Millicent

This paper on Millicent is an excellent introduction to the niche of micro payment systems. It also describes the next smallest payment system after DSR that I know. It has the great advantage of a plausible introduction scheme—how to get started. It does not disrupt IP; nor does it address payment for communications. Yet it has made little headway.

I think that neither Millicent nor DSR dominates the other. While Millicent's transaction costs include a strong hash, and that it much cheaper than a public key signature verification, DSR's simple 32 bit add is far simpler still. Scrip must be stored and records kept of spent scrip. DSR must pervade the communications fabric. They would compete for buying a web page that cost a few cents.

Neither is perfectly anonymous; both can support anonymity.

OPUS

I have been reading the paper OPUS: An Overlay Utility Service. These are notes as I read. They have an overlay service which is code that is location and resource savvy and maps application modules to network Points of Presence. Glass net needs that too. I hope we can take some ideas from them. We have not paid attention to this split from the application yet. Some applications can not split out the location savvy part from the rest of the application.

I quote:

We take a decentralized approach in which local site managers “think globally but act locally,” making local resource allocation choices to converge on desirable global outcomes based on information disseminated through the service overlay.
From our Hayekian perspective, we doubt that this is possible, but it will be interesting to see what they achieve. We agree that sociological metaphors are useful. We depend, almost ideologically, on market mechanisms for allocating the crude resources. Between buyers of the high level globally optimized result, Opus discriminates according to what they will pay.

Global optimization is hard; it is best not to make it a monopoly. We wish to enable market mechanisms to help solve the problems that the Opus paper outlines well.