Micropayments, redux

[David Wagner]

Matt Crawford  wrote:
>> No, it doesn't.  It doesn't take unlimited time for lottery-based
>> payment schemes to average out; finite time suffices to get the
>> schemes to average out to within any desired error ratio.
>
>Strictly speaking, the average will come within your error tolerance
>of the expected value *with probability near 1*.

Yes, but the probability of it being significantly worse than I claimed
(i.e., by more than a factor t) is exponentially small (in t).  One can
easily calculate concretely exactly what the risk curve looks like.
I'll spare everyone the details and just say that I see no reason why
this should be a showstopper in practice.

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