[cap-talk] Capability accounting

[Ian G]

John Carlson wrote:
>>
>>As I hale from the digital money side, I see "accounting"
>>as a poor copy of digital money.  Although it is interesting,
>>I probably would always model it as a money problem.  Then,
>>the accounting view tends to disappear.
> 
> 
> I tend to agree with the money idea.  How much does a capability
> cost?  If connected with client side certificates, we can get the
> client certficate, and charge per message or for bytes in a message.

Yes, one of the problems being, that the cost of a
"client side certificate" operation is approximately
that of a "payment operation".  To use an example
familiar to some here, I think some of Mark Miller's
examples show a payment system built out of E Caps,
where one capability operation is one payment, approx.

Such "expense" leads to much fruitless spinning of
wheels in the direction of "micropayments" which
generally reduce to "payment system couple to
accounting system for aggregation."

This would be one of those cases where the cost of
charging introduces costs of its own in excess of
the positive value of allocation (e.g., one has
entered a permanent loss scenario.)

iang