No free spam

[Amir Herzberg]

Ben responded to me thus:

> > This takes care reasonably well of peer to peer e-mail (I think), and
can be
> > easily deployed (any volunteers? I'll be very glad to provide our system
for
> > this !).
> 
> Sure. Is it something I can actually deploy (without everyone else in
> the world also deploying it)?

You can certainly deploy our system, as well as several others, e.g. one
response mentioned correctly MojoNation (of course there are plenty of
reasons to choose ours :-). 

I was puzzled by your saying `without everyone else in the world also
deploying it`. I thought you meant that you are concerned that others will
use it, making your deployment redundant or not commercial etc. Now when
writing this to you I realize I stupidly misunderstood you. What you meant,
I'm quite sure now, if that you are concerned that if you implement such a
payment solutions others will not be able to mail you since they don't have
it. Now that's a very valid concern and I also thought for a long time it
may be a show stopper. 

But now I actually think it could work. Let me explain how. The key is the
belief that micropayment systems MUST emerge - and be interoperable. That is
a payer with account at one Payment Service Provider (PSP) should be able to
pay anybody with account at any PSP. That's certainly our goal - our system
has this property and we plan to work closely with any other vendor which
will want to have this property to ensure interoperability. 

Assuming this, the problem is only the bootstapping phase, before everybody
has accounts in interoperable PSPs. But in that phase when the system is not
yet so widely used, it will be sufficient to force the sender to simply do
some manual process - such as enter a web site to open a demo account and
pay. That's clearly something achievable with our system or others. If it
becomes popular, spammers may develop automated tools to do so as well, but
that will buy them very little as at that point the system will be popular
enough to move to real payments. 

BTW, I've been thinking of payments as the answer to spamming already for
many years, and in fact it was one of my motivations for working on
micropayments (from which our broader 
payment platform emerged). There are others who thought of it long ago, in
particular Kevin Mccurly (see
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/k53/pmail/tsld001.htm). 

Another BTW, the other application I really want micropayments for (and was
my first motivation to this if I recall correctly) is also crypto-related...
it is to motivate people to produce reviews of products, services, and esp.
other reviewers - creating a huge `web` (or directed graph) of credentials.
If these are signed, and identify the reviewed entity by its public key,
these credentials are certificates. Using such a collection of many
credentials is what I believe will be the ultimate solution to public key
infrastructure - and this is another area I'm very interested in (and worked
on). 

Best regards, 
Amir Herzberg
CTO, NewGenPay Inc.  

See demo and lectures/overviews/tutorials on crypto-security for mobile,
e-commerce, etc. in http://www.newgenpay.com/mpay/course/course.html

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ben Laurie [mailto:ben at algroup.co.uk]
> Sent: Monday, May 14, 2001 9:08 PM
> To: Amir Herzberg
> Cc: 'Eugene Leitl'; Russell Nelson; cryptography at wasabisystems.com
> Subject: Re: forwarded message from tylera19 at hotmail.com
> 
> 
> Amir Herzberg wrote:
> > This takes care reasonably well of peer to peer e-mail (I 
> think), and can be
> > easily deployed (any volunteers? I'll be very glad to 
> provide our system for
> > this !).
> 
> Sure. Is it something I can actually deploy (without everyone else in
> the world also deploying it)?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Ben.
> 
> --
> http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html
> 
> "There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
> doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff
> 
> 
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> The Cryptography Mailing List
> Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to 
> majordomo at wasabisystems.com
> 



---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at wasabisystems.com