At 4:21 pm -0500 on 12/18/97, William H. Geiger III wrote:
Well IMNSHO hashcahs mail sucks!! It opens up the pandora's box of usage based charges for everything done on the 'net. What will be next? FTP sites charging hashcash for DL's? WebPages charging hashcash per hit? DNS servers charging per lookup? Routers charging per packet?
Yup, and you'll like it too. Especially if it efficiently prices net.resources so well that the cost of "administering" and "controlling" them disappears, well past the last basis point compared to our current network resource "allocation" scheme, with time-based fixed pricing, "peering" agreements, etc. ... For details of the foundations of this, cf Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control", or any e$ rant I've written in the past few years. Remember my joke about a router which saves enough out of operations to buy a copy of itself? Micromoney mitochondria, picomoney processor food, and so forth... Look, Ma, no (human) hands...
Note: In Adams proposal for hashcash only charges the user CPU cycles. The incentive for wide implementation of hashcash is going to be a real ecash based system where the implementors can make $$$ off it.
Yup. Money's fungible, and all that. In collision algorithms like hashcash and MicroMint, you're effectively using computation time as copy protection on unique digital objects, but *only* for that, like you're only using the cost of intaglio printing to create unique paper bearer certificates, dollar bills being a good example. You still have to add *value* to those unique objects, and for that you need a market to set a price. (Sorry, Adam) The parallels are even greater for things like hashcash, or at least MicroMint. Like real coins in meatspace, the first collision-coin's expensive to "mint", but the rest are vanishingly cheap. However, you *do* want to make them to be worth something besides cycle time. That's because the cost of anything is the foregone alternative, and all that. If you don't attach fair value to unique useful items, someone else will and start arbitraging them anyway. Ticket scalpers are a classic case of this. Might as well get into the business explicitly instead of creating it for someone else, I figure. Anyway, all this fun with money requires, horrors, an actual financial intermediary. Yet another private currency, in other words. Probably whole bunches of them, I bet, all competing to fill each available market niche. CryptoAnarchy, MarketEarth, Geodesic Economy, whatever...
I have *PAID IN FULL* for my Inet usage!! What bits I send over the Inet, how many bits I send, and who I send them to is NO ONE's BUSINESS but my own!!! -- Last Anarchist of the Inet.
Sounds more like an industrio-socialist, to me. :-). Naw... Just pulling your leg. Put your Glock away... Seriously, I can't imagine fixed prices for *anything* once we have instantaneously settled cash auction markets for anything you can send down a wire. Fixed pricing is an artifact of long production runs, hierarchically organized "economies of scale", and all that. Moore's "Law" creates diseconomies of scale, particularly for information goods and services on a public network. Nodes become cheaper compared to lines, which gives you geodesic networks instead of hierarchical ones, all that stuff. The, um, net, result is auction pricing and cash settlement. Not will you pay in full, Mr. Geiger, but you'll pay cheaper, too. :-). Lots cheaper, I bet... If you could have cash-on-the-routerhead packet switching, it would behoove each router to have as many connections as possible to sell it's services down. You get a *more* geodesic network. That means lots of smaller routers instead of Forbin-sized ones that we're trying to build now. Frankly, super-routers are lost cause. No switch can monopolize the traffic, or it'll choke and the network will route around it. That's the nice thing about Moore's "Law" on the net. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: http://www.fc98.ai/