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Building off of that $0.000001 USD per email thing, has anyone proposed a proof of work per message sent system? Sort of like the server accepting messages says
by neckardt 8y ago
Building off of that $0.000001 USD per email thing, has anyone proposed a proof of work per message sent system? Sort of like the server accepting messages says "hey find some value x where the first n digits of hash(nonce + x) are zero". So the server sending the message could decide if it really wants to complete the work.
It may be a total pain for users if servers set their proof of work really high and reject everything, but maybe it could be implemented to work well, thus limiting spam.
This would have the same effect as Gates's idea, but compute power is easier to come by than real money.
- austinjp 8y agoYep: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash A mere 20 years ago :)
- jcranmer 8y agoWhat you're describing is Hashcash, which is the first implementation of the idea, and is the basis of how Bitcoin came to the idea of proof-of-work. The reason why Hashcash and other pay-per-email ideas didn't work out is because spammers effectively wouldn't have to pay (since they're not using their own computers and accounts to send spam) but people who have legitimate reasons to send bulk email (say, the Linux kernel mailing list) would have to pay pretty high costs.