Re: e-postage stamps, was Welcome to the new(ish) ASRG list

> > Running a transaction system that has to handle billions of
> > transactions a day is a notably unsolved problem, and not for lack of
> > trying.  The synchronization required to deter double spending of
> > coins or stamps or whatever you want to call them is inherently very
> > difficult.
>
>Which basically pits the best as the enemy of the good.

No, it's the real as the enemy of the fantasy.  I'd like space based
lasers to zap spammers in real time, too.

>Verification of a stamp wouldn't have to be much different from a DNS
>query. "Is the following n-tuple (perhaps source plus stamp) valid?",
>or likely valid would be far better than what we have now.

Oh, OK.  So you give me one stamp, and I use it on 100,000,000 million
pieces of mail, each of which verifies.  Seems reasonable.

If that's not what you mean, the double spending problem is what makes
the giant transaction system intractable.

On the other hand, if you're only talking about rate limiting mail
sent from an individual ISP by its customers, that is a solved
technical problem that doesn't need stamps.

R's,
John