On 17 Dec 1997 02:21:48 -0600, in local.cypherpunks you wrote:
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The implementation of the plan is a more or less impossible scheme.
Nyet. It can be phased in over time...people install the software, mailing lists warn their users to exempt them, and the big servers start asking for the hashcash, little servers pick it up.
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Yes, but if you just phase it in over time, what benefit, if any, will users see until hashcash is fully deployed. Until that time, people will still have to accept email without hashcash or risk losing important messages. We need to find some way for users to benefit from hashcash now, not 2 years from now when 90% of sites are using it. The only thing I can think of is having servers place "Hashcash-verified" headers on incoming mail so that users can do positive filtering ("this is valid email") rather than negative filtering ("this is spam"). I don't see people adopting hashcash unless there is some intermediate benefit to doing so. -- Phelix