[OT] Note to new-ish subscribers: you joined a mailing list, not a "group". (fwd)

[Cathal Garvey]

> We have lots of privacyscam hash-cash code running around these days,
> so what are the chances of just advertising you only accept mail that
> includes a *coin payment to the recipient?

The obvious problem is that not everyone will pay, so you'll end up in a
filter bubble of people who think their speech is so important it's
worth tacking money on to make you read it, and people who think *you
listening to them* is so important it requires money.

One option to fix this is to revive mail priority levels, and set things
up so that you can only have your mail regarded by recipients as "high
priority" if it comes with cash.

Another option is to have a pseudocurrency within mail; not a real
thing, though perhaps exchangeable in bulk for real money, but just a
way to measure roughly speaking the sending-to-receiving ratio of the
*sender*.

That is, when I set up my account, a well-respected server mints me 10
tokens for sending email. Recipients will weigh my mail in higher favour
if I include a token, so by default I spend one per email. Recipients
get to keep my tokens, in a bitcoinish transactional fashion. If I run
out of tokens, people are more likely to ditch or ignore my mail, and I
may have to mint some more by doing something free but time consuming
like hard-proof-of-work (think hashcash in advance) or paying real money.

So, if I'm running a normal email account, I'll send and receive my mail
in a certain ratio, and that'll lead to a certain rate of coin
accumulation or loss, but it'll be manageable. I might have to do
hashcash now and again to replenish if I send more than I receive, or I
might be swimming in 'coin if I receive lots and send little.

But if I'm a spammer, I'll run out immediately, and have to buy more or
spend a lot of time minting; same principal as hashcash, prohibitively
expensive for something that requires huge volumes to catch the
occasional idiot.

This is a bastard combination of hashcash (which would have and would
still work well if implemented, I feel) and the current
white/blacklisting system for servers that impose a moderation
responsibility on SMTP servers. But I think it mixes them in good ratio.
Servers who are trusted can arbitrarily mint, but the usage of coins
makes abuse self-limiting, so there's less load on the servers to
moderate and invade privacy.

On 20/01/14 05:13, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
> I was struggling with spamassassin and attemping to implement reject-
> -at-smtp time filtering, and reading about this 'hashcash' idea, several
> years ago and thinking maybe it would be nice if someone would *pay* me
> to read their email.
> 
> We have lots of privacyscam hash-cash code running around these days,
> so what are the chances of just advertising you only accept mail that
> includes a *coin payment to the recipient?
> 
> (Granted, it's low because most *coiners don't seem to understand what
> mail is given they can't even figure out how to install mailman, but
> the hope remains)
> 
> -- Troy
> 
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