On 3/30/2014 12:11 AM, Barry Shein wrote:
I don't know what "WKBI" means and google turns up nothing. I'll guess
"Well Known Bad Idea"?
Since I said that I found the idea described above uninteresting I
wonder what is a "WKBI" from 1997? The idea I rejected?
Also, I remember ideas being shot down on the ASRG (Anti-Spam Research
Group) list primarily because they would take ten years to gain
acceptance.
Over ten years ago.
Maybe they were bad ideas for other reasons. Some certainly were.
But there's this tone of off-the-cuff dismissal, oh that would take
TEN YEARS to gain traction, or that's a WKBI, which I don't find
convincing.
I read your paper, for example, and said it's a nice paper.
But I don't find it compelling to the degree you seem to want it to be
because it mostly makes a bunch of assumptions about how an e-postage
system would work and proceeds to argue that the particular model you
describe (and some variants) creates impossible or impractical
hurdles.
But what if it worked differently?
At some point you're just reacting to the term "e-postage" and
whatever it happens to mean to you, right?
Imagine living in a world where this system is implemented. Then
imagine ways to break it. The first thing I can think of is money
laundering through hundreds of source and destination email accounts.
The second is stolen identities or credit cards where the money doesn't
exist to begin with (Who pays when this happens?)
Third is administrative overhead. Banks/paypal/exchanges/someone is
going to want a cut for each transaction, and they deserve one since
they're going to end up tracking all of them and need to be able to
reverse charges when something goes wrong. But then you have a central
point of failure and central monitoring point so you want to involve
multiple exchanges, banks, etc.
Then you've got a dictatorship somewhere who says they want an extra
$0.03 tacked on to each transaction, only it's not $0.03 it's <insert
famously unstable currency here> so any mail that goes to that country
has to have custom rules that fluctuate multiple times a day.
Then there is my mom, who knows just enough about computers to send cat
pictures and forward me chain letters. She'll not understand that email
costs something now, or how to re-up her email account when it runs
out. The administrative burden will either fall to me or her ISP, and
each phone call to the ISP probably costs them $$ because they must pay
a live human to walk someone through email.
You can't really say you've exhaustively worked out every possibility
which might be labelled "e-postage". Only a particular interpretation,
a fairly specific model, or a few.
When people talked of "virtual currency" over the years, often arguing
that it's too hard a problem, how many described bitcoin with its
cryptographic mining etc?
Bitcoin might well be a lousy solution. But there it is nonetheless,
and despite the pile of papers which argued that this sort of thing
was impossible or nearly so.
Note: Yes, I can also argue that Bitcoin is not truly a virtual
currency.
Sometimes a problem is like the Gordian Knot of ancient lore which no
one could untie. And then Alexander The Great swung his sword and the
crowds cried "cheat!" but he then became King of Asia just as
prophesized.
>
> Regards,
> John Levine, jo...@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for
Dummies",
> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
The answer is that you can't do this to SMTP. Nobody will ever have the
answers to all the questions involved with adding cost transactions to
the protocol. The only way to do this is to reboot with a new protocol
that people start to adopt, and the only way they'll do that is if it's
markedly better than the old way. You have to remember some people when
given the choice of paying for email or accepting 10 spams/day will opt
for accepting a little spam.
The good news is, with email consolidated into 5 or so large providers
and most people using webmail or exchange, you've got an opportunity to
change the backend. Not much software has to be modified, but you do
need those large providers to buy-in to the idea.
