RE:[Cryptography] Paid SMTP (PSMTP)-6
2018–03–02 18:32 GMT+03:00 xxx@xxx:
If you think about PSMTP again, try to imagine the new environment of the
near future rather than the present and the past. You may think about the
impact of Cryptocurrency, end-point TEE, DANE etc. on the environment.
Judging PSMTP becomes fun and fruitful when you do so.I admire your enthusiasm, but not your common sense. You might consider the possibility that when people who have been thinking about a topic for 20 years tell you that nothing here is new, it’s all failed
I admire your experience but not your self-confidence. We are the kids of the decentralization block. Authoritative tone doesn’t work here. However, I take your feedback seriously. I appreciate your knowledge, time and effort. I read all your links rigourously and took all your considerations into account. I rank the probability that you are right high enough, don’t worry. That’s the first thing a skeptic would do. Remember that I included the FUSSP links to my first post, explicitely stating that I will play the role of the naive, intentionally, with the hope of a provocative discussion. Well, it helped me reach some of my goals and thank you (and the people at CC) for your (their) contribution.
I admire your enthusiasm, but not your common sense. You might consider the possibility that when people who have been thinking about a topic for 20 years tell you that nothing here is new, it’s all failed before, and this time is no different, we actually understand all this stuff including the latest trendy acronyms. (How many DNSSEC signers have you written?) You’re far from the first person to propose blockchains as a FUSSP — Satoshi did in one of the first messages he sent to this list.
I think you don’t understand what Satoshi means, exactly. Please kindly check the modality and tenses in his sentences, carefully. They convey information, too. I think you even miss the more important part of Satoshi’s posts on Bitcoin and brute attacks (SPAM/DDOS). Bitcoin uses transaction fees to fight SPAM/DDOS. Transaction fee based anti-SPAM/DDOS mechanism has been successful so far. Readers of my posts would remember that I challenge some design aspects of Bitcoin. However, I have always accepted counter arguments on transaction fees because I had to admit their success in fighting brute attacks. Satoshi Nakamoto was not alone in this respect. Hal Finley, Adam Back, Gavin Andresen, Gregory Maxwell, Andreas Antonopoulos (most of the Bitcoin heores if not all) defended the same fee based mechanism at all ocassions since birth of Bitcoin to the recent debates on the block-size, costs, etc.
When I checked your list of FUSSP’ers through links you’ve sent, I saw amazing people. Some of them are creators of remarkable things, some patent owners are advanced engineers who dedicated an entire career to mail&spam. It’s an honor to be listed in your FUSSP WKBI’ers List. Could you do me a favour? Just put my name next to Satoshi Nakamoto:) I am a fan of his. If you can’t then how about Tim Draper. I share his crypto-enthusiasm. The fact that so many great thinkers have worked on the fee/payload based schemes to fight spam despite the past failures should ring a bell.
I have written the differences between PSMTP and all the FUSSP WKBI’s you have sent, explicitely with technical terms. You haven’t objected/responded to any of them. Your *it’s all the same* claim is not accepted. You have to answer all of the differences I wrote before claiming it’s all the same. If you mean it’s all the same because it’s a payload based scheme, then you sound like someone calling all consensus algorithms the same in a debate comparing different consensus algorithms. Yes all the consensus algorithms have a great deal in common but if your resolution is not too coarse, they are not the same. The higher the resolution the bigger the differences. USPO has not agreed with you apparently, when it gave the grants. Definitely, the FUSSP’ers themselves saw significant differences.
Imagine that PSMTP is exactly the same as a famous FUSSP that failed miserably, say 20 years ago. Does this guarentee that it can never succeed any time? Timing is important because the environment evolves. An idea that fails now can succeed in the future in an environment where pre-requisites to success is available. Did you say the same thing to Satoshi when he first mentioned the idea of Bitcoin? Did you say that the idea had failed the past 20 years. A very brief reminder from Wikipedia: “Prior to the release of bitcoin there were a number of digital cash technologies starting with the issuer based ecash protocols ofDavid Chaum[3] and Stefan Brands. Adam Back developed hashcash, a proof-of-work scheme for spam control. The first proposals for distributed digital scarcity based cryptocurrencies were Wei Dai’s b-money[4]and Nick Szabo’s bit gold.[5][6] Hal Finney developed reusable proof of work (RPOW) using hashcash as its proof of work algorithm.” Bitcoin is more similar to b-money and bitgold than PSMTP to a great deal of your your FUSSP WKBI’s. Most Bitcoin historians have a consensus on the profound effect of the Mortgage Meltdown timing on the success of Bitcoin. Andreas Antonopoulos nails it beautifully in his book “The Internet of Money”: The idea of Facebook has been around before. However, it needed enough adoption of Internet, variety in content comprising daily communication and sharing, and cameras on mobile devices to make it a good idea finally. I had the priviledge to see Alex Mashinsky talk live last month. In his presentation he explained what happened when a boy asking him for funding, explained him their search engine project. Alex was a tech innovator celebrity, then. He responds the young boy: “All new search engine entertprises have failed. There is no room for a new one and your search algorithm is the same.” The name of the boy was Sergey Brin. Sergey definitely failed to explain Alex, the guru, that their ranking/sorting idea, though simple, had the right time when content on the Internet had become too big and content based clustering mechanisms were not sufficient anymore. People were getting frustrated by scrolling through pages of hit lists without being sure if they spotted the most relevant page on the Internet. Google was founded on the very basic idea called PageRank. “It works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.” Google’s success is based on this simple idea and Larry Page was not the first one to think about it. However, the then high content size and diversity helped that idea, become superior to other mechanisms. If Larry and Sergey came up with the same idea during ARPANET, people would tell them that they would prefer content based approach to relevancy rank rather than the gossip approach.
No amount of hand waving will make the scaling problems or the social interaction problems go away.
Imagine you are not in my contacts and write your first ever mail to me through PSMTP. It goes to my mail box as PSMTP, I read your mail and add you to my contacts (whitelist). Default setting will not redeem the payment attached and will trigger mutual whitelisting scheme. The whole process will not touch the PSTMP network. All the future mailings between us, two PSMTP users, will never touch PSMTP processor system until we remove eachother from whitelist. People at contact lists are not a burden on PSMTP processors. Therefore, PSMTP nework will have much lower traffic than you imagine at first sight. I admit that I failed to explain PSMTP to some people in mail format. Maybe I should prefer the paper format. Besides the sharding scheme I explained together with the geographical nature of the mail system can scales well.
May I ask you to read the article https://www.taugh.com/epostage.pdf (2004) to see that it is not relevant to PSMTP today.
