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This is an amazing idea. I have been thinking how to do webmail + proper privacy for ages. By proper I mean it ought to completely cryptographically protect par

This is an amazing idea. I have been thinking how to do webmail + proper privacy for ages. By proper I mean it ought to completely cryptographically protect participants from any kind of orwellian search and seizure policy as well as just fix the inherent problems of plaintext storage in e-mail. I don't even think that hardware catching up to the main crypted spool is really an issue as we're well past the point where we can use encryption algorithms requiring computationally infeasible energy to decrypt by bruteforce, even granting absolutely unlimited compute resources. The only problem I could see with this is one bitcoin will also eventually run into, but even moreso, which is scale. Average email size is going to be a lot larger than your average bitcoin transaction. That said there may be ways around it, perhaps using the usenet infrastructure as an underlying transport mechanism and piggybacking off that. It already has ridiculous amounts of data flowing through and being stored on it. Something to think on more, thanks for chiming in.

SkyMarshal 15y ago
Yeah, the data size is a big problem, but the bitcoin dev team is working on a bitcoin-lite client to solve that problem. Their eventual solution might be repurposable for bitmail. And here's another thought about that - just delete all messages from the blockchain after they're read, and only store them locally in the clients. As soon as the receiving client unencrypts the message, store it locally, then delete it completely from the blockchain. Unlike bitcoin, this wouldn't be an accounting ledger with the necessity of storing all transactions in perpetuum. All that needs to happen is the message get delivered to its recipient, once that is verified to have happened, it can be deleted. The clients can keep copies and organize them into conversations or whatever. That wouldn't quite solve the issue of hardware eventually being able to brute force the encryption though, since an interested party could store a running record of everything put into and deleted from the blockchain. But it would have to be a very interested party to store that amount of data in the hopes of being able to decrypt it years or decades later. Bitcoin wasn't really designed for deletions though, and that would also double the rate of blockchain diffs, so would have to think more about how or if that would work...
- etherael 15y ago
  I think if we throw away the direct similarity between the blockchain as a transaction log vs a spoolchain as a massive collective megaspool and instead go with the concept of a spoolchain being a log of pointers to storage bins which are the actual distributed storage for a destination group, we get rid of most of the problems with storage size. Eg. I am user@provider.com, I want a storage bin for this account. A storage bin could then be either someone who just has user@provider.com (say on a massive scale, the u shard for the provider.com domain) or someone who has the entire storage bin for provider.com, or someone who has the entire storage bin for .com Couple this with open access to the storage bins from any and all (the more the better, the heavier replicated they are the easier / faster end users have access to their mail) and an economic incentive to participate in storage propagation (mailcoin? n mailcoins per n mb of storage, charge mailcoins for access to the storage bin, whatever model makes the most economic sense) and we might be onto something. It also handles deletion and allows users to "un-send" mail by deleting the mail from the storage bin it exists within. The blockchain in bitcoin does not allow for transaction deletion operations, but that does not by any means rule out the possibility of deleting the position in a storage bin where the spoolchain in mailcoin points to.
- jlawer 15y ago
  Size is unfortunately completely unimaginable.... A small marketing firm I happen to admin the email servers for... sends 15 million marketing emails per month (all opt-in, CAN-SPAM / Australian Spam Act compliant). This alone is nearly 1.5TB of data. We only send marketing campaigns for about 8 national brands and about the same number of regional brands to a country of twenty something million people. Now It might be suitable for a conversation or private chat room. It would work really well in an IRC / small group situation. But I can't imagine a single global system ever scaling past a few dozen people without some significant hardware. As far as deleting things, the problem there is who is responsible for deleting and what if I don't? The number of bounces we get from campaigns from defunct mail boxes that have filled to quota is quite high. Who removes this email that no one reads? At the moment the storage problem is isolated, but a central chain makes it impossible. The more I think about this makes me think you might get it to work with a block chain per domain... but then whats the point over simply setting up your own email server you trust and using encryption?

SkyMarshal 15y ago

Yeah, the data size is a big problem, but the bitcoin dev team is working on a bitcoin-lite client to solve that problem. Their eventual solution might be repurposable for bitmail. And here's another thought about that - just delete all messages from the blockchain after they're read, and only store them locally in the clients. As soon as the receiving client unencrypts the message, store it locally, then delete it completely from the blockchain. Unlike bitcoin, this wouldn't be an accounting ledger with the necessity of storing all transactions in perpetuum. All that needs to happen is the message get delivered to its recipient, once that is verified to have happened, it can be deleted. The clients can keep copies and organize them into conversations or whatever. That wouldn't quite solve the issue of hardware eventually being able to brute force the encryption though, since an interested party could store a running record of everything put into and deleted from the blockchain. But it would have to be a very interested party to store that amount of data in the hopes of being able to decrypt it years or decades later. Bitcoin wasn't really designed for deletions though, and that would also double the rate of blockchain diffs, so would have to think more about how or if that would work...

etherael 15y ago
I think if we throw away the direct similarity between the blockchain as a transaction log vs a spoolchain as a massive collective megaspool and instead go with the concept of a spoolchain being a log of pointers to storage bins which are the actual distributed storage for a destination group, we get rid of most of the problems with storage size. Eg. I am user@provider.com, I want a storage bin for this account. A storage bin could then be either someone who just has user@provider.com (say on a massive scale, the u shard for the provider.com domain) or someone who has the entire storage bin for provider.com, or someone who has the entire storage bin for .com Couple this with open access to the storage bins from any and all (the more the better, the heavier replicated they are the easier / faster end users have access to their mail) and an economic incentive to participate in storage propagation (mailcoin? n mailcoins per n mb of storage, charge mailcoins for access to the storage bin, whatever model makes the most economic sense) and we might be onto something. It also handles deletion and allows users to "un-send" mail by deleting the mail from the storage bin it exists within. The blockchain in bitcoin does not allow for transaction deletion operations, but that does not by any means rule out the possibility of deleting the position in a storage bin where the spoolchain in mailcoin points to.
jlawer 15y ago
Size is unfortunately completely unimaginable.... A small marketing firm I happen to admin the email servers for... sends 15 million marketing emails per month (all opt-in, CAN-SPAM / Australian Spam Act compliant). This alone is nearly 1.5TB of data. We only send marketing campaigns for about 8 national brands and about the same number of regional brands to a country of twenty something million people. Now It might be suitable for a conversation or private chat room. It would work really well in an IRC / small group situation. But I can't imagine a single global system ever scaling past a few dozen people without some significant hardware. As far as deleting things, the problem there is who is responsible for deleting and what if I don't? The number of bounces we get from campaigns from defunct mail boxes that have filled to quota is quite high. Who removes this email that no one reads? At the moment the storage problem is isolated, but a central chain makes it impossible. The more I think about this makes me think you might get it to work with a block chain per domain... but then whats the point over simply setting up your own email server you trust and using encryption?