will spammers early adopt hashcash? (Re: Spam Spotlight on Reputation)

[Adam Shostack]

On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 03:16:21PM -0600, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
| Apropos of nothing (specific) here...
| 
| At 4:56 PM -0400 9/7/04, Adam Shostack wrote:
| >What do you see as
| >equilibrium postal rates
| 
| Remember, boys and girls, prices are *discovered*, not calculated. Heck,
| you probably can't even *estimate* something like this with a straight
| face. Nobody should even try.
|
| Like any other security -- and hashcash *is* a security, a bearer
| certificate "reserved" by the sender's processor time -- we probably won't
| know what the equilibrium prices will be until they're issued, auctioned,
| if you will, by senders, and "bought" by receivers of mail...

So you can do some trivial calculations of how large a collision can
be found in the tcp_wait states on a zombie, and predict that a price
2x that requires that the spammers send half that much spam.  You can
certainly calculate a floor here, below which it is not worth
metering, and you can calculate a ceiling, above which its too
annoying to use.

Adam

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