At 07:23 AM 9/17/01 +0000, Ryan Lackey wrote:
What would be really cool would be replacing "decipher these numbers" with some kind of task which produced actual value, but could be evaluated either by a machine or a horde of other humans; "prove this theorem", "sort these files", etc.
If you *required* injected messages to be PGP-encrypted, you have a hashcash-like cpu cost, plus you perform the 'human value' of increasing encrypted traffic and possibly increasing PGP's deployment. And AUP-legit botwriters can handle this. I suppose 'credits' from a distributed-computing project (fubar@home) would work, if you could work out how to reliably associate those people with your ephemeral ones. Or partner with a Process Tree (tm) -like commercial dist.comp. company. Also contributing hand-prepared pages for the Gutenberg project, or indexing some content, or evaluating other contributors' offerings for validity. Cheers,