it's pure waste-generation, but hashcash is a fairly old strategy for this, and it's one of the foundations of Bitcoin. there's no "proof of payment to any beneficial recipient", sadly, but it does throttle high-volume spammers pretty effectively.
Maybe if you could prove you sent a payment to a charity node and then signed your message in the receipt for verification...
Imagine a world where every City Hall has a vending machine you can use to donate a couple bucks to to a charity of your choice, and receive an anonymous one-time use "some real human physically present donated real money to make this" token.
You could then spend the token with a forum, to gain and basic trust for an otherwise anonymous account.
I like that idea a lot.
Re:Why the open social web matters now
by charcircuit on Sunday October 19, 2025 @01:33AM
(#45632229)
The people willing to pay money to post messages are not a desirable demographic. It is one that includes people like spammers.
And then if you could verify you'd paid it in a completely P2P decentralized fashion.
I'm not a crypto fan, but I'd appreciate a message graph where high signal messages "burned" or "donated money" to be flagged for attention.
I'd also like it if my attention were paid for by those wishing to have it, but that's a separate problem.