[e-gold-list] Re: How Penny Per Page Might Work
At 03:21 PM 11/25/2001 -0500, David Brooks wrote: How is e-gold useful? Transaction fees are orders of magnitude larger than the transaction amount. Steve, With respect, I believe you do not understand the transaction fee structure of e-Gold. This is quoted from the e-Gold webpage: http://www.e-gold.com/unsecure/fees.htm The fee for this transaction is 1% of the transaction amount, subject to a maximum of 50 cents (US$) equivalent value. Steve and I experimented with very small e-gold transactions tonight - if he sent me .1 ounces of gold (USD .002728), I received .06 ounces (USD .001637), and e-gold took .04 (USD .001091) for their spend fee .. which is a spend fee of 40 percent, not 1 percent. I think it's entirely reasonable for the e-gold folks to insist on a floor or minimum charge for transaction processing - because that does have a cost - but it's not well disclosed. I get the impression that .04 ounces is the minimum spend fee, from playing with the calculator at the URL indicated above. I'm still far from convinced that micropayments are important, but e-gold doesn't seem to be a good way to do them if micro means under USD .10 or so. (I get the impression that it might be possible to go a lot lower than that if one used silver, not gold, as the limited factor seems to be ounces, not USD of transaction value - but I don't have any silver to play with, and it's not that interesting to me anyway. Similarly, I wonder about small transactions with higher-value metals. Perhaps other list members are more motivated than I with respect to those experiments.) -- Greg Broiles -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- PGP 0x26E4488c or 0x94245961 4000 dead in NYC? National tragedy. 1000 detained incommunicado without trial, expanded surveillance? National disgrace. --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gold.com/stats.html lets you observe the e-gold system's activity now!
[e-gold-list] Re: How Penny Per Page Might Work
At 08:51 PM -0800 11/25/2001, Greg Broiles wrote: ... Steve and I experimented with very small e-gold transactions tonight - if he sent me .1 ounces of gold (USD .002728), I received .06 ounces (USD .001637), and e-gold took .04 (USD .001091) for their spend fee .. which is a spend fee of 40 percent, not 1 percent. Hi Greg. You are correct, there's a relatively-high spend fee when the payment's that small. Of course, half of that goes to originators of the payer payee which often might also be the spender/spendee, but for the *really* teeny stuff you're absolutely right, e-gold doesn't work well. I think that anything really teeny that's going to work and be popular will have to be bearer rather than account based, fully automated so you don't have to do much thinking to at least give it away, and (here's where I think MoJo will, unfortunately, fail) convertible into other forms of money (especially e-gold!) for anyone motivated enough (who owns enough of the stuff). I'm also not too convinced that the really-small stuff's important, as I don't want to type my passphrase for anything less than a tenth of a gram of gold. I like repeating that they're *possible* because so many people still think they're not. :) My definition of micro involves having the motivation to type a number and a passphrase, obviously nobody really likes doing that. I also think that micropayments might have the advantage of pretty-good security in that nobody wants them so the various criminals out there might not be as motivated to try to steal 'em in the first place. I suspect most users who got them might just redirect all micropayments to something like EFF rather than bother to cash them, but all this is of course only a prediction. Your intuition about e-silver being best for *really* teensy payments is also correct. Conversely, since everything's by weight, the higher value metals might be a tiny bit worse for micro-stuff (but some people -- like me -- enjoy having the P-metals anyway). Thanks. JMR --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gold.com/stats.html lets you observe the e-gold system's activity now!
[e-gold-list] Re: How Penny Per Page Might Work
At 10:15 PM 11/25/2001 -0500, Andrew McMeikan wrote: For sweetspot applications that are considered immoral in *any* place in the world then you get at least a potential problem for those that promote/encourage/use depending on the reach and proportional power of those offended Agreed. But then again this already applies to credit cards (interest is illegal in some Muslim nations) and other mainstream financial products and their usage. I can think of evil 'guilds' that should be defied yet how do you protect against them when they have increadibly large power? It is these very large 'guilds' that object, they notice even if the ones you are truely against are smaller and powerless. An excellent test of any ecash system's anonymity is Child Porn. Traffic analysis is the bamboo spike in the bottom of the financial crypto pit, find a way to avoid the spike, win the prize. Remember you might only want to beat the small bad guys, but you must also be able to beat the biggest because they wont be on your side. Quite a bit of work has been done and continues in this area. http://netcamo.cs.tamu.edu/ Within the NetCamo ( Network Camouflaging ) project, we study how to prevent traffic analysis in mission-critical QoS-guaranteed networks. Some of the people from this project gave a talk at the USENIX Security works-in-progress session on a quantitative analysis of anonymous communications. Abstract is at: http://www.usenix.org/events/sec01/mcdaniel_wip.html Also, Roger Dingledine and Paul Syverson have a recent paper on reputations for MIX cascades which may be of interest, given previous discussions on how to build more reliable remailers. See it at http://www.freehaven.net/doc/casc-rep/casc-rep.ps http://www.freehaven.net/doc/casc-rep/casc-rep.pdf slides at http://www.freehaven.net/doc/casc-rep/slides-oreilly.ps steve --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gold.com/stats.html lets you observe the e-gold system's activity now!
[e-gold-list] Re: How Penny Per Page Might Work
How is e-gold useful? Transaction fees are orders of magnitude larger than the transaction amount. Steve, With respect, I believe you do not understand the transaction fee structure of e-Gold. This is quoted from the e-Gold webpage: http://www.e-gold.com/unsecure/fees.htm The fee for this transaction is 1% of the transaction amount, subject to a maximum of 50 cents (US$) equivalent value. Also, your message appears to have been truncated. Dave Brooks [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gold.com/stats.html lets you observe the e-gold system's activity now!
[e-gold-list] Re: How Penny Per Page Might Work
How is e-gold useful? Transaction fees are orders of magnitude larger than the transaction amount. How is 1% of the transaction amount orders of magnitude *larger* than the transaction amount? Shouldn't that be the other way around? We'll probably see pay per page online when we see pay per page offline and fractional stock share trading from leading brokerage companies. I'm missing the connection between leading brokerages offering fractional stock share trading and pay-per-view web - or are you just trying to imply that pay-per-view web will never be a commonplace reality? Viking Coder http://www.two-cents-worth.com/?VikingCoder --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gold.com/stats.html lets you observe the e-gold system's activity now!
[e-gold-list] Re: How Penny Per Page Might Work
At 03:21 PM 11/25/2001 -0500, David Brooks wrote: How is e-gold useful? Transaction fees are orders of magnitude larger than the transaction amount. Steve, With respect, I believe you do not understand the transaction fee structure of e-Gold. This is quoted from the e-Gold webpage: http://www.e-gold.com/unsecure/fees.htm The fee for this transaction is 1% of the transaction amount, subject to a maximum of 50 cents (US$) equivalent value. You're right. I didn't have my thinking cap on. Still, I have a hard time believing that if e-gold became a micro-payment nexus, with many users holding only small balances and executing frequent small transactions (especially below one cent equivalent) that this would not become a profit problem. As to the truncated message, I meant to provide a link to an analysis of where many (including myself) believe the primary (perhaps only) financially viable markets to launch ecash. Unfortunately, the web site has been down for about a week. Fortunately, I have a copy... Look, this is all part of something I talked about at the June physical meeting in Berkeley: by failing to acknowledge the high-value markets for untraceability, characterized by such things as Swiss bank accounts and income-hiding, porn-trading rings, and information markets, the whole technology of privacy/untraceability gets ghettoized into low-value markets like untraceable subway tokens (wow, gee!), weak versions of proxy surfing tools, and boring attempts to get people to use digital money for things they don't mind using Visa and PayPal for. At the June meeting I drew a graph which makes the point clearly. A pity I can't draw it here. (Yeah, there are ways. My new Web page should have some drawings soon. But this list is about ASCII.) Plot Value of Being Untraceable in a Transaction on the X-axis. This is the perceived _value_ of being untraceable or private. Start with little or nothing, proceed to about a dollar then to hundreds of dollars then to thousands then to tens of thousands and more. (The value of being untraceable is also the cost of getting caught: getting caught plotting the overthrow of the Crown Prince of Abu Fukyou, being outed by a corporation in a lawsuit, being audited by the IRS and them finding evaded taxes, having the cops find a cache of snuff films on your hard disk, and so on.) Some examples: People will demonstrably get on planes and fly to the Cayman Islands to open bank accounts offering them untraceability (of a certain kind). It is demonstrably worth it to them to pay thousands, even tens of thousands, of dollars to set up shell accounts, dummy corporations, Swiss bank accounts, etc. For whatever various and sundry reasons. (They may be Panamanian dictators, they may be Get Rich Quick scamsters, they may be spies within the FBI or CIA.) They expect a value of untraceability to be high, in the tens or hundreds of thousands...or even much higher. Even their lives. Call this the Over $100K regime. I cite this because it disputes directly the popular slogans: People won't pay anything for privacy or untraceability. (In fact, people pay quite large sums for privacy and untraceability. Ask Hollywood or corporate bigshots what they pay not to be traced.) People will also pay money not to be traceable in gambling situations. They gamble with bookies, they fly to offshore gambling havens, and so on. The _value_ to them is high, but not at the level above. If they're caught, they face tax evasion charges, maybe. Call this the $1K-10K regime. (The spread is wide, from low-rent bookie bets which even the IRS probably doesn't care much about to schemes to avoid large amounts of tax.) At lesser levels, some choose to pay cash for their video tape rentals (with deposits arranged) just to avoid leaving a paper trail. (Bet Justice Thomas wishes he had.) And then at very low levels there are the cases where the benefits of untraceability are worth little or nothing to most people. I call this the millicent ghetto. Actually, the ghetto begins down at around a dollar or less. Sadly, a huge number of the proposed untraceable digital cash systems are targetted at uses deep down in this ghetto. (Perhaps because they have no hint of illegality?) On the Y-axis. Plot here the _costs_ of achieving untraceability for these levels of achieved. This is the cost of tools, of using the tools, of delays caused by the tools, etc. For example, flying to the Cayman Islands to personally open a bank account may cost a couple of days in time, the airfare, and (more nebulously) the possible cost of having one's photograph taken for future use upon boarding that plan for Switzerland or the Caymans. Lesser costs, but still costs, would be the costs of using Freedom (much frustration, say most of my friends who have tried to use it), the costs of getting a Mark Twain Bank digital cash account and actually having it work the way it should,
[e-gold-list] Re: How Penny Per Page Might Work
snip CONCLUSION: To really do something about untraceability you need to be untraceable. Draw this graph I outlined. Think about where the markets are for tools for privacy and untraceability. Realize that many of the far out' sweet spot applications are not necessarily immoral: think of freedom fighters For sweetspot applications that are considered immoral in *any* place in the world then you get at least a potential problem for those that promote/encourage/use depending on the reach and proportional power of those offended in communist-controlled regimes, think of distribution of birth control information in Islamic countries, think of Jews hiding their assets in Swiss bank accounts, think of revolutionaries overthrowing bad governments, think of people avoiding unfair or confiscatory taxes, think of people selling their expertise when some guild says they are forbidden to. I can think of evil 'guilds' that should be defied yet how do you protect against them when they have increadibly large power? It is these very large 'guilds' that object, they notice even if the ones you are truely against are smaller and powerless. Most of all, think about why so many efforts to sort of deploy digital cash or untraceability tools have essentially failed due to a failure of nerve, a failure to go for the brass ring. - steve Traffic analysis is the bamboo spike in the bottom of the financial crypto pit, find a way to avoid the spike, win the prize. Remember you might only want to beat the small bad guys, but you must also be able to beat the biggest because they wont be on your side. cya, Andrew... --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gold.com/stats.html lets you observe the e-gold system's activity now!
[e-gold-list] Re: How Penny Per Page Might Work
Let me make it clear (and I hope Mr. Schear can also clarify his message) that I think e-gold's one of many tools that make very small payments easier than they're made out to be. e-gold spend and storage fees are low enough that I think it's economical, but I'd bet the more important role of e-gold may be as a base for other kinds of things, too. http://www.ecoin.net/ is probably only the beginning. JMR Trivia question for (at least) a gram! What's the name of the VERY FIRST currency that was based wholly on e-gold, and (this is the hint...) where is it used? First correct answer gets a gram of e-gold! --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gold.com/stats.html lets you observe the e-gold system's activity now!
[e-gold-list] Re: How Penny Per Page Might Work
Let me make it clear (and I hope Mr. Schear can also clarify his message) that I think e-gold's one of many tools that make very small payments easier than they're made out to be. e-gold spend and storage fees are low enough that I think it's economical, purely FWIW, my opinion is that microspends are an initially appealing, but on further thought stupid idea that will never amount to anything. Although it is super that e-gold makes microspends percetly possible with, as you say, awesome egold technology / pricing .. one need look no further than egold for the answer to microspends. (I created and operated the first, only, and almost certainly highest-grossing ever true micropayment site, which is http://rootworks.com/fauxdoyevsky -- but it's only of historical interest.) Trivia question for (at least) a gram! What's the name of the VERY FIRST currency that was based wholly on e-gold, and (this is the hint...) where is it used? First correct answer gets a gram of e-gold! Hmm, do you mean digigold, which is used on some porno site? I feel porno is part of the answer! :) If I'm right: http://1mdc.com/pay.cgi?241164jpm1.00grams --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gold.com/stats.html lets you observe the e-gold system's activity now!
[e-gold-list] Re: How Penny Per Page Might Work
James M. Ray wrote: Trivia question for (at least) a gram! What's the name of the VERY FIRST currency that was based wholly on e-gold, Flying Rat and (this is the hint...) where is it used? First correct answer gets a gram of e-gold! It's not used now that I know of. Bob --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-gold.com/stats.html lets you observe the e-gold system's activity now!
