Re: [Asrg] About that e-postage draft [POSTAGE]

[John Levine <johnl at taugh.com>]

>> People have been thinking about micropayments for 15 years, and
>> transaction systems for 50 years (really), and you are assuming a
>> cheap solution to a long-term unsolved problem.
>
>   I'm assuming the problem is defined wrong if it takes 50 years
>to solve. Once you separate token creation/redemption from _all_
>other accounting (by journaling the creation/redemption) it becomes
>much simpler. And once you move the token database into RAM, timing
>problems pretty much disappear.

Sigh.  There are lots of transaction systems that work well, and have
been since about 1964.  But there are no transaction systems that
handle a very high transaction rate, most of which are rejected and
provide no revenue, at a cost of a tiny fraction of a cent per
transaction.  We haven't even started to consider how the transactions
get in and out of the systems with the RAM, and I don't think it would
be productive to do so at this point.

That's why I really think it would be a good idea to figure out what
sort of performance and what sort of cost an e-postage system would
need, as a prototype or as a production system, so in the even that
someone came up with a concrete design, we could tell whether it's
within an order of magnitude of being workable.

R's,
John