t want it solved. I underestimated both the enemy’s level of sophistication, and also the enemy’s level of brute malevolence. I always knew that spammers had no principals and no ethics, [...]
The inimitable White Glenn received one of those obnoxious confirmation-bounces anti-spam software occassionally does these days. As a man of good taste and high ideals, he didn’t like it. How to avoid this problem with our hypothetical $MTP protocol? The only possibility I can see is over analysing all our email — if you get [...]
One of the tricks with paying for http requests is that you screw up the protocol. Normal http requests are a simple request/response pair, and that’s it — you ask for a page, and you get given it. Worse, the protocol is optimised for that: if you want to do more than just send a [...]
One of the fashionable things about ecash is (or at least was back in the mid 90′s when ecash was fashionable, and pre-September 11) that it can provide anonymity: neither the bank, or the merchant, or the government can track how you spend your money. Lucre provides anonymity to the degree that you can’t do [...]
There’s an interesting paper on millicents (digital cash worth about a thousandth of a cent) from a guy who seems to be involved in Microsoft’s Penny Black project. A decade hence, assuming that computers (and their components) continue on the price and performance curves of the last two decades, the minimum transaction grain will be [...]
Oh, the double entendres. Anyway, this Infoworld article quotes Ryan Hamlin, the general manager of Microsoft’s antispam technology and strategy: “It won’t surprise me at all if we spend close to $18 billion a year next year to deal with spam,” he said. This cost includes the price of filtering software and storage hardware and [...]
Each currency has to have a single dedicated bank to handle transactions. It requires a database containing an entry for every transaction that’s taken place. Each transaction needs to do a single element lookup from that database, and there shouldn’t be any locality of reference. Your storage requirements are O(T), and your transaction overhead is [...]
An obvious problem is how to transition from charging nothing for all your mail to charging something, without having everyone else do the same thing at the same time, or not getting any email ever again. There are a few ways we can ease this in. The first and biggest problem is mailing lists. Coping [...]
The biggest difficulty in running an experiment like that is to make sure that it’s possible to get involved in the market. That’s a wildly difficult undertaking: it essentially requires everyone who might ever want to send you email to obtain the tools and understanding to operate in the market. That can be made fairly [...]
Thomas Sowell makes a very convincing argument for markets in his book Basic Economics. In principle, the idea is that markets allow people to redistribute scarce goods (food, labour, materials, land, etc) according to where it’s most useful to society. The more creative you are, the more and better work you do, the more other [...]