Small fee on sending electronic messages

[stampz]

Hi!

I am considering developing a framework in which micro payments in bitcoin or similar will be used to mark messages in email and similar as "preferred", i.e. someone payed a small sum for you to read it, similar to sms messages and paper letters, but not that expensive.

The possibility of sending un-stamped messages will still exist, but if you put a stamp on your message, it will end up on the receivers "priority" folder or similar effectively allowing you to ignore spam or second-rate mail from that firm you haven't ordered from the last 10 years.

Please vote!

[CIYAM]

You might want to look into "hashcash" (which is where the whole "proof-of-work" concept in Bitcoin came from).

It doesn't require anyone to spend money but just to solve a "proof-of-work" problem (which spammers won't be able to afford to do when you are talking millions of emails) - unfortunately though the idea (as far as being used by any known email clients) never took off (probably mostly because "bayesian" algos have been so successful in filtering spam).

So if no-one could be bothered with using something would address this problem that was free of charge to use then I think that the chances of making money out it would be rather low.

[stampz]

Hmm yes I dug into hashcash, it seems to be dead.

Perhaps one problem was that you had to wait some time for your email to send, i.e. your computer to come up with a solution, variance of response time being one annoying issue (we all know how impatient we are with that send button)

[CIYAM]

In my upcoming software platform the Email package will actually have support for hashcash (not that I really expect anyone to use it - I included it as more of a tip of the hat to one of the origins of Bitcoin than to be anything practical) and using my fairly average powered laptop it generally takes a few seconds to find an SHA1 hash with 20 leading zero bits (which I think was the "difficulty" that they had last suggested when it was active).

I would guess that if the CPU was more like that found in a typical smartphone then the sending of an email would probably have to occur as a "background" task (and would likely result in your phone getting quite warm). I guess that the creators of hashcash may not have foreseen the emergence of smartphones way back then.

I think the whole "impatient" users thing is a problem with the idea of using email "stamps" (which is a term coined for this suggestion in the past) - unless the process is totally automatic then people aren't going to be bothered to use it (regardless of actual costs).

[MysteryMiner]

Great idea! Spammers will pay for Spam so it will become legit e-mail from systems point-of-view!

[CIYAM]

Currently spammers only send so much email because it is so cheap - if a price per email were to be set at even .001 BTC then I'd be very surprised if the amount of spam would not dramatically decrease (as the cost of sending 1,000,000 spam emails would now have had to increase by at least 10,000 USD - still think people would do that?).

[aodh]

I think this is arguably a better idea than hashcash. The reason is already given: since different devices have different efficiency in computing hashes, using hashcash would make it too expensive to send emails from, e.g., a smartphone (or if attackers used specialized hardware, then it would become too expensive to send emails even from a desktop). In contrast, this would allow you to send emails almost instantly, and even a small fee would act as a sufficient deterrent to spammers.

However, I don't think this will take off, for the simple reason that spam isn't much of a problem these days (given the existence of Bayesian filtering). If my inbox was overflowing with spam, then I would be prepared to go along with this, but, as it stands, it really doesn't seem necessary.

On the other hand, it might be useful in other similar situations - for example, a one-time fee to create forum ids, which would act as a sufficient deterrent to spammers (who would quickly be banned and hence lose the fee). And then we wouldn't have to make 5 posts before being allowed to use the whole forum.

[CIYAM]

I agree that Bayesian filters have pretty much defeated the spam problem (I only get a few spam emails per week these days when I used to get over 20 per day years ago) so I think the idea of an email "stamp" paid for in BTC (or using hashcash or some other means) is not likely to ever take off.

The idea of paying a "deposit" in order to join and immediately qualify to post in a Forum may be of some benefit - although another approach (which I am thinking I will be using with my software system) is to simply require a GPG encrypted email to be sent (and then a password sent back) in order to "join" (as I really don't think that the spammers are going to go to that much scripting effort just to end up with an account that will be very quickly shut down).