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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

I signed up for earn.com with the expectation that anyone wanting to message me would have to pay first. Then they sent me spam from ICOs without paying me. Worse than useless. Their previous hardware mining ASIC product was also poorly thought out and ultimately a colossal waste of money.

I'm thinking the people claiming that there are other motives behind this deal are probably right.

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Looking at their home page, they say, "Paid email is already one of the first truly useful applications of the blockchain."

Does that make any sense? If I wanted to set up paid email, how does a blockchain help? It seems technically unnecessary.

And if I really wanted user adoption, why woulnd't I just pay people in their local currency instead of trying to get them to take part in something much less directly useful to them?

ahh, thats the trick isnt it -- blockchain provides universal currency. No need for local currency handing, banks, cc processors, forex transfer providers, and all the things associated with local payment processors. While i dont think this is the first or is it truely useful, but yes, blockchain (specifically bitcoin) is providing a decentralized universal currency for use in decentralized systems like email. Its a valid point.

In theory, perhaps. In practice, it provides a universally inconvenient currency. If somebody wants to send me money to read an email, then I want to be able to spend that money. If they send me bitcoin, I can't spend it directly: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-l...

Ergo, I am right back in need some way to convert it into my local currency. Except far less conveniently than just letting my bank take care of the exchange, as they would with an international wire transfer.

Also, as I explain elsewhere, the forex thing is a solution looking for a problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16854526

The reason I'd pay somebody to read an email is so that I can do business with them, and for a fair bit more money than I pay for the email. That involves one of us paying the other. Which in practice will mean a real currency, not cryptotulips.

I might add, that exchanging these BTC into fiat is a taxable event.

>>Does that make any sense? If I wanted to set up paid email, how does a blockchain help? It seems technically unnecessary.

By accepting cryptocurrency payments, you can accept email from anyone in the world. With the traditional finance system, there are legal obstacles to where a payment system can operate.

Also, using a traditional financial intermediary would mean that all the users of the winning paid-email service would be locked into using the same financial intermediary, which would then have significant power over its users owing to its network effect.

I guess calling it "email" instead of a task makes it sound new, but they do have competitors, Mechanical Turk probably being the most prominent.

Mechanical Turk pays out using Amazon payments or Amazon gift cards.

Google Opinion Awards pays out as either Google Play credit on Android. It looks like you can convert this to a gift card, at least in the U.S. They use Paypal on iOS.

This is a solution in search of a problem. Most people barely want to accept email from people they are likely to do business with. What American is excited to get email from some stranger who literally doesn't have two nickels to rub together?

Also, you're just wrong about traditional financial intermediaries. It's easy enough to provide a few different ways to transfer funds. Or to do it over a relatively open network like e-check or wire transfer, where there's no lock-in possible.

>>What American is excited to get email from some stranger who literally doesn't have two nickels to rub together?

I don't know, but tying the expansion of the email system to the reach of the US financial system seems quite limiting and archaic, and totally contrary to the international and open nature of the internet.

>>Or to do it over a relatively open network like e-check or wire transfer, where there's no lock-in possible.

Making a wire transfer to use email? That'd be ridiculously expensive. You'd need a payment system built on top of the bank wire system, and it would need to be truly international in scope, and open, which no trusted third party based financial system is.

> I don't know, but tying the expansion of the email system to the reach of the US financial system seems quite limiting and archaic, and totally contrary to the international and open nature of the internet.

Email is already open and international and doesn't need bank accounts. This is paid for email solicitation, and nobody needs to do that without access to payment networks, unless perhaps they wish to conceal their true identity because they're spear-phishing.

But email solicitation is a major usage of email, and therefore any widely used protocol for managing solicitation needs to use wholly open and decentralized components to maintain email's qualities.

>>and nobody needs to do that without access to payment networks

Some people can't access a particular financial system, due to political reasons. The global financial system is not borderless.

> tying the expansion of the email system to the reach of the US financial system seems quite limiting and archaic

The important word here being "seems". Seeming is a thing that happens in someone's head. So the fuller version is "seems to an anonymous person who has tied their identity to a particular technology and a specific political vision".

It does not seem like that to me. Or to 99.9% of companies, who start out tying their companies to the reach of a specific national or regional financial system and then move happily beyond it.

In practice, starting with the use of the US financial system provides much more reach than Bitcoin, which has a much smaller user-base, something more like Bolivia or Switzerland, and whose "residents" do much less of their economic activity through that financial system than those in developed nations do.

>>In practice, starting with the use of the US financial system provides much more reach than Bitcoin, which has a much smaller user-base, something more like Bolivia or Switzerland, and whose "residents" do much less of their economic activity through that financial system than those in developed nations do.

Of course but that's pretty disingenuous, because it ignores the obvious: that those pushing this track see cryptocurrency becoming mass adopted over the coming years.

Their point is that cryptocurrency's potential reach is far greater than any centralized legacy financial system's.

Their other point is that it's more consistent with the open and decentralized nature of the internet.

>>So the fuller version is "seems to an anonymous person who has tied their identity to a particular technology and a specific political vision".

Are you sure that's not you?

> I signed up for earn.com with the expectation that anyone wanting to message me would have to pay first. Then they sent me spam from ICOs without paying me. Worse than useless.

What lead you to expect that people would want to pay to email you? The business model makes no sense; it's obvious that that wasn't going to happen.

I didn't really expect it, though I thought there was a chance that some ICOs with more money than sense might try it once or twice. I did expect, however, that they wouldn't spam me with non-paid messages. Obviously that was foolish.

Is it possible that spammers could spam their registration servers checking which emails had been already used? E.g. get a list of all the public emails off of github commits, then cross reference them with Earn.com registrations.

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