[13607] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: An attack on paypal
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anne & Lynn Wheeler)
Thu Jun 12 16:54:44 2003
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 11:26:57 -0600
To: David Honig <dahonig@cox.net>
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Cc: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>,
David Honig <dahonig@cox.net>, Sunder <sunder@sunder.net>,
"James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>,
"Email List: Cryptography" <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.20030611173433.008fbad0@pop.west.cox.net>
At 05:34 PM 6/11/2003 -0700, David Honig wrote:
>When I buy $20 of gas with non-bearer credentials (ie, credit card),
>the vendor does a real-time check on me. Seems fair/useful to be able
>to do same on them. I suppose eBay's feedback suffices... if their
>last N "feedbacks" are negative, I might go elsewhere.
we sort of tried that ... however the financial justification sort of fell
apart. the big thing about BBB is being able to trust some merchant that
you have absolutely no knowledge about. However, the actual buying patterns
are extremely skewed ... with well over 80 percent of the transactions
either repeat or with some organization that there is other avenues of
trust propagation .... and involving a very small number of very large
merchants. The BBB model tends to work with higher value, infrequent
transaction. The remaining online, merchant market segment not covered via
other trust processes, tended to represent a small percentage of total
transactions, spread over a very large population of very small merchants,
and frequently low value.
eBay is an attempt to provide an alternative delivery for such market
segment .... and the issue is how does eBay operations break even
financially on a BBB like offering. The first filter is to quickly catch
major scamming operations ... and differentiate between the one-off
transactions.
--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm
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