It appears that Graham Fluet <graham.fluet@xxxxxxxxxxx> said: >When sending an email, the email has to contain a digital "postage stamp" which contains a specified amount in a traditional >or digital currency that is paid out of the sender's account. If the recipient does not receive payment, or receives an >invalid payment, that email is rejected and the payment is returned to the sender. The payment required could potentially be >as low as as a fraction of a cent, or even a valueless amount if using a digital currency that is only shared between a select >few. E-postage is a very old idea. It was a bad idea 30 years ago, and it's a bad idea now. I wrote this white paper 20 years ago, but nothing important has changed: https://www.taugh.com/epostage.pdf >Another example is with web pages having a charge to read, meaning that journalists can avoid having paywalls by having a >standard pay-per-article system that is managed by an account linked to the user's web browser. There would need to be systems >in place to ensure the user is aware of the charges and consents to them. i admittedly haven't explored this in depth as much. The Web is in essence a version of Ted Nelson's Xanadu system, simplified enough to be possible to implement. Ted always wanted royalties per byte, but neither he nor anyone else ever had a plausible way it could work. Also, users hate hate hate metered services. That's why your mobile phone plan has a bundle of minutes (probably unlimited) rather than pay per minute, even though per minute would likely be cheaper for many people. R's, John
