On Aug 26, 2013, at 1:16 PM, Ray Dillinger <[email protected]> wrote:
Minor point in an otherwise interesting message:
> Even a tiny one-percent-of-a-penny payment
> that is negligible between established correspondents or even on most email
> lists would break a spammer. Also, you can set your client to automatically
> return the payment (when you read a message and don't mark it as spam) or
> just leave it as a balance that you'll return when you reply.
This (and variants, like a direct proof-of-work requirement) has been proposed
time and again in the past. It's never worked, and it can't work, because the
spammers don't use their own identities or infrastructure - they use botnets.
They don't care what it costs (in work or dollars or Bitcoins) to send their
message, because they aren't going to pay it - the machine they've taken over
is going to pay.
Granted, today most machines don't provide access to Bitcoins. But assuming
your idea catches on, they will. Once a box has a legitimate capability to
send some form of mail, it can be subverted to send mail of that form that the
owner of that box didn't intend. As long as endpoints can be "pwned", nothing
about those endpoints can be trusted....
-- Jerry
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