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Comment by alooPotato | Hacker News Reader

One thing stood out to me in the article "make something free and easy and people will do a lot of it".

What about this as a potential solution - in order to send an email to someone, you have to pay something.

Here's how it could work:

1) You sign up for a service that autoresponds to all incoming email stating that in order to send this receiver an email, they require at least X BTC.

2) The receivers inbox only shows email where the sender attached the minimum X BTC. In fact the inbox is sorted by the amount of BTC attached to each email.

3) The receiver keeps half the attached BTC and the email service keeps the other half. This is the part I'm least sure about.

Thoughts?

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Already been tried. It's called hashcash: http://www.hashcash.org/

Coincidentally, hashcash's proof of work is the foundation of bitcoin.

But don't let this discourage you from trying your idea. I think it's still a fantastic idea. Making email cost something to send (either btc or CPU time like hashcash) would kill spam, and slow down the flow of over-communication.

The merits of charging CPU time are arguable, but adding monetary costs to sending email is absolutely immoral. Especially something like Bitcoin, which has a steep learning curve.

Unless your goal is to transform email into a system more closely resembling snail mail, but for cipherpunks.

You just complicated email by adding money and monetary transactions to it. This approach would also do a horrible disservice to the roughly 6.7+ billion people with not much money; it assumes someone's communications are to be judged primarily by how much money they have or whether they have bitcoins, rather than the value of what they have to say. Making communication over the Internet more expensive (when the opposite should occur), breaks the Internet and drastically devalues one of the things it's best at and was designed for.

It would be like charging every visitor to your web site, to deal with scrappers, form spammers or dos attacks.

There are already excellent solutions to every possible scenario the money approach would supposedly solve.

Attaching BTC to an email is akin to the sender attaching an "importance" score to the email - with the benefit that the sender doesn't like as much because it costs them money.

The receiver can still setup rules - i.e. if the sender is in my family or team at work, don't require the BTC attachment. You could set it up so that it was only for strangers emailing you. Your spam filter would still be in place.

Its a way to pay to get a quicker response or more attention - kind of like advertising.

You would need a way for me to whitelist or discount senders.

I don't want my wife to have to pay to send me an email.

I don't want personal contacts to have to pay.

I don't want people offering me (good) jobs to have to pay.

You have to figure out a way to solve these problems without me having to review each email to determine how much it should cost.

I had this exact same idea about a week ago! You can create a forwarding email address that has a payment barrier to sent emails through.

Regarding point number 3, I think the service should charge a small fixed fee for each accepted email not some percent. This would enable users to create services based upon email alone. You could charge people for support or consulting with your entire operation occurring over email.

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