[Cryptography] Paid SMTP (PSMTP)

[Ersin Taskin]

2018-02-28 20:53 GMT+03:00 John Levine <johnl at iecc.com>:

> In article <CACMCW-MX+E4t1feHg9xipKn6V1S4ASZS4wA4ifK
> oK5cL3wY_7A at mail.gmail.com> you write:
> >Anyone who is not capable of installing, filling, using a crypto wallet
> >cannot be a part of PSMTP. They can continue with SMTP. Granma can keep
> >mailing her granchildren in SMTP.
>
> Oh, sorry, I misunderstood.  If you want a tiny walled garden for
> crypto nerds, sure, go ahead.
>
> But you might want to look at Bitbounce, an extremely annoying venture
> funded version of this WKBI.
>

Cryptographic wallets will make it to the mainstream soon. It is not
visionary to imagine all smartphones equipped with a wallet in the near
future. If you consider P-SMTP as a solution for the past, or even today,
it fails. If you consider it as a solution for the future, the whole thing
changes.

Think of a very near future where private key based apps running in TEE on
mobile devices and PC's is ubiqutous. This month, I will start development
using a SDK that gives me access to TEE on mobile devices. Did you know
that it existed today? Well this is a totally different story than that in
the past. We should use this opportunity to fight spam. It is obvious that
forcing the spammer to crack private keys in end-point TEE is raising the
bar so much that spam will be out. Such a skilled attacker will no longer
be called a spammer. Therefore, I request you, someone remarkable in the
anti-spam camp, to think about a cryptocurrency-wallet based solution to
spam.

Thank you for Bitbounce recommendation. I read their whitepaper. Here are
the issues I found at first glance.
(i) They offer a complicated scheme of paying various amounts to various
people, important people asking for more money to accept your mail, even
more to respond, not providing a solution to guaranteing that it is the
famous person that is really taking time to write the reply, rather than a
secretary and/or bot.
(ii) The main problem is adoption. The spam problem is the problem of the
entire Internet. I expect a wide consortium of the ecosystem led by IETF
(or the like) to achieve a successful attack on spam. If we can get Google,
Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, etc. on board, I think adoption is possible.
Integration with current mail clients and services is key. We are lucky
that a handful of companies provide the vast majority of mail
clients/services. Adding companies like Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, etc. can
be interesting. The adoption problem cannot be solved by a desperate, small
ICO trying to make money competing/fighting against animals of same size.
(iii) Their token is ERC20 based and this obliges them to rely on Ethereum.
This causes a scaling problem. They acknowledge it. They say they hope
blockchain sharding will be implemented by core Ethereum team some day.
This would not be enough of course. The basic problem is decentralization.
POW is horrible and POS is not enough. They are aware of that as well and
claim that they can think of off-chain solutions. They think of moving to
another blockchain like Tezos if Ethereum fails. My proposal stays away
from decentralized blockchains. I cannot understand why the experienced
developers on board decided to rely on Ethereum. What an obvious design
mistake! Probably they were after token sale and ERC20 was the most popular
way to get funded. This design choice proves that they did not believe in
wide adoption in the mid term.
(iv) they have a hopeless adoption scheme. Spamers can expoit it to get
incentives to distribute bitbounce to sybil accounts. They do not provide a
solution to this problem other than using buzzwords like KYC. Well, even I
wouldn't be that naive to call for KYC to fight spam:)
(v) proprietary, closed source, patent applying approach is not the way to
fight spam.

They have a good team though. Having Tim Draper as an investor is
interesting. The technical team is cool and experienced. They are on right
track on sharding bitbounce DB to scale. They have completed their ICO
stage successfully. I believe they will fail to fight spam, however, I'll
try not to underestimate them.
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