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Given that in the long term the cost of mining bitcoin is in the ballpark of the electricity cost of the proof-of-work (in that being cheaper encourages more pe

by Lerc 14y ago

Given that in the long term the cost of mining bitcoin is in the ballpark of the electricity cost of the proof-of-work (in that being cheaper encourages more people to mine and more expensive means mining would run a loss). You could effectively outsource the cost of the proof of work by having bitcoin validated email. Send a fraction of a bitcoin with an email to let it past. If email clients maintained the wallets you wouldn't need to even worry about the cost if you had a balance of in/out mail. You could still white list anyone you want to email for free. A cost of $0.001 per message would have very little impact on regular users. A botnet would still need to get the funds somewhere to bulk send, if they cracked the mail programs internal wallet they could drain that and send a small number of emails, but beyond that they'd need funds, and quite frankly if they could get at the wallets they'd just take the money direct. It raises an interesting question. what is the value to a spammer of an individual email? The return from advertising/scams/phishing/whatever divided by the number of emails sent. It's got to be tiny.

jiggy2011 14y ago
This would incentivise spammers to get people to send emails to them, they could probably do this by signing up lots of fake accounts to services that send registration emails.
pronoiac 14y ago
> A cost of $0.001 per message would have very little impact on regular users. I wonder about mailing lists - a couple of thousand members isn't too big a list, but $1 a message adds up. Who pays it? What keeps someone from adding fake accounts to run up the costs of lists they dislike?
- Lerc 14y ago
  Payment isn't compulsory. You could have a number of mechanisms to clear mailing lists, white-lists would be easiest. Since joining a mailing list should be by user decision, provided the user interface is simple and painless you should be able to include adding to the whitelist as part of that process.

by Lerc 14y ago

jiggy2011 14y ago

This would incentivise spammers to get people to send emails to them, they could probably do this by signing up lots of fake accounts to services that send registration emails.

pronoiac 14y ago

> A cost of $0.001 per message would have very little impact on regular users. I wonder about mailing lists - a couple of thousand members isn't too big a list, but $1 a message adds up. Who pays it? What keeps someone from adding fake accounts to run up the costs of lists they dislike?

Lerc 14y ago
Payment isn't compulsory. You could have a number of mechanisms to clear mailing lists, white-lists would be easiest. Since joining a mailing list should be by user decision, provided the user interface is simple and painless you should be able to include adding to the whitelist as part of that process.