Re: ecash thoughts

[jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>]

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@pacifier.com