Abstract: of The Digital Silk Road

[norm@netcom.com (Norman Hardy)]

Existing and proposed mechanisms for digital money all require large overhead
to transfer money between parties. This overhead makes them unsuitable for
extremely low cost activities such as delivering and routing packets.
We propose a money system with extremely low transaction cost built into the
communication protocols. The money introduced by this system is much more
like coins than like bank accounts; it supports only small transactions,
requires limited trust among the participants, and requires no central bank.
With this as a foundation, we then describe elements of an open system that
fully supports network resource management, routing, interconnection with
the Internet, and other information services, across trust boundaries with
competing providers for all services. This supports a style of informal
information commerce.
 
To appear in "Agoric Systems: Market Based Computation",
edited by Wm. Tulloh, Mark S. Miller and Don Lavoie.
 
A draft of this paper is available thru anonymous ftp at
netcom.com:pub/joule/DSR1.ps.gz, DSR1.rtf and DSR1.txt.
The file format, .rtf, (Rich Text Fotmat) can be read by many different
word processors including those from Microsoft, MacWrite II,
and some Unix systems. I will produce other formats with a bit of pressure.