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Although solving a captcha can be translated into a monetary cost (often the cost of labour for a human in a clickfarm to solve it for you), the nice thing is t
by Retr0id 2y ago
Although solving a captcha can be translated into a monetary cost (often the cost of labour for a human in a clickfarm to solve it for you), the nice thing is that it's still "free" to solve normally.
If you switch to direct payments that are still affordable for routine use by your poorest users, then your rich adversaries can afford to generate orders of magnitude more spam (until we solve unequal wealth distribution globally).
Also, the cost of using a postal service nominally covers its operating costs. The cost of actually transferring a spammy HTTP request over the internet is negligible, but the costs imposed on its receiver are less so (i.e. the cost of responding to it (cpu/ram/disk/bandwidth), second-order costs of lowering the quality of the service for everyone else, etc.).
- Y_Y 2y ago> until we solve unequal wealth distribution globally Is this a joke?
- Retr0id 2y agoWhy would it be a joke?
- Y_Y 2y agoEven assuming that uneven distribution is a problem, and that it was possible to make global wealth evenly distributed, it would be such a collosal undertaking that it would necessarily entail massive social upheaval and take a very long time after which the captcha problem would hardly be comparable to what we have now.
- Retr0id 2y agoNone of that is at all relevant to the point I was making. Whether you think extreme wealth inequality is good or bad, for as long as it exists, it makes paying fixed fees a poor alternative to captchas.
- genewitch 2y ago"A fine means it's legal if you're rich"
- Y_Y 2y agoUntil we solve the "water is wet" problem domain squatting will continue to be an issue. Without a definitive resolution to the continuum hypothesis there will be no efficient distributed consensus algorithm. As long as humanity bears the mark of Original Sin, it will be hard to run a business selling GPL software.