Dear Robert,

mailing list. In fact, as I recall I once discussed with John Gilmore after a Bay Area Cypherpunks Physical Meeting whether he would pay me to implement some sort of solution to spam, but we didn't agree on a strategy.

Damnit, Zooko, it's all your fault! (I'll try to resist forwarding my next thousand spams received to you. lol) Friend Venkat and I wrote a paper on self-extending wireless networks based on the concept of micro (or perhaps nano) payments for moving digits across a given router. Setting payments very high would reduce traffic, of course. There's also the concept of charging to receive e-mails. A person could have a fee, say, $100 for receiving e-mails from unknown third parties. I can white list friends and family (well, some family) and charge them nothing. People who really want me to see something can pay the fee. People with a lot of time can set the fee very low, perhaps make some money.

Hey, the future is long. (We hope.)

The future is long and mankind's ingenuity is infinite. Life is good while the bad times come not.

...

One of the larger reasons is that despite a lot of smart people working on micropayments, we have nothing approaching a system that will work for billions of tranactions per day, where 90% of the purported payments are bogus, along with the lack of any interface to the real world financial system that would scale and withstand the predictable attacks.

Actually, we had such a system, and we called it e-gold. It could offer a millionth of a yen's worth of gold as a micropayment. It had great payment validity. And there were many people providing interfaces to the real world financial network. The government came in and broke it in December 2005, couldn't figure out why they were there, and came back and broke it again in April 2007. It remains broken, and the government people involved (some of whom are reading this list) are despicable thugs who should be ashamed of themselves and commit suicide to regain some semblance of honor. Nevertheless, it worked. Sidd, what's the micro-est payment I can make on Pecunix? I know you support currencies like the Yen, but how many digits after the decimal? Obviously, there's no reason you couldn't make an arbitrarily large number, like ten, or twelve available. I should note that Pecunix has a proven interface with Goldmoney, via bailment and redemption.

Coincidentally, I just blogged today about how we are much closer to this now than we were then, even though none of the smart people that you were probably thinking of are involved in the new deployments: http://testgrid.allmydata.org:3567/uri/URI:DIR2-RO:j74uhg25nwdpjpacl6rkat2yh...

That's a very, very long URL.

WoW-gold, for example, appears to have at least millions of transactions a day. Does anyone have more detail about the scale and scope of these currencies?

Worlds of Warcraft gold is a virtual only currency, though various secondary markets exist for things one might want in the game. The only thing that would scare me away from checking it out is reading that Graham Kelly loves it, is selling lots of it, has checked out the owners through his private investigators, and is meeting with them soon. He said much the same about OSGold, INTgold, Stormpay, Brightpay, Notsobrightpay, Reallyquitedullpay, but I exaggerate.

...

My white paper could use a little updating, but the basic conclusions remain sound:

http://www.taugh.com/epostage.pdf Thanks! I'll read this.

Me, three. Can you feed this message back their way, Robert? Kevin, is Comoro.net ready for prime time? Regards, Jim