The gist of one of the most important problem: zero cost of mass unsolicited mail. > Spam is a result of the desirable feature that anyone can email anyone, co

The gist of one of the most important problem: zero cost of mass unsolicited mail. > Spam is a result of the desirable feature that anyone can email anyone, combined with the fact that sending an email costs approximately nothing, even if you send millions of emails, and aggravated by the fact that spamming has de facto no real financial or legal repercussions. Good that we can discuss this. > 2.2 Overview of solution Has some ideas in the right direciton of imposing the cost on the sender, as well as some ideas which have nothing to do with it. The author jumps straight into implementing things, giving little attention to formulating how we want the cost function to look like. > 2.6 Digital stamps Good for some use cases, but not for others. Imagine your relative wants to write you another email about how they are doing, or that but you haven't read their previous one, or forgot to issue them the new token. So they may as well create a new identity in order to email to you again? > Alternatively, the email server could require the person sending the email to solve a CAPTCHA-like puzzle. Blind and otherwise impaired people would get out of jobs at cusotmer contacts. > Email servers could also sell stamps for real money. As the measure of the last resort, the author turns to the ultimate medium of value exchange. If the sender communicates to you, they expect to derive some (not necessarily immediately monetary) value from it, otherwise why are they motivated for it? If the sender communicates to you so that you benefit, then you should have either paid them in advance, or they should reasonably expect you to pay them back. I think it's time we recognize the economic side in everything we do, and stop shying away from "commercialization" of aspects of our life, i think. Otherwise we won't get out of the nonsense like "free software provides so much value, but nobody wants to pay for it" - valuable things are meant to be valued, that is, exchanged for other valuable things.