On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, Ayyasamy, Senthilkumar (UMKC-Student) wrote: > " If I don't know you, and you want your e-mail to appear in my > inbox, then you must attach to your message an easily verified > "proof of computational effort", just for me and just for this > message. > > If the proof of effort requires, say, 10 seconds to compute, then > the economics of sending spam are radically altered, as a single > machine can send only 8,000 messages per day. tracking moore's law could be a problem. > The recent proliferation of spam has lead to a renewed interest in > these ideas. This work is about both the choice of functions that > can be used to yield easily verifiable proofs of computational > effort, and architectures for implementing the proof of effort > approach. Filtering and/or forcing senders to pay in other > currencies, such as human attention and money, will be covered as > time permits" "Sender pays" is good. The penny black stamp effectively introduced a flat-rate tax on sending letters, rather than a variable-rate tax on receiving them, effectively turning mail into a common good available to all society. The government also undercut private messaging operators and effectively put them out of business, but could use money earned towards other services for society (having simplified and saved on its operational costs along the way). So, computing as a social good - you want to send an email to someone you're unknown to, you've got to provide proof that you're participating in SETI@home, searching for big primes, in a distributed crypto challenge, working on processing public GIS information, autocomparing versions of typed ascii out-of-copyright texts (or raw CD rips?) for accuracy, processing gene data or archived NASA tapes or otherwise doing good things -- guess this would make each computing charity (give us your spare cycles) the ticket server or PKI manager, although you might want to try distributing that too. > for more details > http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack I don't see any discussion there of the computation as a social good, or computational functions as utility functions. Microsoft, eh? http://www.glassinesurfer.com/f/gsrowlandhill.shtml -- and here's the obligatory mention of Jeremy Bentham. L. <http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/><L.Wood@ee.surrey.ac.uk>