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Comment by jonwest | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the point of this is to reduce junk mail by forcing a financial cost to sending mail thereby causing the sender to really consider the content of their message before sending it—except there is a real cost associated with sending traditional mail and there is still a huge amount of garbage traditional mail sent out every day.

Maybe I’m missing the point, though?

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No. And I've heard proposals like this going back at least a couple of decades. The theory goes that if you make email expensive (at scale) charging even a trivial fee will make shotgun blasts cost prohibitive. While (very much in theory), a few cents won't deter the casual emailer. Though more likely, as with SMS at one point, people would find ways to route around the expensive pipe because bits are bits at the end of the day.

>> While (very much in theory), a few cents won't deter the casual emailer.

Better yet. Require proof of work where the receiver sets the challenge level. Now you can whitelist people by offering trivial challenges for them. If you really want to email me it's going to take 2 minutes of CPU time - this will be done by the new mail clients in the background, so individual personal cost is essentially zero but bulk mail will require significant resources to send.

Sounds like you're just increasing the demand for botnets.

Don't take this the wrong way but... Oh great. Just as the environmental tire fire that is bitcoin and the other crypto-currency bros is winding down, let's replace it with email.

The primary reason why a proof of work implementation for something like bitcoin has a huge environmental impact is because it is a winner take all system. You have thousands of machines trying to do the same thing but only one will get there first and claim all the reward, making all that other work that was done a waste of resources.

At some point 1:N becomes prohibitively expensive for the sender, but that doesn't mean that there is wasted work.

edit: To clarify, not really promoting the idea per say, just commenting on the proof of work statement.

No no no, this one is actually genius. The cost to send an email some one who doesn't know you (and has a real, functioning email) becomes too high to do casually in terms of the base resource (CPU time), I literally could not spam even if I wanted to without throwing absurd resources at the problem, which presumably would also make detection and correction easier if some of these elder-abusing rackets are more profitable than that. But! I could still send you a real email.

It would come down to numbers of course on whether it was actually a good idea, and one of those numbers would have to be "how much work needs to be done before your average spam calling scammer is no longer profitable", but as it stands if there is a number sufficient for that that still allows for regular emails, then the incentive to burn machine time on sending out mass-emails is effectively removed.

That's where we got the idea of proof-of-work in the 90s [1]. The problem is that this makes legitimate use cases like mailing lists very expensive, while providing little protection against spam from botnets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Obviously a subscriber to a mailinglist need to set the cost to 0 for the list sender.

The carbon footprint of those proposals is always forgotten. Global warming is a more important issue than junk email.

But mail is always priced at a fixed rate. What if your inbox worked on a bonding curve, such that as it filled up it became more expensive to send to (except for whitelisted addresses you approve)? What if your inbox required that the sender owned a particular NFT (proof of membership in a community)?

I mean there are infinite rules to play with in that sense. That's what excites me about crypto.

> What if your inbox worked on a bonding curve, such that as it filled up it became more expensive to send to (except for whitelisted addresses you approve)?

When my inbox fills up with spam I can't get legitimate mail because my inbox is full wouldn't essentially the same thing happen? I dunno why not just use the whitelist and be done?

What if you just click "spam" for the 1:10000 mails that make it through the filter and moved on with your day?

>I mean there are infinite rules to play with in that sense. That's what excites me about crypto.

Its pretty clear they also like to think about math, so you can probably answer why they don't 'just' do the thing you're asking yourself.

I think the most promising price scheme is one where the receiver can set it to arbitrary values. Are you in my contact list? Your price is zero. Are you one of my suppliers that likes to send me "new product" notifications every week? You can still send those, because I need to receive notifications from you, but your marketing department has to really want to talk to me because this will cost them 600 seconds of CPU. Did you come across my email on the Internet, and I don't know you at all? Sure, my email is in my signature for anyone to parse, but when you put it in the "To" field of your email client it will inform you it will take 300 seconds of CPU.

At the moment the cost of sending mail doesn't scale with the amount of mail you send. After spinning up a mail server the difference in cost between sending 1,000 and 10,000 emails is trivial.

Sending 10,000 mails yes, but will the email be actually delivered by large mail providers?

> forcing a financial cost to sending mail

By doing this, you'll encourage the commercialization of email. The people who can fund sending email will be the ones who send email.

Frankly, I don't think email is broken, as is. It is very easy to subscribe and unsubscribe to email lists, and spam filtering generally works. It is relatively easy to control one's inbox, and it is completely under your control, as opposed to the many other services that have tried to replace it.

There is really not that much junk mail in the traditional mail, in my experience. Probably it varies place to place, but it's much MUCH less than what I get in my gmail.

My experience is the opposite. I'm constantly getting junk mail at my home with no filtering, meanwhile gmail does a great job blocking unwanted emails.

I suppose it depends on how you count volume. I maybe get 2 or 3 pieces of "junk" mail a day, along with bill/renewal/etc. associated paper (most of which is handled electronically), and few other letters and packages. Certainly I get way, way more than that in email whether outright junk or the loosely-related result of being on countless industry lists, etc.

I get 10's of actual unsolicited spam emails per day that want me to click a link and run an exe, or buy Canadian drugs, or give bank account details so they can send me millions, etc.

I will say that Gmail seems to catch almost all of that historical sort of spam for me. But I get another 50+ emails per day (not counting those that are dumped in my spam folder--probably because enough people reported them as spam) that are various marketing because I once had a badge scanned at a show, someone bought a list of scanned badges from somewhere, I entered an email to download a doc I wanted to read, a PR pitch because I sometimes write for publications, etc.

None of this is exactly spam and I sometimes go on an unsubscribe binge (and report as spam anything without an unsubscribe) but it's still a flood of mail.

I think amounts of different types of spam one gets is variable, but it's trivial to ignore email spam. Even a smaller amount of spam in your snail mailbox has some negative side effects over spam in your email mailbox.

* An overstuffed mailbox tells burglars you're away

* There's more waste involved - it mostly goes to landfill (unopened)

* An overstuffed mailbox leaves less room for legit mail (most email services are good at creating a focused mailbox, so there's not the same signal to noise issue there)

* ID theft is probably easier from intercepting a preapproved credit card application than being able to hack your email password

Are you a homeowner? I do get some legitimate mail, though always from companies that already sent me a digital bill I paid by auto-debit anyway, that just refuse to go paper-free even though I'm throwing away all the paper they send me. But the overwhelmingly majority of my mail is unsolicited refinance offers, just as the overwhelming majority of my SMS texts and phone calls are people claiming they heard I want to sell my house.

If communication wasn't worthless before, flooding money markets to drive interest rates to permanent zero finished killing it.

At least with email, most of it gets automatically filtered, though it is also quite annoying there when every company or contractor I have ever purchased anything from ever feels the need to send me every day updates on everything happening with their business.

95% of the mail I get goes directly into my trash. And there's no way for me to bounce mail addressed to the previous homeowner.

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