Payments as an answer to spam

Ian Grigg iang at systemics.com
Wed May 14 12:36:03 EDT 2003


Adam Back wrote:

> Having a centralised e-cash bank issuing coins (or a group of banks
> with inter-bank clearing) is a highly non-trivial task when you're
> talking about micropayments that are expected to be attached to every
> email.  The volume alone is staggering.

Yes it's a challenge, certainly.  I think the
problem would have to be reduced to many many
issuers of such coins, to enable scaleability.
Great news for providers of such systems, but
still not compelling enough for any of us to
have done anything about it ;-)

> And it's not clear what the
> minimum transaction cost for the system would be where the bank could
> remain profitable after paying infrastructure costs, staff costs to
> maintain security of their bank private keys -- this minimum
> translates into a real monetary cost to the sender.  With hashcash,
> there is effectively no monetary cost to the normal sender; for the
> spammer there is, but I think economists might agree that having
> spammers sitting in the corner burning dollar bills to be able to spam
> is a net good if it is more efficient overall in saved human
> resources, or perhaps feasible where real ecash may not be in the
> sense of the profitability of it.  (Hashcash doesn't need a business
> model where a bank has to turn a profit because there is no bank, nor
> private keys to secure etc).

Imagine a world dominated by hashcash.  I am
a spammer.  I can either run my servers incurring
a cost of - say - a penny each mail going out,
or I can offer to pay the recipient of my outgoing
mail that same penny to read my mail.

I think in the end the latter would win out.  That's
what economists mean by "more efficient use of
resources."  Those pennies are re-used, which
makes them much more powerful than the pennies
that were burnt up.

-- 
iang

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