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> Imagine how much less spam we would have if it cost 1 cent to send an email. Friction can do a lot of good.

Incidentally, this was the motivation behind a PoW system called Hashcash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash.

Bitmessage had this and it would burn up my laptop cpu trying to send a text message but spammers with gpu farms could still take out the whole network with no troubles.

Seems like in a mature implementation your phone/laptop would route the message to a GPU farm and the work requirement could be scaled appropriately. And for whitelisted everyday contacts the computation cost could be zero.

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