At 03:46 PM 5/12/03 -0400, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
So, what's my reason to accept a "payment in cpu time"? As best as I can tell, a "payment in cpu time" means that someone *else* doesn't get a payment in cpu time with their spam. I still get the spam.
The realistic benefit is that you can use something like hashcash as one of your spam filtering rules. Anyone who is spending 1/2 sec on a reasonable machine per e-mail sent isn't likely to be spamming you, because that won't scale up very well for sending out thousands of e-mails at a time. The problem is that until it is widely adopted, it's not a very useful additional filter. There are actually dozens of similar ways to stop nearly all spam, if you can deploy them all over the net at once. But deploying anything all over the net at once isn't practical, so instead, each user or ISP tries to find some workable solution for the problem, typically involving changing his filtering rules every few months and spending a minute or two a day going through his spam folder, making sure he's not throwing away something valuable.
- Bill
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