Could Bitcoin eliminate spam forever?

[s2]

Was just thinking about a comment in Satoshi's paper and thought of a slight twist and curious if this might be the way to avoid us getting spam forever...

If when sending an email we include an extra header of 'my private email key' which is just a bitcoin private key.

If that address has more than X bitcoins in it the email will appear in your 'trusted email folder'.  If it's not spam, everything is good and life continues.  If however it's an unwanted email you simply collect their bitcoin (and send it to a charity) and this therefore cost the sender real money and will stop the email from appearing in other people's 'trusted email folder' as that address now has a 0 balance. 
The value 'X' can be user specified so perhaps myself I'd only set it at 0.001 where as Microsoft directors would require 1BTC in the account to receive a trusted email as they probably get more spam?

It does mean that who ever you email you must trust them to not steal your money but that sounds quite a sensible if you're really keen on making sure you get someone's direct attention.

This opens the door for other possibilities such as making your email public!! Yikes!!

Secondly this could be applied to your telephone too, imagine that... no more PPI calls as it would be costing people a fortune to run these annoying marketing campaigns if you could just press a button after the call to take their staked funds.

If it sounds sensible it seems all we need to trial it is an outlook plugin that can test a private key (perhaps via blockchain.info to begin with) and a button to 'donate' the received money to a charity.

Perhaps setting up a pending escrow transaction from the sender to the charity whereby the receiving client can decide to allow the transfer to happen to avoid malware theft?

I'm sure there must be flaws in this as it seems a potentially easy solution to eradicate spam so curious what I've overlooked? 

If it sounds sane, anyone interested in helping code up an outlook plugin?
 

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[kezzyp]

Well its an amazing crap, don't get me wrong sometimes craps are amazing too.. This will lead to more SPAM, more stealing more crisis, who is trusted and who is not trusted?

  Spammers and hackers will just easily intercept  people email and them cash the funds from senders account, Game over scammers win.
 
You send emails with money on them is not an idea, your talking about gambling without profit with your money, staff members that has left an       
   organisation long time already can actually cash out the fund if their email is still in existence.

Everything will be wrong with this unless you actually come up with a better plan about it.

I like ideas and i love them when they are developed, and i honestly tell you what i think and believe if you do more research and some more thinking you might get a better idea and a solution on how to make this idea better..

 

[s2]

Let me polish this turd a little further eh...

The interception concept is only valid with the private key, you're right, that invites malware and the likes so a good reason to not use that approach but a pending 2of3 escrow however shouldn't suffer from this issue since it wouldn't benefit the scammers.

Also I'm not saying all email must have this 'feature', just emails from external domains can optionally attach it to get put in your 'verified it's not spam' folder.  It's not gambling as you would only send these emails to people you want to read it and believe it strongly enough that they'll see why you emailed them.

If you're foolish enough to email someone with an unsolicited sales mail or speak in a tone that pisses them off they'll donate your 'postage fee' away which seems a win/win for the good guys.

[kezzyp]

Let me polish this turd a little further eh...

The interception concept is only valid with the private key, you're right, that invites malware and the likes so a good reason to not use that approach but a pending 2of3 escrow however shouldn't suffer from this issue since it wouldn't benefit the scammers.

Also I'm not saying all email must have this 'feature', just emails from external domains can optionally attach it to get put in your 'verified it's not spam' folder.  It's not gambling as you would only send these emails to people you want to read it and believe it strongly enough that they'll see why you emailed them.

If you're foolish enough to email someone with an unsolicited sales mail or speak in a tone that pisses them off they'll donate your 'postage fee' away which seems a win/win for the good guys.

Things you should consider first, how are you going to get this done?
Why do you think people needs this then the spam blockers which is actually paid to get rid of spam mails permanently
Why do money have to be involved to (gamble) coz its gambling like a bet, i put bitcoin and you put too let get this going to see who loses his.
Well, think about the rest.. Gotta do something..

[12648430]

The fundamental problem with opt-in anti spam systems (like HashCash, or this, or other proposed implementations of this) is that blocking legitimate emails is unacceptable, so as long as there are potential senders of legitimate email who don't opt-in you can't really reduce the likelihood of non-stamped messages making it to the inbox. As a result, as long as most people aren't using your system the system offers nothing but a way for spammers to pay for space in your inbox.

Since such a system is limited by a network effect anyway, one approach to implementing it is as a feature of an email alternative; email has a lot of legacy baggage you don't need if you're abandoning its network effect anyway. This is the approach Facebook has taken with its pay-per-message scheme.

[geri]

Bitcoin will end spam, but in a different way.

If you create malvare to sit on someone's PC, the easiest way to monetize it is to rent infected PCs to send spam. So that's what's happening.

Sending spam is not very profitable compared to mining.

When more hackers find out that it's more profitable to use that malware to mine bitcoins, less of them will send out spam.

And sending spam will become much more costly up to a point that it's not worth it anymore.

[12648430]

Mining Bitcoin and sending spam bottleneck at different resources (ASIC or GPU utilization, network bandwidth). There's no reason not to do both.

[newtothescene]

Check this out:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitmessage

[geri]

Mining Bitcoin and sending spam bottleneck at different resources (ASIC or GPU utilization, network bandwidth). There's no reason not to do both.

Fair point, although sending out spam gets you discovered much faster (ISP blocking that person) than mining bitcoin. If you mine on GPU while not used, it's unlikely the user or his ISP will ever find out.

[t3a]

Check this out:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitmessage

This doesn't eliminate spam, it just makes it much slower. It uses hashcash, which means someone can flood the network fairly easily.



Anyways, here's my idea based on your idea OP.

1) I want to send a message. I sign an email with a key that has control of a certain number of satoshis, then I encrypt the email with your public key.

2) I make a transaction spending to a script. The script gives me a refund if either 48 hours have passed, or 2 of 3 signatures sign it. Otherwise, if another set of 2 of 3 signatures sign it (these keys are used solely to indicate that it is spam) it spends to a charity address. The mediator address is chosen from either a web of trust or a mutually recognized authority.

3) I send you the signed encrypted email along with the script.

4) Before opening the email, your client automatically verifies that it has been signed by the signature of someone who just spent the threshold number of coins to the script that your received.

5) If it is spam, you can prove it using their signed message and you and the mediator will both sign it and give money to charity. Otherwise, you can click "not spam" and give him a refund, or just wait 48 hours.

[domob]

Anyways, here's my idea based on your idea OP.

1) I want to send a message. I sign an email with a key that has control of a certain number of satoshis, then I encrypt the email with your public key.

2) I make a transaction spending to a script. The script gives me a refund if either 48 hours have passed, or 2 of 3 signatures sign it. Otherwise, if another set of 2 of 3 signatures sign it (these keys are used solely to indicate that it is spam) it spends to a charity address. The mediator address is chosen from either a web of trust or a mutually recognized authority.

3) I send you the signed encrypted email along with the script.

4) Before opening the email, your client automatically verifies that it has been signed by the signature of someone who just spent the threshold number of coins to the script that your received.

5) If it is spam, you can prove it using their signed message and you and the mediator will both sign it and give money to charity. Otherwise, you can click "not spam" and give him a refund, or just wait 48 hours.

Yes, that would work better.  Another (similar) suggestion is to use a 1-of-2 address, with a key of the recipient and your own.  I can take back the coins at any moment, but this will revert the "trusted" status of my message if I do it before the mail has been read and processed by the recipient.  If they take the coins, then everyone can verify in the blockchain that it was indeed the recipient who took the coins - and thus if I feel unfairly treated because it is not spam, I can make the message public to show everyone that the recipient took the coins nevertheless.  Or even the other way round, every time someone takes coins, they "should" publish the message so everyone can see it is indeed spam.

Of course, this won't prevent cheating, but snatching up coins too often will hurt your reputation; thus trusted people won't do that.

[kezzyp]

This is a gamble, people will lose tons of coins, snitches, mistaken emails as spam is not even 100% eliminated in this process, guys even today good mails go junk and not seen, even the email owner might not even notice because he is too busy checking on mails that was not send to spam or marked spam by the system, and there goes your coin..