Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com> writes:
In more general terms: A "free market" fundamentally grants more control to those with more money. Postage of whatever variety turns the medium over to those with more money. That would, in my opinion, fundamentally alter the character of email in a strongly negative direction.
OK, lets say we make emails free, unmetered, but they _must_ include a valid token for 0c. (OK Dimitri?) Next we choose a threshold say 1000 posts per day. Seems hard to imagine anyone generating manually over 1000 emails per day. That's more than 1 per minute for a 10 hour day. Next when you sign up for this new email postage system, you have to hand over a $100 deposit. The 0c payments are anonymous. But if you spend over 1000 of them in one day, your identity becomes known (via a mechanism like that used for Chaum's off-line double spending detection protocol). You loose $100. To you, the spammer, the posts cost 10c each. Your account is disabled until you pay another $100. However there are a number of practical problems with the above scheme: - How do we stop spammers buying unwanted 0c postage stamps from people for under 10c a stamp? - Sounds like an online protocol, will be high bandwidth requirements at the bank(s) - How do we stop banks cheating and spamming or selling spammers postage more cheaply Doesn't look like it could work, unless anyone has any ideas to fix-up a distributed protocol which can acheive something like this, and preserve anonymity at the same time. Adam -- Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`