Maybe I’m missing the point, though?
Better yet. Require proof of work where the receiver sets the challenge level. Now you can whitelist people by offering trivial challenges for them. If you really want to email me it's going to take 2 minutes of CPU time - this will be done by the new mail clients in the background, so individual personal cost is essentially zero but bulk mail will require significant resources to send.
I mean there are infinite rules to play with in that sense. That's what excites me about crypto.
When my inbox fills up with spam I can't get legitimate mail because my inbox is full wouldn't essentially the same thing happen? I dunno why not just use the whitelist and be done?
By doing this, you'll encourage the commercialization of email. The people who can fund sending email will be the ones who send email.
Frankly, I don't think email is broken, as is. It is very easy to subscribe and unsubscribe to email lists, and spam filtering generally works. It is relatively easy to control one's inbox, and it is completely under your control, as opposed to the many other services that have tried to replace it.
If communication wasn't worthless before, flooding money markets to drive interest rates to permanent zero finished killing it.
At least with email, most of it gets automatically filtered, though it is also quite annoying there when every company or contractor I have ever purchased anything from ever feels the need to send me every day updates on everything happening with their business.
* An overstuffed mailbox tells burglars you're away
* There's more waste involved - it mostly goes to landfill (unopened)
* An overstuffed mailbox leaves less room for legit mail (most email services are good at creating a focused mailbox, so there's not the same signal to noise issue there)
* ID theft is probably easier from intercepting a preapproved credit card application than being able to hack your email password
Email servers get hacked daily, If you’re auto-sending payment to receiver , now there is an incentive for hackers , to spam themselves with your inbox and you pay out of your wallet for that.
Now, yes one could say, that’s no problem just have a multi-wallet approval method , so unless the second one approves, it wont. But now that makes it a bit more complex, especially for newsletters where multiple recipients can be there.
Also, i just think overall Paying to send emails is lame... It sounds all cool and dandy, until it isn’t..
Getting spammed with newsletters from a writer ? Unsubscribe (and if they still continue , mark as spam)
Having to pay to send newsletters, now just adds an extra step for new newsletter authors to fight against fraud , and constantly calculate if its worth it to send emails to a person, and when they’ll stop sending because of that. Pretty sure the receiver, wouldn’t be that much happy.
Nice idea though, Who knows, a refined version of it might make sense.
A very small fraction.
4th class mail, sent to the occupant of every house, is very very cheap.
Really, the cost of adwork, logos, placement, 4 colour print is more expensive than post.
Newsletters are no issue in EU though. They need to provide a clear and easy way to unsubscribe or they break the law.
Edit - now with good ol' ASCI formatting.
—————————-
Your post advocates a
( ) technical
( ) legislative
( ) market-based
( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!I believe it was HN's Paul Graham who innovated wrt spam filters.
The provider I used was onto it (I used Mutt over SSH with them and all spam was in a seperate folder due to procmail IIRC but later they added spam and virus filters which you could customize), that was before Gmail existed though. They do the same, for free, but you pay with your privacy.
If newsletter senders are paying to send out they're going to have to then have some sort of separate charging mechanism from the recipients to get them to compensate the sender.
And since blockchains are public, you need to address anonymity and communications tracking (what the spooks call metadata): public keys are pseudonyms and there has been a lot of successful research on decloaking “anonymized” data.
Done.
> there should be economic incentive to only communicate valuable information. Sending an e-mail should cost "something".
Why wouldn't this be solved by attaching a simple POW to every message? The trust thing is a non-issue, you'd just whitelist people or domains you trust.
So I just do a sybil attack of sending messages to accounts I control, and not marking them as spam? Avoiding Sybil attacks ain’t so easy when you’re building a peer to peer and permissionless system.
Oh and it gets better… this reputation can then be milked for all kinds of things:
”In a system where we want to incorporate some kind of reputation system, after reading the message, the recipient could publish an acknowledgement on the chain with an indication of how valuable the information was. This could be as simple as yes/no/abstain. There would probably need to be rules here to prevent gaming the system. For example, the weight of the acknlowedgement could decrease over time. The pricing mechanism could then be based on your reputation.
The reputation would be stored in a token, and a set of smart contracts would goven their behaviour.
Reputation could be fungible (ie if I have 10 reputation, I can "endorse" someone else up to 10-N reputation, N tbd, for example - there could be other endorsement rules). This could permit anyone to create multiple pseudonyms which, with some ZKP magic, all "share" their reputation, but cannot be linked. This could even work across networks.”
So basically, the whole system would be built on “reputation” credits that are easily obtainable by creating lots of fake identities, to “mint” reputation tokens by colluding.
Edit, having read the article: If you're going to put that much cryptography into it, why not give a unique key when you subscribe? That way you can unsubscribe or reduce volume at any point, by dropping messages with that key (and all messages without keys). As usual, what is the extra blockchain for?
I can't see anything that stops a perverse incentive being created on the recipient's part: Why wouldn't I create a harvesting mailbox which signs up for as many messages as it can to generate income?
It seems like there would need to be a feedback mechanism so that senders could tell who was actually a recipient worth paying to talk to.
I like the idea of using the blockchain to handle the micro transactions, but I'd rather only have the money put in escrow until the reader opens it and either accepts or rejects it (or it goes back to the sender after 10 days or something).
I think that sometimes we forget that we are almost always sending and receiving anonymous emails and how weird that is.
All of this is offered to solve a problem that a user can solve by right click->mark as junk in most e-mail clients.
Yup - I'm certainly not going to volunteer to pay more :p Spam filtering. It's not perfect but it is effective. I agree wholeheartedly with this being just another excuse to insert the pet technology of the day - which to day is Blockchain.
Blockchain Blockchain Blockchain!
Just don't sign up to mailing lists you don't like, or learn how to use temp email addresses and/or email+filter variables
Adding more capitalism is not how to solve problems caused by capitalism.
A lot of the passion/hobby newsletters I receive would not exist if the person writing them had to pay to send the emails. Adding a cost to distributing information does not increase the quality of distributed information, it just increases the percentage of information distributed that is trying to make the sender money.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the article. Are they talking only about marketing newsletters or just any kind of mass-emailing? Because sure, I'd support adding a toll to sending marketing emails. If your intent is to sell something, it should cost you some money to advertise.