Re: [Taler] e-postage redux

[Florian Dold]

Hi hellekin,

as you already pointed out, the scalability argument in the text you
linked is not very strong and rather hand-wavy.

But I think the malware argument is even weaker:  Why would you care
about your cheap-ish postage stamps being wasted when you device is
infected by malware?  I'd be way more worried about my credit card
details, my private keys, my browsing history, my online shopping
accounts, my electricity bill (bitcoin mining!), ...

I do agree that users will hate micropayments, but that concern might go
away when they can actually do other useful things with these
micropayments, as opposed to just being allowed to send mail.

- Florian

On 04/20/2016 10:33 PM, hellekin wrote:
> I remember a conversation where using GNU Taler as an anti-spam shield
> in the line of pay-to-whitelist.  At the time it seemed obvious:
> increase the price of sending email, and spam will stop.
> 
> But then I was recently pointed at http://www.taugh.com/epostage.pdf
> which is a decade-ago argument against all forms of e-postage.
> 
> Some of the arguments could be technically avoided, but there's at least
> one point that seriously made me doubt: how to handle Trojan horses,
> that abuse the current user to send email using their (probably
> white-listed) address.  A GNU Taler protection would certainly fail in
> this case, unless you can convince me that this paper is outdated, and
> you found a magic trick.
> 
> ==
> hk
>