[12854] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Failings of credit cards
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kent W. England)
Wed Jun 1 18:14:59 1994
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 1994 10:09:19 -0700
To: szabo@netcom.com (Nick Szabo), com-priv@psi.com
From: kwe@cerf.net (Kent W. England)
At 1:50 PM 5/28/94 -0700, Nick Szabo wrote:
>Today, the dominant form of payment over the Internet is the credit
>card. ... this assumes jurisdictional uniformity,
>accounting standards, and high per transaction costs, a
>situation light-years away from somebody running a web
>site on an network that crosses hundreds of jurisdictions
>and dispenses files at $.50 a pop. ...
I think the key distinction to be made in deciding the future financial
transaction base of the Internet is whether or not transactions are
one-shot or ongoing. UDP or TCP. :-)
If each accounting transaction (whether large like a book order or small
like a file at $0.075) is independent and must be fully authenticated and
transacted on its own, then we need a new cost-transaction protocol to
match our data-transaction protocol.
If each accounting transaction is one of many over the course of a
relationship between buyer and seller (call it a "subscription") then we
don't need as capable a financial transaction system. We do one
complicated authentication (called "signup"), occasional financial
transactions (called "monthly bills") and lots of little usage accounting
transactions on a collection of servers that are totalled up into the
monthly bill. This is how we do time-accounting for dialup today. It
should extend rather well into web services. If not, then let's think
about a more complicated one-shot universal accounting system.
--Kent
