Re: The Crisis with Remailers

[jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>]

At 09:32 AM 5/20/96 -0700, Ian Goldberg wrote:

>I mentioned this to Chaum, and he didn't really seem agree with the need for
>something lower-level...
>
>Another problem with postage in Mixmaster:  the minimum ecash payment is
>$0.01.  Do we want to charge that much for email?  Need we consider
>micropayments?

Absolutely!  Given the exponentially increasing rate of data transmission 
ease, and corresponding cost reduction per bit, any "reasonable" minimum 
payment today becomes an unreasonable one tomorrow, and a hilariously 
outrageous one 10 years from now.

Suppose the US Government had put a "information storage tax" on hard disks 
in about 1980, of about $10 per megabyte which would have worked out to be 
about 1/20 of the retail value at that time.  Today, a 1.6 gigabyte hard 
disk would cost about $1850, which would be $250 for the drive and $1600 for 
the tax...

Any more questions?

Many months ago, I suggested using the idea of "probabilistic payments," in 
which a person could make a very tiny purchase with a large coin, by in 
effect "gambling" with the payment:  You could buy a 0.1-cent email with a 
1-cent coin, in which the likelihood of actually paying is 10%.  
Statistically, both myself and the vendor will be happy in the long run.  An 
advantage of this system is that the payments can be made arbitrarily small 
and of indefinite granularity:  I can pay you 0.3156893 cents with only 
1-cent coins.

I would be surprised if I was the first to think of such a system, at least 
in the ecash world, but I never heard anything to the contrary.






Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com