[Asrg] POSTAGE, was The fundamental misconception about paying for mail

[John Levine]

>} Then 98% pay with fake versions of whatever it is that they give you
>} to say that you have an account.  Same problem.
>
>Well, no, it's not the same problem.  A fake version of an account ID
>matches *somebody's* real account, so instead of 98% of the people
>stealing directly from Dunkin, they're stealing from the other 2% of
>the customers.  Or more likely, they're stealing from a credit card
>company who has a few hundred billion units of the US Gov's attention.

Ah, my spam is OK because I stole the postage from Citigroup.  Well,
it's an interesting idea.

> I mean, really, is it that hard to require that transactions on the
> same identity are serialized to within some tolerance?

In a toy system, it's easy.  In an interestingly large system, it's
phenomenally difficult.  I get the impression you aren't familiar with
transaction systems or large databases.  Or for that matter, why the
double spending problem is a killer for micropayments.

>} That's what Turntide does, except for "history of wanted mail."
>} Why would "history of paying" be better?
>
>Revenue stream to cover all the expenses of putting such a system
>in place and running it.

How much revenue do you expect your postage system to generate?  How
much do you expect it to cost to run?  (Don't forget to account for
the 98% bogus transactions that generate no revenue.)  Do you have any
reason to expect that those numbers will be within two orders of
magnitude of each other?

R's,
John