Comment by bcrl
9 hours ago
Exactly this. Spammers have the technical competence to overcome any technical hurdle, so using evidence of technical competence achieves nothing.
If it were possible to charge $0.25/email for delivery, I'd be more than happy . However, I'm sure large tech firms will need to say that is "too hard to implement at scale".
Stamp costs don't stop snail mail spam, either, unfortunately. I would be concerned if we added something like bitcoin fees to email delivery rather than curtail spam it would just further encourage grifters seeking ROI on their spam deliveries.
What if a single email cost $0.001 cent to send, and it was paid to the recipient? For $10, you could send 10,000 emails. For recipients, every 1,000 emails they get is a dollar in their wallet. You’d need something like a blockchain for this to work because the traditional payment processors still haven’t figured out micropayments.
If snail mail cost $0.001 per recipient people would be getting much, much more junkmail. Likewise, if e-mail cost as much as even bulk snail mail, there'd be much less spam.
Some sort of payment scheme is really the best, most durable option. The problem of mailing-lists and personal correspondence could be solved by an exclusion mechanism where the recipient effectively whitelists senders, explicitly or implicitly (e.g. whitelist a replying-sender automatically if a recipient initiates a conversation).
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