4 ms·

If paying to send email is your suggested solution, I can see why you don't like the meme in question. But the suggestion is rife with problems. How exactly are

by efdee 8y ago

If paying to send email is your suggested solution, I can see why you don't like the meme in question. But the suggestion is rife with problems. How exactly are you going to get everyone to start paying for email, which is free today? If it's a parallel system, how are you going to get people to switch? Who are they going to pay?

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
If people received credit for incoming mail then the majority wouldn't get a bill as most people receive more than they send.
mathnmusic 8y ago
> Who are they going to pay? The sender pays the reader. If the reader is the one deriving the value from this communication, they would pay the sender out of band as compensation.
- detaro 8y ago
  So what does a reliable, not centralized payment system that is viable for this volume of tiny transactions that everyone can use look like? That's IMHO the big problem with all these suggestions.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
bjoli 8y ago
Most bigger services are probably going to send and receive about the same amount of mail so it will be an almost zero-sum game. Most services today have a cap on how mail you can send, and this could be made more explicit and have cases where the end user actually pay. I don't really see the payment as a big problem. This has been discussed previously, mostly initiated by the big email services
thekyle 8y ago
As an alternative but similar idea, Proof of Work was originally developed to solve the email spam problem. The idea was that you would hash the email body + timestamp + nonce producing a hash with some number of leading zeros. It would be fast for individual devices to compute and fast for email servers to verify en mass but expensive if you needed to send lots of emails. The obvious downside is that since the system is fundamentally just cryptography it doesn't discriminate between spam and legitimate bulk mail (password resets, newsletters, mailing lists, etc.)

by efdee 8y ago

tonyedgecombe 8y ago

If people received credit for incoming mail then the majority wouldn't get a bill as most people receive more than they send.

mathnmusic 8y ago

> Who are they going to pay? The sender pays the reader. If the reader is the one deriving the value from this communication, they would pay the sender out of band as compensation.

detaro 8y ago
So what does a reliable, not centralized payment system that is viable for this volume of tiny transactions that everyone can use look like? That's IMHO the big problem with all these suggestions.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

bjoli 8y ago

Most bigger services are probably going to send and receive about the same amount of mail so it will be an almost zero-sum game. Most services today have a cap on how mail you can send, and this could be made more explicit and have cases where the end user actually pay. I don't really see the payment as a big problem. This has been discussed previously, mostly initiated by the big email services

thekyle 8y ago

As an alternative but similar idea, Proof of Work was originally developed to solve the email spam problem. The idea was that you would hash the email body + timestamp + nonce producing a hash with some number of leading zeros. It would be fast for individual devices to compute and fast for email servers to verify en mass but expensive if you needed to send lots of emails. The obvious downside is that since the system is fundamentally just cryptography it doesn't discriminate between spam and legitimate bulk mail (password resets, newsletters, mailing lists, etc.)