At 09:08 PM 11/8/95 -0800, Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com> wrote:
Consider, though, what happens in the current ecash system if it were used to charge a penny per page. You would click on a link in your web browser to go to the new page. It would set the GET request to the remote server as usual.
For penny-a-page on-line services, unless ecash transaction costs are _radically_ cheap, it probably makes more sense for the service to sell its own tokens, bought with (anonymous or non-anonymous) ecash, which you then trade for pages. No calculation required, just an on-line lookup for double-spending and you don't get your page if you double-spend. An alternative to them picking the token numbers is for you to give them the numbers and them to keep them in their database, but that's probably unlikely to be done and doesn't really buy you much privacy.
I think that one thing that's needed is the concept of probabilistic payments. The problem: How do you pay, say, 1/10th of a penny for a good or service if the minimum denominated coin is a penny? This is important, because as we all know the cost of providing computer services of all kinds (and data transmission) can be expected to continue to drop as time progresses. If we allow the minimum size coin to control our lives, it will keep prices higher than they ought to be and prevent low-cost services from existing. The answer, I suggest, is that the payer and payee should "flip a coin," actually a probability, such that the likelihood of making the payment times the size of the payment equals the intended payment. If a seller wants to sell access at 1/10th of a penny per page, he and I can flip a 10-sided coin (using encryption principles already established) leading to a 1/10 likelihood that I would have to pay 1 cent, and a 9/10 likelihood that I'll get the service for free. On the average, it'll be a payment of 1/10th of a cent.