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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

The obvious solution to spam/scams are micropayments.

When you send an email, you attach a micropayment (say 1 cent's worth). When the recipient opens the email, you get your 1 cent back.

This would make mass spam unfeasible while still allowing companies with legit bulk email needs keep sending email, since they would get most of their money back.

It would even create an industry for people to be the payment middleman where they front you the cash for your bulk emailing and then assume the risk and keep the difference as profit.

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One cent is less than the cost of a credit card transaction, which makes that infeasible.

That brings us to what I assume you had in mind, which is blockchain, the solution in search of a problem.

Unfortunately proof of stake systems can be gamed by using stolen credit cards to buy stake, which defeats your proposed system. On the other hand, proof of work is an unmitigated environmental disaster, one of the most egregiously wasteful technological endeavors of the last twenty years, and would be rightfully shunned if not for its enthusiastic users who are too enamored to see the second-order effects of their easy access to illegal drugs and speculative investing while they hope for the next Bitcoin bubble so they can cash out for more fiat currency to retire on.

You don't need blockchain. You just need a few big players willing to set up a payment system with tiny transaction fees specifically for email.

Heck, the big players, like Gmail, could just let you put say $5 down and then send 5,000 emails at a time (since you'd get it back when they were opened).

Except payment is already required for traditional mail, yet I still receive an endless stream of spam and scams.

Yes but nowhere near 1 cent per email, a sum that is still very little for legitimate users (especially considering the high likelihood of getting it back), but much higher than what current spammers pay.

Do you? I get unsolicited postal mail, but it's at least well targeted and often relevant to me. Sure I toss the credit card offers, but if I were in the market for a credit card, the ones that I'm getting offered are probably the ones I'd consider.

Bad guys will buy cheap stolen credit cards (and there will be intermediaries for more legit ones). One credit card bought for 2$ - one hundred thousands emails sent. On the other hand payment processors will drown in transactions which cost more than amount sent. And before someone says "blockchain" - highly unlikely that it could work, but lets say maybe, for some specific token system. But eventually it will be plagued with exact same issue - easily and cheaply stolen funds will empower millions of emails and system will struggle under millions of useless transactions, problem won't be solved.

You wouldn't use traditional credit cards for micropayments. You'd need a dedicated micropayment processor just for emails that is significantly cheaper (like .01 cents per transaction).

The microprocessor would have an incentive to create anti-fraud systems. Perhaps you can't send email until 30 days after you pay or something like that.

It would be a place of innovation.

It could even start with the big players, like Gmail and Hotmail, allowing big senders to put down deposits.

In a dystopian world, it would be implemented by Gmail/Hotmail/etc. and they would allow free emails amongst themselves and then charge other senders. That's honestly how it would probably go down in the real world.

Just another processor won't solve the problem existing today - fund need to get into this system and they will get there from regular CC or regular people, which are stolen and sold cheaply today. It will be a battle between fraud and checks. The way they will battle this is "the dystopian" way, you are correct there - more and more closed systems, proprietary protocol additions, ban of 3rd party clients, eventually it will work only internally in google, microsoft and apple. It already starts to happen with dynamic emails, blocking imap etc.

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