Awesome. This was actually my idea too when I said that members of hackernews should be paid for messages to reach them by other hacker news members. But you came up with much nicer.
implementation. I like it.
Here was my idea https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44277071
Bit tangental, but if this was a real thing, we could hopefully stop letting google / microsoft determine whats spam. Private mail servers would hopefully more common and actually work. Super annoyed, I use cloudflare + protonmail for my custom domain, but I have the feeling that some outgoing emails from my domain gets blocked... 90% deliverability means practically useless.
Just say I'm a sender who wants to send an email to someone on this system, and who also holds zero BTC and is justifiably deeply skeptical of anyone pushing it, exactly what steps would I need to take with this system vs hitting "Send" from Outlook?
Cool! This is something I've been thinking about and wanted to build too.
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.
this is backwards. advertisers WILL pay you money for your eye balls. legitimate senders will not because it's insulting to ask them for money. this is like dating vs prostitution. if you rate what to let near your eye balls by the highest bidder, you'll get all kinds of diseases.
I'd recommend you to take a look into nano cryptocurrency as well which supports zero gas fees or sei cryptocurrency which can actually allow Stablecoins like USDC to be used.
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.
How is the whitelist built and managed? I have several thousand emails that I would need to whitelist, many that don’t email me regularly, but I wouldn’t want them to get hung up or worse receive an auto response that I expect them to pay me.
Earn.com (since acquired by Coinbase, originally called 21) tried this idea for a while — also using Bitcoin — but couldn’t make it work. Paying to email people just isn’t a compelling idea. Do you have any thoughts on new things you’re bringing to the table that will allow your project to succeed where others failed?
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?
HashCash, one of the moving parts of Bitcoin, was itself invented by Adam Back as a way to fight spam.
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.
The economic web is an interesting concept, but so far is failed. Nostr is probably the most successful experiment, but it remains a failure because:
- 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.
17 comments
[ 0.89 ms ] story [ 36.0 ms ] threadI 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.
This idea has been discussed for decades now. I like it
https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Anti-spam_20_27stamps_27#124...
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.
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?
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.
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?
- 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.