[Cryptography] A festival of WKBIs, was Proof of Work is the worst way to do a BlockChain

[John Levine]

In article <CACMCW-PnU+QQQ-3GFzGxBtfWoB0ecMndtTGoKcKoA2hgSAcdzQ at mail.gmail.com> you write:
>> earn.com does exactly that already and it is based on Bitcoin.
>>
>> earn.com does not aim to fight against spam but rather to help popular
>people earn money when they read/respond to emails and make you pay to
>reach the attention of important people.

This particular WKBI has failed many times before.  One of the higher
profile failures was Boxbe, which tried to do exactly that, and failed
due to a combination of patent trolling and the reality that the
number of people who imagine that they are important enough to pay to
contact exceeds by many orders of magnitude the number who really are.

Furthermore, if you are an actual important person, auctioning
attention is a really lousy way to weed out time wasting bores.
That's why they have secretaries to screen their calls.

There's another one called Bitbounce, same idea of pay crypto coins to
contact me.  It keeps showing up on mailing lists as nitwits join,
sign up for mailing lists, and it indiscriminately spams anyone who
writes to them.  Boxbe is still around but they are now doing
something else.

>What I propose is the following to fight spam all over the Internet:

>IETF (or W3C/IEEE/EFF) owns a token to be used in mail communication on
>sender-pays-recipient scheme. 1 mail costs 1 MC (MailCoin). All emails are
>equal, all people are equal. Simple. Normal people who send and receive
>emails pay a net cost around zero, those who send a lot of emails to their
>clients and receive much less pay a fair amount. ...

This might be a good time to flog my 2004 paper on why e-postage can
never work.  Some of the numbers need another zero or two, but nothing
of importance has changed.

https://www.taugh.com/epostage.pdf

I have a new proposal: any time someone proposes a new FUSSP, he has
to post a $1000 bond that is forfeited to the first person who reports
where it's failed before or where it's been patented.  This is pure
self-interest; after a year or two I'll be able to buy an island and
retire.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly