Re: fbi, crypto, and defcon

At 10:10 04/08/96 -0400, Robert Hettinga wrote:
>At 2:06 AM -0400 8/4/96, anonymous-remailer@shell.portal.com wrote:
>> As long as they are doing any kind of usage-based
>> charging, that actual act of charging will continue to cost
>> considerably more than the data transmission.
>
>Ah. So, why settle the transactions for digital cash and skip all that
>overhead? Yet another application for micromoney.

True, though even better would be simply to charge you a flat
rate. If billing is that expensive, why bother? 

What happened to the proposals asking for flat-rate pricing before the FCC?

Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta@cpsr.org
http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/  finger amehta@cerfnet.com for public key

Arun Mehta <amehta@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in> writes:

>
>True, though even better would be simply to charge you a flat
>rate. If billing is that expensive, why bother?
>

Tragedy of the Commons.

Flat rate works only if no single user can use more than
a tiny fraction of the total bandwidth.

Martin Minow
minow@apple.com