hashcash spam throttle

[Adam Back]

Robert A. Costner <pooh at efga.org> writes:
> It's much like spam.  It's a very shortsighted view when a user says "why
> can't you just hit the delete button?"  This is an incorrect answer for a
> user who received one piece of spam, but whose small ISP, being the relay,
> lost all mail services for two days.

See HashCash: http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/hashcash/

Hashcash ensures that the would be spammer has to consume more
resources than you do.  Hashcash is arbitrarily expensive to create
and cheap to verify.  It's also decentralised and anonymous.

Adam