[11842] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: NYTimes 'green card' article
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Norman Hardy)
Thu Apr 21 21:06:54 1994
Date: Thu, 21 Apr 1994 14:27:44 -0800
To: "Mark R. Ludwig" <Mark-Ludwig@uai.com>, com-priv@psi.com
From: norm@netcom.com (Norman Hardy)
At 17:27 4/20/94 -0700, Mark R. Ludwig wrote:
...
>Part of the problem is the indirection. For example, I would have a
>_very_ difficult time recovering costs from someone logically and
>physically distant, and with whom I have no legal relationship.
...
When I buy a coke from a coke machine I have no legal relationship with the
machine. I suspect that it will give me a coke if I give it $.60. If not I
stop dealing with it.
In my ideal world the sender would have to include the postage, a reading
tarrif that I impose on mail from unknown sources and rent for disk space.
My scheme is a ways off but it is spelled out in "The Digital Silk Road".
There were no legal arrangements among traders on the Silk Road, merely a
code of behavior which dealt with cheating.
Abstract: of The Digital Silk Road
Existing and proposed mechanisms for digital money all require large
overhead to transfer money between parties. This overhead makes them
unsuitable for extremely low cost activities such as delivering and
routing packets. We propose a money system with extremely low
transaction cost built into the communication protocols. The money
introduced by this system is much more like coins than like bank
accounts; it supports only small transactions, requires limited trust
among the participants, and requires no central bank. With this as a
foundation, we then describe elements of an open system that fully
supports network resource management, routing, interconnection with
the Internet, and other information services, across trust boundaries
with competing providers for all services. This supports a style of
informal information commerce.
To appear in "Agoric Systems: Market Based Computation",
edited by Wm. Tulloh, Mark S. Miller and Don Lavoie.
A draft of this paper is available thru anonymous ftp at
netcom.com:pub/joule/DSR/DSR1.ps.gz, DSR1.rtf.gz and DSR1.txt.gz.
The file format, .rtf, (Rich Text Fotmat) can be read by many
different word processors including those from Microsoft,
MacWrite II, and some Unix systems. I will produce other formats
with a bit of pressure.
ftp.uu.net:/packages/gnu/gzip-1.2.3.msdos.exe may work on PC clones.
