Attention Bonds | Hacker News Reader

Attention Bonds

wiki.asrg.sp.am

28 pointspmoriarty17 comments

So the value provided in the email has to be greater than the value of the bond, or else the recipient will just collect. Yet the bond value has to be great enough to incent opening in the first place. That seems like a large hurdle.

Not to mention if the value imparted is informational, once you read the email (to judge whether spam) the value has already transferred, making it easy to double-collect by hitting spam.

"Opinion polls suggest an extremely high level of resistance to any kind of financial cost potentially being involved in sending e-mail."

I think this is the most important point of the whole concept. Make people pony up cash to send email, and they will send their messages in some other way.

Remember when SMS messages used to cost money no matter what service you used?

And remember how people sent a billion of them? Opinion polls are different from, how people will actually respond. They'll gripe, then they'll pay up.

My point was that once services appeared that let you send them as part of a package or even for free, people flocked to them. Of course people complained and used the service when there was no alternative.

I'd say that in that limited scope of an example, opinion polls and consumer action were very similar.

I'm wondering if email could be sold as a pay-to-play (not pay-per-email) sort of thing? We already pay our ISP, so I guess that's happening already. The only question is then, how much more would we pay for good email? SPAM-free email, with messages vetted by authentic origin.

The problem is that you don't care about paying, you care about other people paying. Email exists already, and email sent without paying must continue to arrive.

Also note the myriad issues associated with mailing lists and similar.

I run my own mail server, and would happily risk a few cents per email to not have to deal deliverability bullshit. I'm a little sad hashcash never caught on for email.

Maybe a naive question - is Spam that big an issue any more? For me (both corporate and personal email managed by GMail) I rarely see Spam messages. This article is from 2004, maybe it was a bigger issue at the time.

I think it's a much smaller problem for end users these days - the cost to our attention is down to something like 1% at best.

But there's still a very large cost to systems, sysadmins, etc. - because all of that spam still gets sent, so processors still have to devote cycles to sending it, receiving it, and classifying it, and someone pays for the bandwidth as well.

What's to stop you from signing up for every newsletter available and then marking them as spam to collect money? Is there anyway for the sender to appeal?

Signing up could require posting a bond as well, so the sender could recoup the cost if you reneged on the agreement.

I like to think that some day when the main currency is energy rather than money, one of the primary things it is exchanged for is attention. Seems to me that these are the most fundamental scarce resources that need to be managed sustainably.

Attention bonds would combine perfectly with cryptocurrencies to provide a general basis for contracts. Perhaps it could make for an honest ad business!

It's interesting to compare/contrast this with hashcash one of the precursor technologies of Bitcoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Obvious question is whether some kind of blockchain based implementation would address enough of the disadvantages to be useful.

I feel like what I'm about to suggest must have been thought of: is it possible for me to somehow attach a "one time crackable key" such that if someone wants to send me an email, they have to do a nontrivial amount of calculation? Like... a turing email address, where they have to compute the actual address, and the computation is nontrivial?

Check out HashCash, another solution proposed around the same time.

Round about 2004 there were several attempts to solve the SPAM problem. This was a fertile time for innovation in this space. Yahoo's DKIM and SPF records were invented, and many other systems were proposed, including my own that I called Choicelist. There was at that time a micropayment solution called HashCash. You might find that method interesting.

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