This is pay to play to contact someone - more akin to donors paying politicians for access at a dinner.
For every legit paper mail, I've had 5-10 garbage leaflet advertisements shoved into my mailbox by half-legally working teenagers earning $1-2/h in exchange for everyone's annoyance. 99% of these went into trash immediately without looking.
Maybe 20 (edit: 15) years ago Flattr launched a tipping service that failed because people didn’t want to tip people and then a decade later things like Kofi and Patreon came along and have been a huge success because attitudes shifted. Maybe now is the time that pay to email can work?
You don't need to buy into the "Bitcoin will replace the U.S. dollar" narrative to buy $5 worth of bitcoin to send a few hundreds or thousands of emails..
No one goes to an arcade wanting to play a game and says "I don't know about these tokens, though..."
You buy bitcoin somewhere (if you can't figure this out yourself you arent trying)
And send it to whatever address this app provides to you..
I am unsure whether you could use e.g. Apple Pay to pay directly, or if you’d have to follow the microtransaction playbook to buy a greater amount of currency which you can spend.
The more detailed answer on how this works can be found by going to the site and clicking "How It Works"
1 Someone Emails You 2 The Gate Catches It 3 Sender Sees the Payment Page - The sender clicks the payment link in the reply. They see exactly what's being held and what it costs: 4 Pay with Lightning — 15 seconds 5 Email Delivered
I don't want it to be like I'm a valuable person and lower people pay for the privilege of my attention, but I do like the idea of making it so that senders have skin in the game and can't just infinitely generate emails that waste other people's time.
What I'd like to see is different costs based on how I classify the email.
So, everyone except trusted contacts pays $5 per email to me. If I think your email was pure spam, I keep the $5. If I reply, you get your money back. If I do nothing and never classify the email, you get back $4 after 30 days. And I can manually override like reply and keep the money, but those are the defaults.
Maybe a 3 to 4 tier inbox. Known and trusted user being able to contact you without paying, a high value inbox for the $1+ range, a low value inbox for the $.2 range emails wont be auto-deleted in and a very low value inbox emails will be deleted in depending on the amount paid, with free mails being gone within e.g. an hour, all the way up to e.g. a month for $.19 mails.
Then unify those inboxes and set up notifications to the users' likings.
Also, I'd normalize e.g. 10% going to the e-mail service providers and enshrine that amount into the protocol right away. Otherwise the protocol wont get a lot of attention from the major providers and if it does, the provider taking his share is going to become normalized anyway. But then the split isn't going to be in favor for the users. Which isn't negative per-se, but it'd be nice to have at least one type of service where this is split is reversed. And it is fair to assume whoever takes the larger split has more influence on the prices, potentially either making this feature useless or pricing very casual users out of the service.
This idea has been discussed for decades now. I like it
https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Anti-spam_20_27stamps_27#124...
It also adds to the adagium that all spam solutions ultimately do not work, and Bill Gates proposed all of them (a meme, too).
Furthermore, email is a broken protocol not because of federation (something alternatives usually lack) but because of lack of E2EE.
yeah Im sure some of you are super cool and dont need to read an email someones paid to sent to you, but for most people it would be a good service.
Im sure Zuck charges people to DM him on facebook? Or was that just in the past?
In essence, it’s a proof of work. So an email would require a tiny amount of “work” to be received. For one email this is no hindrance at all. But at spam scale it becomes a true hindrance.
Though I don't quite remember if it was your comment exactly or if it was someone's elses comment which had the same idea as this.
For legitimate senders, the attached fee would end up being spent by the receiver to send a reply, like a "refund", so it ends up zero-sum.
But for spammers it becomes an expensive option. Nobody is going to reply to the spam to "refund" their fee.
- it lacks a design that makes complete sense, i.e. a generic communication tool that combines short posts (Reddit model or private one like SMSs) with long-form notes (blog post model or private ones like emails) chats + audio-video where possible, including the archiving of the same; ultimately, it lacks a SINGLE self-hosted application that acts as a relay, but also as a web/local client, with Reddit/Lemmy-style posts, long-form blog posts, configurable with a few themes and easy to modify, chats, etc. We have Haven, which isn't bad but is just a "multi-purpose" relay + Blossom server (media attached to notes), there's Habla for blog use which does nothing else, there's 0xchat which still doesn't really work well outside its own relays... Nostr could be "the address book of the citizens of the web" with WoT to help and individual self-hosted instances as their digital home; it could be, but it isn't, and often messages posted outside of 4 giant "hub" relays simply aren't found by anyone, replies don't reach the recipient depending on the relays they are posted on, etc.
- it lacks a cohesive community; it's full of PoCs that are actually quite nice, but they're written and then abandoned. Almost no one seems intent on maintaining their own code.
- a lot is announced, correctly following the "release early, release often" model, but it goes nowhere.
Once upon a time, we had the hugely successful eMule/KAD for file sharing, we had ZeroNet for "websites without hosting" which largely failed; what's missing is essentially an application that serves modern public communication all-in-one, in a classic decentralised form like the KAD network, where everyone shares their own stuff and those not behind NAT help those who are to bypass it, and that's it. AT ITS CORE, people came for a function and discover the others, then you can plug in an economic aspect: "want my videos in higher resolution? Yes, I have them, for a fee", "want my books from which I extract articles here and there that you like? They're available, but for a fee", and so on. The foundation, the user economy, should only be the gift of storage and bandwidth, period. No needs to pay dedicated services nor directly nor via fees.
Otherwise, we're going nowhere (like Staker News), or if we do go somewhere, it won't be where we want to be and it won't work quite as we'd hoped at the start. Nowadays spam is easy enough to control at personal levels even with dbacl filtering and gnus scoring. That's not the problem. The problem is having something distributed enough since our connections can sustain a significant overhead, to avoid pay third party services, get easy censorship etc.
People's need for comms vary, give a single tool who support many, something easy to deploy, self-contained as much as possible, is the key to harvest users for a reason and they discover other reasons and enough other humans to stay.
BTC lightning can have some flaws too IIRC and I am curious how you handle it.
I have worked somewhat with nano just out of curiosity and it was a decent experience.
It's a shame that nothing like nano has been built for stablecoin itself properly. There is a exchange provider (nanswap) which has nanusd idea and I have even talked to the creator of that project but they are a sole proprietor and the business even after talking to them doesn't feel sadly trustworthy enough that I can recommend it at any scale given that it essentially boils down to that I have to trust them with my money.
Polygon chain with USDC can come close.