At 02:18 PM 7/4/96 -0700, Steve Reid wrote:

The person wanders around the web, acting as though he's perfectly willing to pay, and participating in the fair coin tosses. Except, he really has no intention of paying. He will gain free access to 9 out of 10 sites, and on the ones that he loses the 1/10 gamble, he just backs out of the deal and doesn't pay anything. The end result is that instead of seeing all of the web at 0.1 cents per page, he sees 90% of the web completely for free. If everyone does this, the sites will go broke.

It's the equivalent of welshing on a bet.

The obvious solution would be to require that the person pay the 1 cent, then if he wins the 9/10 bet, he gets the 1 cent back. But that will just move the problem from the user to the server- the site can welsh on the bet and refuse to pay back the one cent. They will get ten times the payment that they are supposed to get.

If you're a store and I want to buy something that costs, say, $4.50, and we want to eliminate the need for change (for whatever reason) then I would pay $4.00 up front and we'll flip the electronic coin for the rest. At that point, you already have $4 so I'd have no reason to welsh on the remaining 50 cents. It obviously doesn't work this way if the minimum coin is larger than the current purchase... Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com