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It's made me a little down on digital stamps, which was an idea I used to like. Back before spam filters got good, one of the proposed solutions to the spam pr

It's made me a little down on digital stamps, which was an idea I used to like. Back before spam filters got good, one of the proposed solutions to the spam problem was to require everyone to compute an easy to verify, difficult to produce hash for their email message and bounce everything which didn't come with an attached hash. The idea was that a regular user could spend 1 or 10 seconds hashing each email, but a spammer couldn't spend the time hashing millions of spam messages. Now I suspect that we would have just ended up with data centers full of highly efficient hashing hardware cranking out signatures for spam messages.

throwaway7767 11y ago
We didn't need bitcoin to know that HashCash and the like wouldn't work to prevent spam. The existence of botnets already means spammers won't be impacted. No need for expensive specialised hardware when other people are paying for the commodity hardware and electricity. And since a regular user on a not-so-powerful mobile device needs to be able to compute the hash in a reasonable time, that puts an upper bound on the processing that's guaranteed to not be an obstacle to a spammer with 3000 botnet slaves.
- 13of40 11y ago
  > since a regular user on a not-so-powerful mobile device needs to be able to compute the hash in a reasonable time I would assume this would be implemented at the SMTP level, so when I connect to gmail with my phone, it's their servers that need to generate the hash before they send it through SMTP.
  - throwaway7767 11y ago
    gmail handles a lot of mail, which again puts an upper bound on how difficult the puzzle will be. I don't think this changes anything. And if you make it too hard, "free" (ad-supported) email will no longer be possible because the costs are simply too high for the financial return.
- saalweachter 11y ago
  Yeah, the botnet / cell phone gap was already large enough. I wonder if that could have been foreseen in the halcyon days of the late 90s, when the image of the l33t hax0r was someone sitting in the middle of a cobbled-together supercomputer in a garage with painted over windows, and not in the middle of an anonymous coffeeshop with a botnet.
deleted 11y ago
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throwaway7767 11y ago

We didn't need bitcoin to know that HashCash and the like wouldn't work to prevent spam. The existence of botnets already means spammers won't be impacted. No need for expensive specialised hardware when other people are paying for the commodity hardware and electricity. And since a regular user on a not-so-powerful mobile device needs to be able to compute the hash in a reasonable time, that puts an upper bound on the processing that's guaranteed to not be an obstacle to a spammer with 3000 botnet slaves.

13of40 11y ago
> since a regular user on a not-so-powerful mobile device needs to be able to compute the hash in a reasonable time I would assume this would be implemented at the SMTP level, so when I connect to gmail with my phone, it's their servers that need to generate the hash before they send it through SMTP.
- throwaway7767 11y ago
  gmail handles a lot of mail, which again puts an upper bound on how difficult the puzzle will be. I don't think this changes anything. And if you make it too hard, "free" (ad-supported) email will no longer be possible because the costs are simply too high for the financial return.
saalweachter 11y ago
Yeah, the botnet / cell phone gap was already large enough. I wonder if that could have been foreseen in the halcyon days of the late 90s, when the image of the l33t hax0r was someone sitting in the middle of a cobbled-together supercomputer in a garage with painted over windows, and not in the middle of an anonymous coffeeshop with a botnet.

deleted 11y ago

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