Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project

[R. A. Hettinga]

At 11:49 AM -0800 12/28/03, Jim Gillogly wrote:
>wouldn't it be preferable to prove that you've contributed
>the same amount of power to a useful compute-bound project, such as
>NFSNET.org or GIMPS or Folding at home or SETI at home?

Simple economics. If you're going to go so far as using some cryptographic
proof of paying a transfer-price ("work", "good" or otherwise :-)), you
might as well just pay a straight price to the recipient instead, in the
same way that "contributed" cycles for such efforts like the above -- and
open source software, for that matter -- would increase dramatically if
transaction costs were low enough to *pay* for such things as they're
produced.


Certainly the implicit price of "free" email keeps going up. I notice,
lately, that the less-than-a-year-old Bayesian filters on Eudora are
completely circumvented now by messages containing a word-salad of a
hundred random words or so and a web-bug graphic containing the spam
message inside. Frankly, I expect that the only thing of real value is the
web-bug itself, which proves that a message has been received by a working
email address, so it can be sold to other spammers in some greater-fool
market of email lists.



As most people here learned a long time ago, the only real way to solve the
spam problem is with good old fashioned cash, payable to the recipient of
the message: "A white list for my friends, all others pay cash".

Everything else is just barter and transfer pricing. Though I might grant
that such stuff *might* make a good first step to some cash-settled
end-state, I personally think it's a waste of, well, time, if not actual
money. I suppose proving it doesn't work is worth something, I suppose.
And, now that I think of it, stuff like camram and hash cash *did* require
the invention of exchange protocol of some kind, which is, actually, quite
necessary to exchanging real money for service later on.


Which is one way of saying that doing cash-settled transactions for mail at
the SMTP-protocol level just not that hard anymore, people. And, the more
spam there is, the easier it becomes. Think of it as the charging of an
economic capacitor or something, and I think lots of people on this list
will be in a position to earn some serious money when it goes off.

Of course, it *would* be fun to calculate what the threshold transaction
cost might be to make this happen or something, but like all financial
experiments, this stuff must be observed in an actual market, or nobody
will believe the data anyway. It's just a matter of integrating, and not
necessarily writing, code, now.


Again, the cost of doing this keeps falling, and the cost of "free" email
keeps going up. Somebody's going to just stick a mint onto an online store
of value and see if it works someday. Then things are going to get
interesting.


Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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