> > But tying it to a legitimate system rations the stamps, since the only way
> > to get them is through the legitmate system, who would presumably turn
> > down a request for 10,000,000 stamps from hack3rd0od@yahoo.com.
>
> Why would you? How do you define limits? And legitimate use?
>
> What about mail lists? Who's stamp is used? Because if it's the list-owner,
> hack3rd00d might well have a legitimate need for that, just not a corporate
> need. Are we now limiting high-volume to only corporations?
No, of course not. But if hack3rd0od@yahoo.com* can order up 10M free
stamps and use them to send out 10M pieces of spam, what have we
accomplished? Go ahead, cancel my account, tomorrow I'll be hack3rdo0d
instead.
Like I said, even if you disregard the fact that it's unlikely to be
possible to implement, if e-postage existed, it'd substitute one set of
problems for another, and I've never seen anyone even start to argue that
the new problems are less bad than the old ones.
Call me crotchety, but I'm getting kind of tired of people positing vast
technical edifices and then waving away the reality that they're
unbuildable, and even if built would be uninhabitable. You want
e-postage, great, design it, build it, and prove us wrong. Until then, can
we stop pretending that it's real, because it's not.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner
"Just how much hay did we buy?" asked Tom, balefully.
* - who happens to be me, but you'd have trouble proving it
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