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Re:Forced Exposure by bigiain on Tuesday August 20, 2013 @07:36AM (#6242986)
Its not as though we don't have a spam problem already…

Freshly pulled-out-of-the-air suggestion – anonymous but requiring micro-payments. Say, 500 or 1000 satoshi (around a tenth of a cent) per message delivered – not as a means of generating revenue, but as a way to destroy email's current "if I only get one sale per 100,000 emails I send, that just means I need to send 10,000,000 emails a day to get my desired 100sale/day" vulnerability - if that actually cost the spammer $10,000/day, it just wouldn't happen.

('course that required having hard currency to bitcoin exchanges easy enough for the general public to use, and scalable enough to service a significant proportion of internet-using people)

Re:Forced Exposure by willvarfar on Tuesday August 20, 2013 @08:45AM (#6243310)
Yes there have been various attempts at proof-of-work algorithms to fight e.g. spam. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system

Bitcoin is itself a proof-of-work system.

However, these again don't work. The abuser has ample resources to actually do the work on: a botnet.

Re:Forced Exposure by pessimizer on Tuesday August 20, 2013 @08:37AM (#6243276)
>Freshly pulled-out-of-the-air suggestion

That's not fresh. I think it may have even been entertained by Congress for a while.