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Comment by stakhanov | Hacker News Reader

It's such an obvious idea, and it has been around for as long as spam e-mail has been a problem. I absolutely do not understand why it has not yet been adopted for all e-mail traffic worldwide. If an e-mail were to cost just one cent, it would never add up to an amount that a normal person would even notice, yet it would solve the problem of spam e-mail over night.

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But I still receive spam mail in my (physical) mailbox. I imagine they're not doing that for free either.

I agree with you though, it would probably still (drastically) reduce the amount of spam we have to deal with and we might still get some very specific targeted spam

It would kill newsletters and mailing lists. Also, considering that SMS spam is a thing (they cost just under a cent to send), it's not a foolproof solution.

This was one of the motivators described in the original Bitcoin white paper

And Hashcash, 12 years before that.

I wonder if this would have the unintended consequence of incentivizing companies to get even more of our personal data so that they're more judicious & targeted in who/what/when they send their emails.

There is De-Mail in Germany that is basically E-Mail. Initially, sending a De-Mail would cost a couple cents. It also offered the possibility to be legally binding, like a physical letter.

Despite some technical/security issues with it, nonne really uses it (although you can now send them for free, IIRC).

maybe it only costs a cent if the receiver does not accept it

Where would the money go?

Perhaps into a cryptocurrency wallet of my choosing to cover my bandwidth and storage costs incurred by receiving the message?

In fact, I wonder if this could be shoehorned into SMTP somehow? I.e. automatically respond with a unique wallet public key, and only forward the message if said wallet receives a specified payment?

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