[cap-talk] Capability accounting

[Nick Szabo]

The main barrier to micropayments and agoric allocation of resources
is not computational costs, but mental costs:

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html

Mental accounting (or mental transaction) costs arise whenever 
Grandma (or anybody else) is asked to make a security or economic 
decision.  Mental costs pose a severe limit on how fined-grained such
decisions can be, and thus on how fine-grained it is useful
for the computational mechanisms (such as capabilities for
security or tokens for payment) to operate.   

Some user interface proposals, such as my market translator, may 
help counteract this problem by allowing users to express general
(broad) preferences that are treated by the computer as
fine-grained preferences upon the circumstances specified or
implied by the user.

Nick Szabo
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/