[Cu-wireless] Fwd: Financial Cryptography Update: The Digital Silk Road (DSR)

[David Young]

On Sun, Mar 21, 2004 at 12:13:18PM -0800, Todd Boyle wrote:
> Ian said,
> 
> > DSR is a historical pre-commercial (circa 1994)
> > http://www.agorics.com/Library/dsr.html shared accounting
> > architecture that was proposed to compensate router owners for
> > passing the packets of other entities.
> 
> Good reminder!

The conclusion of that paper:

    Much of the charm of the Internet is the informality of access. One
    can learn of a program through netnews, fetch it via FTP and run
    the program in the span of an hour with no bureaucrats, clerks or
    lawyers involved. This simplicity is as much a matter of Internet
    culture as charter. But what has more charm and informality than a
    flea-market where cash and anonymity prevail?

Are "charm and informality" all that cash-based packet-forwarding has
to offer?

> However, capacity is not infinite and the critical element
> missing from a large-scale urban mesh is only the lack of
> social agreement how to measure or charge each other
> for transit across our hub.

All this time I thought that the shortcomings and expense of existing
technology prevented us from fostering packet-forwarding jealousy and
avarice by building a large-scale urban mesh. In fact, it is the lack
of NET-MONEY that is holding us back.

> SPAM is a great example of
> when happens when no effort is made to charge for use of
> a resource.  SPAMMERS send 1 million ads for viagra,
> or 1 billion, what's the difference?

This sounds to me like, "Either we charge real money for e-mail to be
delivered, or else 1 billion Viagra ads will be sent."  You do not think
that might be a false dilemma?

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933