[hashcash] Re: comment on reducing padding

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On Fri, 17 Sep 2004, Jonathan Morton wrote:

according to my own non-scientific research, most email addresses are 15-30 characters. the amount of padding these stamps contain just seems ridiculous.

Most users won't see it. How many ordinary users do you know who regularly read mail with "full headers" displayed? The padding is there for performance reasons - putting the tail of the count field in the right place adds 10-15% performance, easily.

Anyway, the padding gets "used up" quite neatly if you start adding extension fields, such as: 
==========================

the padding is used up until we hit what, about 88 bytes being stamped? and then we jump to a 116 byte stamp.

i agree that most people will never know it's there, but an email addressed to 10 people would carry >1K of extra headers (the trailing spaces when using "X" makes this worse). i'm not saying that this will break email, but the extra message size can become non-trivial.

i'm also not suggesting that this is any reason not to use hashcash... but it seems like there's room to optimize this and make the stamps more compact.

        ...atom

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