In the wake of the recent public goods postings and some related traffic on a couple of Finnish mailing lists, the concept of transaction costs has somehow managed to dominate my time. That sort of thing has a lot of unlikely consequences, some of which I think are highly CP relevant. While I tend to agree with Tim about the shorter term trouble with micropayments -- the fact that such payments, well, do not pay -- I'd say in the longer term micropayments are what counts, and not perhaps anonymity. The reason is, most of the economy is, and I think will remain, over-ground. People really don't have enough to hide to make anonymous payments mainstream quickly enough. Sure, they have their applications, some of them radical. It's true they will shake the society quite a bit. But the shadier applications can always be controlled, given the vulnerability of the anonymity infrastructure itself. But micropayments, they are another deal entirely. If and when they become practical, we can envision a whole range of previous unheard-of mass transactions taking place. The kind which need millions plus people before they actually become profitable. This is the situation I alluded to in the public goods example, and any market oriented solution to the problem of coordination will eventually have to tackle the issue of aggregating the cost. That's the problem micropayments, as an idea, are meant to solve. So, what's so notable about such transactions? Simply the fact that they are new. In the past entire classes of transactions (the foremost example would be the ones we nowadays see in the international financial markets) have been enabled by lowered transaction costs. I don't think the spread of micropayments will be an exception to the rule. In fact I would argue that the only *lasting* surprise offered by AP was the fact that when mild wants of large numbers of people can be coordinated, economic efficiency can lead to significant, and heretofore unexpected, outcomes (i.e. getting a notable figure killed). In the end I think such new classes of financial transactions, borne of lowered transaction costs, will be far more significant to the society as a whole than anonymity. I also think this is the essence of what is driving the wider P2P cirlce, at the moment, though few people seem to realize it. So, I would deem it quite likely that the millicent ghetto will eventually run over us. -- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2