ecash thoughts

[jim bell]

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 at pacifier.com