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It means shunning users and avoiding Sybil attacks. If you can't avoid Sybil attacks, then you're stuck censoring content, and that's an unhappy job. Blockchai
by samatman 4y ago
It means shunning users and avoiding Sybil attacks. If you can't avoid Sybil attacks, then you're stuck censoring content, and that's an unhappy job.
Blockchain tech is good at one thing: making numbers expensive. That property has made them really unpopular, along with doing it by turning huge amounts of electricity into heat, but it's useful in that an identity is just a number, and if you can make identities allodial and somewhat expensive, you can solve the problem at the user level, by banning bad actors.
If a user ID costs ten bucks, spammers have to make that plus labor back before everyone shuns them. That's discouragingly difficult to do.
- sph 4y agoHashcash is a similar solution to make spam computationally intensive, but minimally invasive for regular users. Bitcoin's proof-of-work system is inspired by Hashcash. But yes, the solution to spam is to make it expensive: either monetarily or energetically.
- xeromal 4y agoIf hashcash involves taking a penny or more from someone for it to work, it won't work.
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoIt does work, since when have you ever received spam from Hashcash?
- tomjen3 4y agoBy that logic the solution to spam is alcohol, since I have never received it from wine either :) I also don't ever remember having received an email with Hashcash.
- TakeBlaster16 4y agoHashcash does not require money, it only requires you to burn CPU cycles. But it's tough to implement fairly. A feature phone might take 60 seconds to do the same proof of work that a PC can do in 0.1 seconds. (And spammers would eventually just build ASICs anyway.) So those without powerful hardware are back to trusting some centralized entity to burn CPU for them and relay their message.
- sph 4y agoI'm not sure modern phones are 600x as slow as an average PC in single threaded performance. These days the performance difference is about less than 10x on the cheapest of phones. A hashcash that takes 100ms on my PC and 1s on my phone to send an email would be prohibitively expensive for any spammer.
- NotAdamBack 4y agoThis MUST be Adam, no one else argues by ignoring the main points and focusing on the pointless random numbers involved instead, it's kind of his specialty. (The "inventor" of HashCash is also responsible for the corporate take over of the GitHub repository of Bitcoin Core).
- TakeBlaster16 4y agoHashcash's proof of work is an embarrassingly parallel problem, and I'm typing this on a CPU with 24 cores.
- tomjen3 4y agoDidn't some HN develop a hash strengtening algorithm that relied on using memory, rather than CPU cycles? If not Chia coin works that way, maybe that algorithm could be used? In either case it would make ASIC useless.
- sph 4y agoHashcash doesn't involve taking money from anybody. Here, I've googled it for you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
- pjc50 4y agoI think bitcoin has proven that if the economic advantage of a proof-of-waste system is big enough you can create truly huge amounts of waste. I don't think we want to add that to spam. > the solution to spam is to make it expensive: either monetarily or energetically. This is used nowhere in practice? In practice, the solution is for a small number of dedicated central spamfighters to cooperate on lists of known spam IPs, or correlate across a large number of emails to produce statistical markers of spam.
- NotAdamBack 4y agoIf this is not Adam Back I will eat my hat. The biggest mistake Satoshi made was including a reference to HashCash in his white paper
- sph 4y agoThis ain't Reddit, we can do without novelty accounts, especially to imply I am Adam Back. You have my blessing to eat your hat.