As an ISP EarthLink offers mail services which means their servers “see” the mail going to all their customers’ mailboxes and can make determinations from that just like all the other email providers uses the same situation to reliably detect spam and deal with it in what get manner their customers ask for. There’s no mystery, micro transactions or unfair advantages involved. The challenge we face as MiaB admins is that individually our users don’t receive enough common-origin messages to identify spam the same way large shared mail providers can. That is the fundamental issue at hand which your proposed solution does nothing to address. Your approach still makes it every recipient for himself, i.e. nobody has a broader view than just their own mailbox. It doesn’t what hair brain scheme with escrow payments and rewards you dream up, it won’t get anywhere because it doesn’t address the most basic problem. But once you have solved that fundamental problem, exactly how you handle identified spam is a free choice. You can monetise access to your mailbox if you want to or simply bask in the absence of spam. It’s not the spam toll that will reduce spam but the inability to send spam without getting caught out.
Not my experience but it doesn’t really matter. Whatever crypto needs to go from having users to being the de facto standard must first be put in place, then allowed to convert people by making it an order of magnitude or two easier to use than anything else, then withstand the countermeasures instituted by the incumbent currencies to finally win the war and become all people use. For the system to work for me it must already be what everyone else has chosen to use otherwise I’m the one swimming upstream at my own expense, and by the time I find myself grossly outnumbered by a world filled with crypto users I will gladly make the switch. Making the switch now would mean I am swimming upstream now and it would be at my expense. Now you could of course argue that if everybody did what I am doing crypto would never get there, and you’d be exactly right. It’s not my job or that of the billions of non-crypto users to accept the change to crypto, so until crypto makes it so much better for all of us to switch, those who do switch will remain a minority of martyrs. My only job is to do what I believe to be in my best interest and that of every community I feel aligned with.
As explained above, that is its fundamental flaw, and by the time you’ve ironed out that flaw you won’t be needing the proposed scheme at all because all it really needs is the coordination between servers (but without exposing thousands of email accounts).
That I’m paying them is a fact I’m pretty sure I’ve acknowledged.
If you’re sure, go ahead and make it so. What are you asking me for? Why are you arguing with me? If you know and you know why know, then you know and should do nothing other than act on it. But you don’t know, you think, or more to the point, you’re clinging onto hope that your singular original thought would be vindicated. People will not be lining up to vindicate you. If you’re onto something useful they’d keep it to themselves to see where it goes. If they come up with a slightly modified version that works where yours wouldn’t, they’d keep that to themselves as well. So if you are sure you’ve got the best possible solution already thought through you better hurry along and make sure you’re first to market with that solution, because anyone that can derive something even better from your ideas would race to implement that instead while you’re wasting your time on something that is beaten before you can launch it. So far your solution had not shown any sign of evolving in response to the feedback we (mostly me) have given you on it. I suggest that if you genuinely don’t recognise that your solution needs to improve not only now but over its entire lifespan you should drop it like a hot potato. If you’re hiding the fact that you are in fact adjusting what you aim to implement based on this discussion then good for you, I’ll send you my bill once you are successful.
I made assumptions along those same lines, but rather than act on gut-feel I chose to test them. This post is exactly how I went about that, and the result was quite clear - yes people dislike spam, often passionately, but not enough to get them to move an inch towards a different or uncertain future. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. I didn’t like that outcome, but I am glad I opened myself to the possibility before spending energy chasing a solution that technically would work but would never be given a chance to flourish because the problem it solves is not really a burning platform for most.
No, I really won’t want to. I’ll be amongst the last few to change if or when it becomes unbearable not to. That’s my service to my fellow human. If crypto doesn’t work for them yet, let them be free to stick with what does work for them. Once the crypto exponents have done all that needs to be done to make crypto to easiest most natural choice for everyone, my duty would be done and I can make the switch myself. I said the very same thing before the rise and before the fall of Windows. Same thing. Follow what works for the masses because whatever wants to change what works for the masses must make it easier for the masses to choose the new thing than it is to stick with the old, and when I am just one of the masses that means they must make it easier for me too. My predictions based on that had been spot on every time.
