A killer app for Bitcoin? – Spam and Phishing Emails Killer
spamandphishingemailkiller.wordpress.com
spamandphishingemailkiller.wordpress.com
Miners will still choose whether to include them or not (being a good citizen and adding a tx fee is still recommended), but now other nodes will relay them so they can find their way to a miner. Other Bitcoin developers can correct me if I'm wrong.
Being easily cynical, I will say that those who currently own Bitcoins are those who would make a buck if it was adopted, so it's not surprising to see that kind of idea there. But that's just me being cynical.
Anything that increases adoption increases demand for bitcoin and benefits current owners-participants. Cynical is a cynical way of describing this. Interest doesn't necessarily mean sociopathic. It's good for people to have an interest in making bitcoin successful.
Our current sensitivity to financial bubbles is confusing here. Currencies are basically always bubbles. They have value only because and to the extent that people believe they will have value in the future. To make a new currency, you need to make a bubble.
IMO, what bitcoin needs is exactly something like this: uses as a medium of exchange. A lot of the current interest/value is centered around bitcoin as a value store, if that's what we want to call the current speculative investing. To really make an impact as a currency, people need to be exchanging bitcoin for goods & services.
Edit: Also, a comment I wrote a while ago with some more thoughts and information on fidelity bonds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6048650 (starting on the 3rd paragraph)
See the difference?
"they'd be happy to pay pennies for [safer email system]" is an assumption that has been explored for years and is clearly completely false.
That's a pretty big leap of faith right there.
The truth is we already have a cryptosystem that is not only free, but always works. We have had it for years: PGP. Only the extremely savvy use it. We have a non-free one that does cost a mere "few pennies:" digital certificates. Only the insanely savvy use it.
The existence of a system does not imply its use. That should be common knowledge for people who hang around on a website that is mostly geared toward startups.
It can also encode various cool contracts that are impossible to do otherwise: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/58240549599/contracts-without-... (well, this requires a UI, but it's already supported by the network).
In all cases, you apply physical force or legal imprisonment until confiscation succeeds, it's that simple.
2. Even if someone knows that you have some bitcoins, they don't know where they are stored and how keys are encrypted. "Civil forfeiture" or "freezing account" are very cheap and are used a lot. Irrelevant against Bitcoin savings.
3. Legal force is more costly than "civil forfeiture", but then you can always multiple ways to preserve the money: by sending it to someone else you trust, by locking it up in multisig transaction with someone you trust (who is outside jurisdiction), by saying "my hard drive has crashed" etc.
In other words, the cost for anyone to confiscate your coins is much higher than with paper cash and even higher than with bank accounts.
...kind of like a drug dealer who has stashes of paper money hidden in various places around his turf.
"Even if someone knows that you have some bitcoins, they don't know where they are stored"
When the police make an arrest, SOP is to take all computers, all storage devices, and then look in places where tiny storage devices might be hidden. Sure, you could have buried your Bitcoin wallet in the woods, but this is not much different from burying some paper in the woods (yes, people do this).
"locking it up in multisig transaction with someone you trust (who is outside jurisdiction), by saying "my hard drive has crashed" etc."
...so basically the old trick of trying to send your paper money out of the country? Criminals try this all the time, and the police are not deterred by it.
The reality is that if you want to hide money from the government, Bitcoin has no particular advantage over paper money -- and the fact that your transactions are broadcast to the entire network actually makes it a bit harder. In any case, you also have ignored the greatest problem with off-the-books money: taxes. You can send your Bitcoin money through all kinds of convoluted paths, and then when you get out of prison and try to spend it the IRS will just swoop in and you will be re-arrested for failing to declare your income.
I'm not arguing that it's always possible to find stuff out. I'm saying the bar is being raised much higher. Today cops don't go to thousands of people to make a "haircut" on their bank deposits. It's done with a single button click and negotiation with a couple of bankers. With bitcoin you'd have to send around policemen to every house to confiscate stuff. When there's no good justification, people will strongly oppose that.
The reality is that if you want to hide from govt and govt wants to find you, then Bitcoin does not help you much (although it's certainly more mobile than cash). But if thousands of people are hiding from govt routinely, it's much more expensive for govt to go after all of them at once. See what happens with Bittorrent. Some people get caught or threatened, while thousands of others enjoy cheap movies.
Regarding last example: you underestimate the power of good mixing. You can swap coins anonymously so that all the "tainted" coins get distributed to thousands of different hands and never go back to you anymore, while you receive thousands of little coins back, from various sources, not tainted by whatever business you was doing before.
In particular, even if everyone suddenly agreed to reject every mail without this deposit (which won't happen), the proposal allows for setting up a new address, making the (small) deposit, blasting a million emails before it gets blacklisted, and using a new address the next time.
This is a strange way to cast a vote. Nonetheless I doubt spammers would have any problem with creating bitcoin accounts with a small amount of money in them - one email/bitcoin wallet could send millions of emails before anyone takes action via the "sentinel" route.
And as mark242/craphound points out: "Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once"
The hashcash idea wasn't so successful, although it's still around and somewhat useful. One problem of hashcash was that the difficulty didn't adjust, making it somewhat unfair, not taking in account GPUs, etc.
On the other hand, bitcoin solves the difficulty problem that was with hashcash. Perhaps in the future, bitcoin could be used for ensuring the smooth delivery of priority emails.
The idea is that sender has to do a non-trivial amount of computation to find a hash below a certain threshold for receivers to accept it; but the amount of computation would be low enough to not adversely effect day-to-day email transacting; something like 1/20th of a second worth of computation of a cpu would probably be about right.
As a side note, spam hasn't been an issue for me for a long time.
Also: The CPU power needed has to increase every year because CPUs get better and better (and thus cheaper).
Then again: Let's assume Hashcash would eliminate spam or reduce it: This would probably mean a production boost (no humans have to detect spam anymore) and spam filters cost CPU as well...
In the end it may be a 0-sum game but reverse the burden. The more I think about it the smaller the potential problems seem to be...
edit
Could potentially be used a a form of ddos mitigation if the browser was required to design a tiny bit of hash cash for each request, although I haven't really thought through all the details.
I don't know about the 1/20th of a second though. Back in the day, the slowest Hashcash stamp with 5 ending zeros I could produce (with optimized code of course) was marginally above 1 second. But the good thing about Hashcash is that, much like Bitcoin - the difficulty scales. Just ask for more zeroes and it'll take longer. Email clients could also use the number of zeroes to help email classification: 0 zeros = SPAM, 5-8 zeroes = HAM.
The difference between free and $n is greater than that between $n and ($n * 2).
Of course, this proposal doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell, so arguing about it is equally pointless and I'm just too bored not to comment...
However, the world should and most likely is looking to move away from insecure emailing. This is especially true for corporate and political figures.
Free software like bitmessage are revolutionary in nature and are surprisingly easy to use. Bitmessage also uses the bitcoin protocol to relay messages across the network in an untraceable & encrypted manner. A spammer would need your public key in order to send you anything. You can also block messages that do not originate from predetermined public key addresses.
The bitcoin protocol and blockchain have so many innovating alternative uses outside of finance and currecny. Also, bitcoin overlay protocols such as mastercoin are already gaining traction.
https://blockchain.info/address/1SPEKXiV6NF9Xg6Ridw2qUtV83T8...
Requiring the user to pay to report spam will not work. It is just one more point of friction. How many report spam right now in Gmail when it is free?