Subject: RE: [Asrg] (no subject)

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 19:51:47 -0700

> 5 billion transactions per day doesn't impress me as proof positive
> of anything, particularly world-wide.
> 
> Obviously if we can deliver that many emails per day THEN WE CLEARLY
> CAN HANDLE THAT MANY TRANSACTIONS PER DAY! Nicht wahr?

The fact we perform 5 billion transactions with no charge mechanism in an
entirely decentralized fashion does not provide an existence proof for
being able to resolve 5 billion charge transactions.

VeriSign handles 5 billion transactions a day and many milions of payment
transactions, they even flow through some of the same systems. But they
are not directly equivalent. A single payment transaction costs several 
hundred times more to support than a single DNS transaction.

Funny thing is that the minute I suggest accreditation, which would
involve each mail server requiring an SSL cert equivalent we have people
railing against 'the VeriSign tax'. Then folk go and suggest a payment
system which will inevitably require micropayments. Go work out where
the cybercash IP is owned.

I don't see the market opportunity here. Setting up a system that could
handle the demands is certainly possible, it is already in place for the 
telephone. But the telephone markets are trending towards flat fee 
charging.

		Phill

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From: "Alan DeKok" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 10:36:42 -0400

> being able to resolve 5 billion charge transactions.

  One way to lower the number of messages is to aggregate the costs
per ISP over time.  e.g. Rather than accounting for each transaction,
account for N transactions between you and ISP X over Y hours.

  The real charges can then be based on differentials, and not on
absolute numbers.  "You're charging me $1000 for my mail, but I'm
charging you $900 for mail you sent to me, so I've only got to pay you
$100."

  The end result of this system, though, ends up looking a lot like
accreditation, where the accreditation is "ISP is/is-not
revenue-neutral to the rest of the net."  i.e. has a balanced flow of
traffic, OR pays his bills on time.

  We already know that spammers hide their traffic on zombie machines,
so this system won't let us bill the spammers.  Rather, it lets the
spammed recipients bill the ISP originating the spam for not fixing
their system.  The ISP is then free to push those bills onto their
customers, who are running zombied machines.

  That's probably the one real utility of any e-postage system: Permit
better accounting of the cost of spam.

  Alan DeKok.

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From: Barry Shein <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 16:44:05 -0400

Yeah well via some creative editing you managed to reverse my point
and create a straw man to argue with.

The responded-to claim was that it's difficult if not impossible to
imagine a system which could impose a charging mechanism on 5 billion
e-mail msgs/day, too many transactions.

I countred that the fact that we obviously handle those 5B msgs/day
would not seem to argue AGAINST the possibility of adding a little
more processing to each, it would seem to argue FOR the possibility.

But a proof? No, not a proof, not either way. Which was my point
exactly.