On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 7:40 PM, John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
The numbers you list in your argument against a micropayment
system being able to function are a fraction of the number of transactions Facebook deals with in updating newsfeeds for the billion+ users on their system.[0]
... which is completely irrelevant because they don't have a double spending problem. Sheesh. It's easy to scale up stuff that is trivially parallelizable.*
Apparently, in the intervening 10 years since you wrote that, you might have missed some advances in the state of the art in computer science. http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.0832v1 I quote from the abstract: " Contrary to the commonly held belief that this is fundamentally impossible, we propose several solutions that do achieve a reasonable level of double spending prevention" I suggest you update your 'commonly held belief' that the double spending problem is intractable. ;)
Also, I wrote that ten years ago. Add an extra zero or two to the numbers if you want, but it doesn't make any difference.
Perhaps the number of zeroes doesn't make a difference; but solving the double spending problem would seem to play a much bigger role in making a difference to your conclusion from ten years ago. Note that one of the concepts around the double spending problem is that of offline spending being able to happen in massively large scale in very short time before the network is rejoined; however, in the case of email, that situation is largely a dead end; if you're not online, you're not going to be making very many mail connections. What may have been seen as impossible ten years ago may now be completely feasible. ^_^;
Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
* - a term of art, look it up
Thanks! Matt