Payments as an answer to spam

[Ian Grigg]

"McMeikan, Andrew" wrote:

> Put a valid 1mdc payment cheque in the subject line and I guarentee to read
> your email!

That's about the bottom line for prevention of
spam.  Add a payment to each email.  That doesn't
really prevent spam, it just makes it more
value-oriented.

As a footnote from economics, it is considered
a bad thing to create a monetary system that
bases its scarcity on destruction of assets.
Such schemes are expected to be dominated by
schemes that achieve the same effect but
manage to conserve their assets.

This applies to hashcash (c.f. Adam B.) or
those various hash collision schemes of
tokenising money (c.f. Ron R?).  Pretty
much all of these schemes can be done more
practically just by doing plain-old-digital-
signatures (PODS?).

The real issue with propogating any such
mail payment scheme (whether destructive or
conservative of value) becomes one of client
ease.  Most all mail clients have trouble
understanding new conventions.

To look at it from an experience pov, if we
could adjust mail protocols and clients easily
enough to add a mail payment scheme, then we
could have done the same to add crypto for
privacy purposes.

Institutionally speaking, we (as an Internet)
have failed to deploy widespread crypto mail
in a lethargic and non-aggresive environment.
It's a bit hard to see how to deploy a mail
payment scheme when we are doing so against
the interests of an active, aggressive, funded
and smart enemy.

> In fact just to reward you for reading this far down (so you must hate spam
> right?)
> https://www.1mdc.com/cgi-bin/pickup.cgi?3573082-2fffa2aa33a2de0e93223fd82b39
> a6c2
> a microspend, valid 7 days.  I stuck this very small chunk of money here as
> a previous post suggested that anonymous money was somehow either wrong or
> impossible, its not wrong and it is possible.

Ha!  I didn't know 1mdc had tokenish feature.
And yes, it does, I just picked it up :-)

Thanks Andrew!

> Prediction for future: 2020, spam still majority of email.  Rumours of new
> system abound.

!

-- 
iang

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