economics of spam (Re: A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?)

James A. Donald jamesd at echeque.com
Wed May 14 03:24:42 EDT 2003


    --
On 12 May 2003 at 21:18, Tim Dierks wrote: Assuming that a CPU
costs $500 and that its value can be amortized over 2 years,
CPU costs .0016 cents/second.

To say the same thing in different words, the spammer's
unattended computer costs 0.0016cents per second, the non
spammer's computer is worth about 0.5cents per second, because
there is an impatient user sitting there waiting for the mail
to complete.

Thus the non spammer's computer time costs approximately four
hundred times as much as the spammer's computer time.

>From this, I conclude that hashcash is not economically viable.
We have to use a form of cash that is similarly valuable for
spammers and non spammers. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     QLQau7uADLb/zG+C/w+cIuiW5I9NSD4m6LNPbwYK
     4zNtefDWUbC4Pp6JJTh53TS6UPtqXu/hY1EPp5PPv


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