From: Steve Reid <root@edmweb.com>
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 08:35:45 +0800
To: jimbell@pacifier.com
Subject: Re: ecash thoughts
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960704135836.188C-100000@bitbucket.edmweb.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> But probabilistic payment should be used to allow the minimum average
> payment to go way below this, perhaps to an unlimited extent. 

I just thought of an obvious problem with "probabilistic payments". 

Suppose someone is surfing the web or whatever, and various sites are 
charging, say, 0.1 cents per web page, via probabilistic payments. 
Suppose there is a 1 in 10 chance that the person will pay 1 cent.

The person wanders around the web, acting as though he's perfectly willing
to pay, and participating in the fair coin tosses. Except, he really has
no intention of paying. He will gain free access to 9 out of 10 sites, and
on the ones that he loses the 1/10 gamble, he just backs out of the deal
and doesn't pay anything. The end result is that instead of seeing all of
the web at 0.1 cents per page, he sees 90% of the web completely for 
free. If everyone does this, the sites will go broke.

It's the equivalent of welshing on a bet.

The obvious solution would be to require that the person pay the 1 cent,
then if he wins the 9/10 bet, he gets the 1 cent back. But that will just
move the problem from the user to the server- the site can welsh on the
bet and refuse to pay back the one cent. They will get ten times the
payment that they are supposed to get. 


=====================================================================
| Steve Reid - SysAdmin & Pres, EDM Web (http://www.edmweb.com/)    |
| Email: steve@edmweb.com   Home Page: http://www.edmweb.com/steve/ |
| PGP (2048/9F317269) Fingerprint: 11C89D1CD67287E68C09EC52443F8830 |
|          -- Disclaimer: JMHO, YMMV, TANSTAAFL, IANAL. --          |
===================================================================:)