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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>> 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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