> The intention is sender pays, recipient is paid, reflecting the > real scarcity of readers time. Mailing lists would be sent > out without postage, but with cryptographic signature, and > subscribers would have to OK it. Letters to the list would be > accompanied by payment, which would be something considerably > less than a cent, which would yield a profit to the mailing > list operators.
However, it penalizes everyone without an infrastructure for electronic payment.
Well, clearly no spender-pays using real value will arrive before a suitable infrastructure is relatively widely available. As for being penalized, it seems those most put upon are those early adopters who will never receive an important email from someone who could or would find a way to buy or create a stamp.
Its like moving out to a location with poor postal service. Both you and those who wish to contact you are disadvantaged. That's why I think PoW stamp systems will predominate at forst.
I don't own a creditcard suitable for Internet money transfers. I don't need it (and the USD/CZK exchange rate makes everything quite expensive), so for security reasons the option is disabled. Until recently, I hadn't a creditcard at all. What would I be supposed to do in order to send mail, then? What about public terminals, libraries?
What about anonymous mails? Wouldn't it add either a high burden to the remailer operators, or nullify the remailer purpose, adding a shining payment trail right to the sender?
Unless something like ALTA/DMT, Yodel or Lucrative were used.
What about improvised ad-hoc systems? When I have nothing other, I am able to send a mail with just a telnet client. Would it be possible with the new system too?
I don't think so, not without either an ecash/estamp purse or a PoW app.
It is another complication. Now not only the email infrastructure will rely on the Net itself, on the DNS and on the SMTP servers, but payment-transfer systems will be added to the equation, greatly affecting reliability.
This only affects first-time correspondence. After a successful first te-t-te a white list function should allow subsequent email passage without stamps.
steve
