On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 9:59 AM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
That way? Make e-mail cost; have e-postage.
Gee, I wondered how long it would take for this famous bad idea to reappear.
I wrote a white paper ten years ago explaining why e-postage is a bad idea, and there is no way to make it work. Nothing of any importance has changed since then.
http://www.taugh.com/epostage.pdf
R's, John
PS: Yes, I've heard of Bitcoins.
Good lord. I love your page about how a micropayment handling system would have to be so immense it couldn't possibly be built, because otherwise someone would have built one by now. 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] You're postulating needing something 100x the size of the credit card processing system, which does 100,000,000 transactions/day. Facebook's presentation talks about doing billions *per second*, which if I do the math right, puts it conservatively at almost 900,000x the scale of the credit card processing system; certainly well beyond the threshold of what you considered necessary to handle email micropayment transactions. I suspect your notion of "Creating a transaction system large enough for e-postage would be prohibitively expensive." is no longer true. Matt [0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi13/technical-sessions/presentation/nis...