Hi,
Sorry if you guys already have thought about this:
I just heard about the bitcoin concept. As a keen hobby economist / nerd i immediately understood how great a concept this is. The only problems to get it really flying fast its missing basically one of two things; physical backing or _lots_ of people who use it. Physical backing is difficult as it will immediately attract the governments attention. Lots of people to use it may be difficult unless there is a killer application for the bitcoins, and i have such a suggestion: Limiting spam!
What about making small plugins to the most popular email clients (and later email server software) where you actually have to pay bitcoins to send email to people. The receiver of your email will get the 0.01 bitcoins it "costs" to send an email. Later application would be that the receiver can himself specify how expensive it should be to send mails to him. A mail with a bitcoin attached to it (its just a text string that can be searched and parsed for right?) will guaranteed be white listed by the mail program plugin (or mailserver which supports bitcoin). The payment will be added to your wallet. For all normal people who send / receive a little bit of emails this will be a zero sum game but for spammers it will be expensive. If you still get spam you can increase the price to send email to you. If you are poor / broke and still want to send email to others you can just "lower your guards" a little bit and let the spammers fill up your wallet with bitcoins (its pretty obvious spammers would still spam, it would just be less and higher quality since its pay per actual read). You can even add advanced features like: The first mail from an unknown person is very expensive and you will get a "refund" if the person you mail to replies, and a lower fixed rate is set after that (like a deposit of wasting peoples time). There could even be features to "buy" peoples attention, attach 1.000 bitcoins and your mail will be marked as crazy important and not be bumped down for several days in the recipients mailbox. If you have something important to say you can buy that attention.
In the beginning both systems (old and new) could live side by side, but as more and more users starts using this system (and experience no spam) users will be tempted to check the "trash any mail not containing bitcoin payment". If you try to mail somebody with this filter you will just get a bounce mail that states "Your email was returned, the recipient only accepts emails with an embedded bitcon of at least 0.001 value". Or the intermediate "Your email has been put into (Insert Name) low priority email pile, if you are lucky it will be read. If you want your email to be whitelisted attach 0.001 bitcoins".
This could kill spam + make millions of people use bitcoins.
Also: its easy to get payment for simple content like text and images, you can just have automated email responses like: To buy this chocolate cake recipe send a mail to
xxx@xxx.com with the subject:ChocolateCake and attached payment of 1 bitcoin.
Normal people and companies would buy bitcoins to send guaranteed spamfree mails, the prices would be low and affordable. There would be a constant demand for bitcoins from all over the world from a multitude a currencies = in some ways better than physical backing because of the easy access to liquidity through normal forex channels.
What do you guys think?
Eivind
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