From: frantz@netcom.com (Bill Frantz)
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 19:48:29 +0800
To: Jeff Barber <vznuri@netcom.com (Vladimir Z. Nuri)
Subject: Re: Micropayments: myth?
Message-ID: <199606070553.WAA28796@netcom7.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 10:05 PM 6/6/96 -0400, Jeff Barber wrote:
>Or are you saying that each IP packet will have an appropriately sized
>digital cash payment attached?  That seems like too much overhead.
>And besides, that contradicts your idea that the user would explicitly
>approve each wallet access.
>
>It gets even worse if you're an ISP, you obviously can't sit there
>and approve each session that goes by (even if you could distinguish
>higher level session boundaries which you won't be able to do).  Are
>you just to assume at the end of the day that everything worked
>perfectly and you received enough revenue to cover your costs without
>knowing anything about the payment/usage profiles of any of your
>customers?  And how is the ISP's network provider to know how much to
>charge the ISP?

I think I'm starting to sound like a broken record, so I'll stop with this
post.  Some of the issues you are discussing are addressed by the Digital
Silk Road proposal from Norm Hardy and Dean Tribble.

See: http://www.agorics.com/agorics/dsr.html

Bill


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