thoughts on USPS "forever stamps"

So the USPS is finally issuing contractual stamps rather than denominational stamps! Hooray

http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/002073.html

The postal system is what made the united states possible, back in the 18th century, and it makes good sense, in this day of alternative currencies, impending inflation, the upcoming collapse of the real estate bubble, yadda yadda yadda, to have a postage stamp that represents a contract to deliver a piece of mail, rather than a postage stamp that is in reality a limited-use sticky paper piece of small change.

This is the best news since self-adhesive stamps. The united states leads
the world in adhesives (don't we?) and I took great patriotic pride in self-adhesive stamps when they first appeared at the local franchise of Mr. Franklin's continuing concern (which is how I think of the post office.)

So -- in the event that the pay2send e-mail system gets up and running, it would make sense to have the sending tokens be in an entirely new currency -- or the currency settable by the recipient! Since the tipjar system is designed to allow creation of new currencies at will, insisting that in order to get mail into your inbox, the sender will have to surrender a tick in some alien accounting system, instead of simple rupees or lira or eurodollars or anything
you can trade at forex -- does in fact make sense, sort of.

The players of Agora Nomic will be pleased to see use of their internal currencies spreading out into the non-player larger universe; the same with ultima (the on-line universe where you can speculate on real estate, I think that's what it's called) and anyone else. A free market in personalized
inbox tokens would guarantee a limited amount of spam while maximizing the
cost of each one -- say you released a hundred pips of your personal inbox
currency each day into the world and there was a market in them. One person
alone doing this would be seen by the responsible e-mail advertising community
as an ignorable crank, but a coalition -- let's say moveon.org or the NRA gets into the business of issuing e-mail deliverability tokens good for forwarding
messages to their members as a fund-raising device -- could have enough guaranteed eyeballs behind their list to cash in on their size in a responsible
way, without sacrificing the privacy of the recipients.

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