Fermat's Library is an email list that sends you one scientific paper per week. The papers are chosen from the broadest range of topics, and all are written so the layperson can understand them. (They don't choose dense niche topics requiring a lot of previous knowledge; rather they choose articles of general interest to link to.)

This week's article is on the thought of using a lottery system to make micropayments... "probabilistic payments"... which would reduce the amount of processing banks need to do though a kind of clever way of thinking...

... which is similar to the clever way of thinking shown in blockchains.

Here's this week's email, with all the signup links, etc, in case you are interested in expanding your mind once a week:

----------

This week’s paper is “Electronic Lottery Tickets as Micropayments” published by Ronald L. Rivest in 1997. In this paper Rivest explores the idea of using lottery tickets as currency. The main idea is that instead of making a payment of 1 cent by having a bank wire 1 cent to an account you can issue a $1 lottery ticket that has a 1/100 chance of winning. This paper explores how you could build a payment system around this insight.

With the rise of cryptocurrencies this 20 year old paper becomes ever more interesting and fun to read.

Read the paper here: http://fermatslibrary.com/s/electronic-lottery-tickets-as-micropayments

Best,

Fermat’s Team

Follow us on:

Twitter: @fermatslibrary

Instagram: @fermatslibrary

LinkedIn: Fermat's Library

Facebook: Fermat's Library

P.S.: Check out our cool t-shirts here: https://teespring.com/stores/fermats-library

P.P.S.: Try Margins, our free online repository where you can save, annotate and share papers. Feel free to give it a try and let us know what you think: fermatslibrary.com/margins