why IPv6 isn't ready for prime time, SMTP edition

Mon Mar 31 00:00:51 UTC 2014

On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 7:40 PM, John R. Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:

> The numbers you list in your argument against a micropayment
>> system being able to function are a fraction of the number of
>> transactions Facebook deals with in updating newsfeeds for
>> the billion+ users on their system.[0]
>>
>
>  ... which is completely irrelevant because they don't have a double
> spending problem.  Sheesh.  It's easy to scale up stuff that is trivially
> parallelizable.*
>

Apparently, in the intervening 10 years since you wrote that,
you might have missed some advances in the state of the
art in computer science.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.0832v1

I quote from the abstract:

" Contrary to the commonly held belief that this is fundamentally
impossible, we propose several solutions that do achieve a reasonable level
of double spending prevention"

I suggest you update your 'commonly held belief' that
the double spending problem is intractable.  ;)

>
> Also, I wrote that ten years ago.  Add an extra zero or two to the numbers
> if you want, but it doesn't make any difference.

Perhaps the number of zeroes doesn't make a
difference; but solving the double spending
problem would seem to play a much bigger
role in making a difference to your conclusion
from ten years ago.  Note that one of the concepts
around the double spending problem is that of offline
spending being able to happen in massively large
scale in very short time before the network is
rejoined; however, in the case of email, that situation
is largely a dead end; if you're not online, you're not
going to be making very many mail connections.

What may have been seen as impossible ten years ago may
now be completely feasible.  ^_^;

> Regards,
> John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for
> Dummies",
> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
>
> * - a term of art, look it up
>
>
Thanks!

Matt