4 ms·

Couldn't some form of proof-of-work system be used to increase the cost of sending a message without it having much of an economic impact on a casual sender? W

by ch 12y ago

Couldn't some form of proof-of-work system be used to increase the cost of sending a message without it having much of an economic impact on a casual sender? Was that what he was alluding to with the "burning bitcoin" reference?

awt 12y ago
AKA Bitmessage
- ch 12y ago
  Yeah like bitmessage, but the network overhead (all users see all messages) of bitmessage might be prohibitive for battery powered clients, no?
  - awt 12y ago
    Probably not a huge deal as phones become more and more powerful.
    - ch 12y ago
      I don't see how its not a big deal. If all messages are seen by my phone, just to be inspected and discarded, then my phone is consuming bandwidth and processing cycles on irrelevant data. And unless my phone has free bandwidth, and the processing cycles don't consume power (or it has infinite power), how can it ever not be a factor?
      - awt 12y ago
        It'll get figured out.
bradleyjg 12y ago
The problem is smartphones don't have much processing power, and what they do have uses batteries. So either they are trivial for servers to generate en masse or prohibitive for smartphones. There's also botnets, whose resources hijackers are happy to exploit.
- ch 12y ago
  Sure but certainly one could still make it costly enough to prohibit mass sending but not too costly to drain a cell battery under casual use. Or am I underestimating the level of complexity needed for a viable proof of work?
  - idlewords 12y ago
    Something lightweight enough to be feasible on a cell phone is likely enough to be trivially computable in bulk by a decent bit of hardware. Think about all those obsolete bitcoin miners out there.
    - ch 12y ago
      It sounds like proof-of-work alone is insufficient. The bit* type systems sound promising but that seems to preclude mobile. Interesting. What a funny problem we have built for ourselves. Interesting that SMS appears to have simply legislated the problem from existence (or so says the article), I suppose if anyone can connect to a telephony network for cheap the problem would persist there too.
marcell 12y ago
I've been working on a system that implements this, called "bitnet". The anti-spam system is basically what you said: you spend a small amount of bitcoin, and the server grants you some large number of "tokens". These tokens can be used to perform actions which use resources on the server, either storing messages, or getting messages. The exact price is configurable, and currently set low [1]. There is a second mechanism that I use, which is intended to lower costs for the average user, but still prevent spam. Essentially, in each bitcoin transaction, a small "transaction fee" is required, which goes to the miner. It is possible to prove, via a cryptographic signature, that you were the originator of a transaction, and therefore the person who spent that transaction fee. The bitnet system grants tokens to people who can prove they spent money on transaction fees [2]. The idea being, a typical bitcoin user will accumulate transaction fees anyways, but a spammer will have to go out of his way to send bulk messages. [1] https://github.com/ortutay/bitnet/blob/master/bitnet.go#L50 https://github.com/ortutay/bitnet/blob/master/bitnet.go#L50 [2] https://github.com/ortutay/bitnet/blob/master/bitnet.go#L38 https://github.com/ortutay/bitnet/blob/master/bitnet.go#L38
- ams6110 12y ago
  Heh. Bitnet was an early (1980s) point-to-point network built out of leased lines between educational institutions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET
diafygi 12y ago
Funnily enough, proof-of-work was originally invented to combat spam and denial of service attacks[1][2]. I asked that in a reply, and it seems that the large gap between server compute power and mobile compute power would make a reasonably taxing proof-of-work system too costly for mobile phones[3]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash [2] - http://hashcash.org/papers/pvp.pdf http://hashcash.org/papers/pvp.pdf [3] - https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000782.html https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000782....
- drfuchs 12y ago
  Just to be clear, "Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail" (Crypto 1992), by Dwork and Naor, invented the idea of Proof Of Work, suggested it for fighting Spam (before the term was even coined!), provided actual functions, and more. This predates HashCash by half a decade. [Edited to de-obfuscate.]
  - diafygi 12y ago
    Ummm, that's the paper referenced in [2]…
zrm 12y ago
> Couldn't some form of proof-of-work system be used to increase the cost of sending a message without it having much of an economic impact on a casual sender? Was that what he was alluding to with the "burning bitcoin" reference? The idea seems to be that you provably "burn" a small amount of Bitcoin to get an identity. An innocent person can then carry on using that identity forever without doing any more computation. Meanwhile a spammer will ruin that identity's reputation almost immediately and then have to pay again to get another one.
- chii 12y ago
  so the war's front moves to botnets - where spammer first installs malware/virus to take over a user's machine, in order to send email _from_ that user's identity. Given that a user's machine is more easily compromised, the burned identity wouldn't cost more than current botnet acquisition.
pmorici 12y ago
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn OpenBazzar a bit-torrent like p2p version of ebay uses proof of burn to make bad behavior expensive.

by ch 12y ago

awt 12y ago

AKA Bitmessage

ch 12y ago
Yeah like bitmessage, but the network overhead (all users see all messages) of bitmessage might be prohibitive for battery powered clients, no?
- awt 12y ago
  Probably not a huge deal as phones become more and more powerful.
  - ch 12y ago
    I don't see how its not a big deal. If all messages are seen by my phone, just to be inspected and discarded, then my phone is consuming bandwidth and processing cycles on irrelevant data. And unless my phone has free bandwidth, and the processing cycles don't consume power (or it has infinite power), how can it ever not be a factor?
    - awt 12y ago
      It'll get figured out.

bradleyjg 12y ago

The problem is smartphones don't have much processing power, and what they do have uses batteries. So either they are trivial for servers to generate en masse or prohibitive for smartphones. There's also botnets, whose resources hijackers are happy to exploit.

ch 12y ago
Sure but certainly one could still make it costly enough to prohibit mass sending but not too costly to drain a cell battery under casual use. Or am I underestimating the level of complexity needed for a viable proof of work?
- idlewords 12y ago
  Something lightweight enough to be feasible on a cell phone is likely enough to be trivially computable in bulk by a decent bit of hardware. Think about all those obsolete bitcoin miners out there.
  - ch 12y ago
    It sounds like proof-of-work alone is insufficient. The bit* type systems sound promising but that seems to preclude mobile. Interesting. What a funny problem we have built for ourselves. Interesting that SMS appears to have simply legislated the problem from existence (or so says the article), I suppose if anyone can connect to a telephony network for cheap the problem would persist there too.

marcell 12y ago

I've been working on a system that implements this, called "bitnet". The anti-spam system is basically what you said: you spend a small amount of bitcoin, and the server grants you some large number of "tokens". These tokens can be used to perform actions which use resources on the server, either storing messages, or getting messages. The exact price is configurable, and currently set low [1]. There is a second mechanism that I use, which is intended to lower costs for the average user, but still prevent spam. Essentially, in each bitcoin transaction, a small "transaction fee" is required, which goes to the miner. It is possible to prove, via a cryptographic signature, that you were the originator of a transaction, and therefore the person who spent that transaction fee. The bitnet system grants tokens to people who can prove they spent money on transaction fees [2]. The idea being, a typical bitcoin user will accumulate transaction fees anyways, but a spammer will have to go out of his way to send bulk messages. [1] https://github.com/ortutay/bitnet/blob/master/bitnet.go#L50 https://github.com/ortutay/bitnet/blob/master/bitnet.go#L50 [2] https://github.com/ortutay/bitnet/blob/master/bitnet.go#L38 https://github.com/ortutay/bitnet/blob/master/bitnet.go#L38

ams6110 12y ago
Heh. Bitnet was an early (1980s) point-to-point network built out of leased lines between educational institutions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET

diafygi 12y ago

Funnily enough, proof-of-work was originally invented to combat spam and denial of service attacks[1][2]. I asked that in a reply, and it seems that the large gap between server compute power and mobile compute power would make a reasonably taxing proof-of-work system too costly for mobile phones[3]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash [2] - http://hashcash.org/papers/pvp.pdf http://hashcash.org/papers/pvp.pdf [3] - https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000782.html https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000782....

drfuchs 12y ago
Just to be clear, "Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail" (Crypto 1992), by Dwork and Naor, invented the idea of Proof Of Work, suggested it for fighting Spam (before the term was even coined!), provided actual functions, and more. This predates HashCash by half a decade. [Edited to de-obfuscate.]
- diafygi 12y ago
  Ummm, that's the paper referenced in [2]…

zrm 12y ago

> Couldn't some form of proof-of-work system be used to increase the cost of sending a message without it having much of an economic impact on a casual sender? Was that what he was alluding to with the "burning bitcoin" reference? The idea seems to be that you provably "burn" a small amount of Bitcoin to get an identity. An innocent person can then carry on using that identity forever without doing any more computation. Meanwhile a spammer will ruin that identity's reputation almost immediately and then have to pay again to get another one.

chii 12y ago
so the war's front moves to botnets - where spammer first installs malware/virus to take over a user's machine, in order to send email _from_ that user's identity. Given that a user's machine is more easily compromised, the burned identity wouldn't cost more than current botnet acquisition.

pmorici 12y ago

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn OpenBazzar a bit-torrent like p2p version of ebay uses proof of burn to make bad behavior expensive.