
A killer app for Bitcoin? – Spam and Phishing Emails Killer - spek
http://spamandphishingemailkiller.wordpress.com/
======
M4v3R
The problem with this idea is that with current Bitcoin protocol
implementation it will not work. As of Bitcoin 0.8.2 the network doesn't relay
transactions with "dust" outputs - transactions that are sending 0.00005430
BTC or less [1]. This check was implemented, ironically, to prevent spam,
because one could flood the network with one-satoshi transactions which could
take much space and bandwidth.

[1]
[https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2577](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2577)

~~~
dwaltrip
As far as I understand, sending amounts smaller than the dust cutoff does not
violate the network protocol. The difficulty is in finding miners who are
using software that deviates from version 0.8.2 by not performing this check,
and will include the micro transaction in blocks they mine. I'm only 85%
confident about this though.

~~~
simondlr
Yes. That's correct. You would've had to find a miner to include the
transactions in the blockchain. However, in upcoming versions, setting output
as OP_RETURN (which basically allows you to embed additional data) will be a
standard transaction type, but immediately prunable. Hence, for the 'currency'
part of Bitcoin these transactions won't form part of the bloat, but nodes
that want to keep track of it, can
([https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=290](https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=290)).

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.

------
simondlr
There's similar ideas being thrown around in the Bitcoin community by using
the network to create identities that is cheap for good users, but expensive
for spammers, by sacrificing a portion of BTC to the miners of the network
(and then showing verifiably proof). See:
[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140711.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140711.0)

~~~
bausson
The idea seams really nice, really.

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.

~~~
netcan
This is part of the reason bitcoin is succeeding. Early adopters become like
investors. There never was an explicit quid quo pro, but overall people
involved early in bitcoin ended up owning a bunch of bitcoin.

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.

------
mfincham
Have a look at
[http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt](http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt)
and make sure you can rebut all the points :)

~~~
mark242
Specifically, "Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once"

~~~
oleganza
This have been solved by Bitcoin. People driven by greed are cooperating on
building one blockchain. Then, they'd be happy to pay pennies for safe, secure
and clean email system.

~~~
PeterisP
Cooperating on a single blockchain is beneficial from a purely functional
greed-motivation; cooperating on a safe, secure and clean e-mail system is not
beneficial from a purely functional greed-motivation.

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.

~~~
oleganza
You don't need to "cooperate" on a email system in a way blockchain requires
cooperation (with strict following on one protocol). People who need to
transfer and store messages will pay for it. Bitcoin makes it easy and cheap.
That's it.

~~~
PeterisP
People who need to transmit messages will not pay for it, because they can
send email for free - in order for a spam-solution to be useful, you need
cooperation from a critical mass of recipients that they will not accept or
send "old free email" anymore.

------
oleganza
Killer app for Bitcoin is Bitcoin itself. Digital gold that can't be easily
confiscated, can be cheaply stored and transferred and resist a lot of
censorship.

It can also encode various cool contracts that are impossible to do otherwise:
[http://blog.oleganza.com/post/58240549599/contracts-
without-...](http://blog.oleganza.com/post/58240549599/contracts-without-
trust-or-third-parties) (well, this requires a UI, but it's already supported
by the network).

~~~
PeterisP
In what way is Bitcoin harder to confiscate than fiat currency (in, say,
anonymous Swiss account) or gold (hidden in a secret location) ?

In all cases, you apply physical force or legal imprisonment until
confiscation succeeds, it's that simple.

~~~
oleganza
1\. It's easier to hide even the fact that you have some Bitcoins. When you
buy some Bitcoins for cash from random people on the street and keep in
different wallets (or even "brain wallets"), no one would know how much do you
have. In case of Swiss or any banking account, there's always a paper trace
somewhere. And recently US was cooperating with Swiss to uncover all accounts
belonging to US citizens.

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.

~~~
betterunix
"It's easier to hide even the fact that you have some Bitcoins. When you buy
some Bitcoins for cash from random people on the street and keep in different
wallets (or even "brain wallets"), no one would know how much do you have"

...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.

~~~
oleganza
Paper stashes can't be put in DarkJPEG and uploaded on Facebook or Dropbox.

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.

~~~
oleganza
I'm not saying hiding BTC is easy now or will ever be cheap and simple, but
it's certainly possible to automate and optimise security measures a lot and
there will be a lot of apps doing exactly that. Right now the cost of
taxation, inflation and bailing-in is very-very low and hurts most innocent
law-abiding citizens (not everyone loves how the taxes are spent, but they are
easy to extract anyway). With Bitcoin, huge chunk of money can safely sit in
private wallets instead of bank accounts, thus making fractional reserve
banking less relevant, bail-in becomes irrelevant too. Those who wish to not
declare some income have much safer way to receive/send money, than with
modern banking system. Most outstanding tax-evaders will be chased and caught,
but 99% may safely enjoy their own little share of global black market without
worries. They already enjoy local black market when they pay in cash for lots
of things, but it'll expand with Bitcoin to the whole world.

------
PeterisP
"Addresses being flagged and becoming useless" is not a solution to spam, as
it happens already currently.

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.

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zamalek
> If you happen to think this is a good idea, please register your approval by
> making a tiny payment (eg one satoshi) to 1SPEKXiV6NF9Xg6Ridw2qUtV83T8TRJZZ.
> Larger donations accepted, if you like ;-)

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"

------
flashmob
Interestingly, some of bitcoin's roots originate from spam fighting. The idea
of the 'proof of work' function that is used by bitcoin came out of the idea
of Hashcash [http://www.hashcash.org/](http://www.hashcash.org/) (as
referenced in Satoshi's white-paper).

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.

------
jpcosta
What if someone flags your emails as spam deliberately, just in order to cause
harm?

~~~
sliverstorm
Yup that's what comes to mind. Easy way to get a target's email marked as spam
all around the world for a buck or two.

------
eof
Interestingly, someone has proposed basically this idea in 1997
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash)

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.

~~~
LinaLauneBaer
I like the idea but wouldn't that also make a lot of legitimate use cases of
email too costly? Think of a service like MailChimp.com: They allow you to
easily manage and send out newsletters. Computing the hashes for 5000
newsletter receivers would take approximately 5 minutes of raw CPU power.

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...

~~~
Jtsummers
Hashcash is actually used by some spamfilters, but not as a sole determining
factor. For legit services like MaichChimp, they could be whitelisted (so
always clear spam filters) or they can get a bonus to their rating (negative?
whichever way would make it less likely to get marked as spam) and then
determined to be spam on its contents rather than the absence of a Hashcash
value.

------
Houshalter
Junk mail was (is) common even in the physical world where there are printing
costs and relatively high postage.

------
user24
The problem as I see it is that, contrary to popular belief, sending spam is
not free, so this merely increases the cost a little.

The difference between free and $n is greater than that between $n and ($n *
2).

------
jka
This sounds very similar to Microsoft Research's concept 'Penny Black' \-
which, worth noting, was itself inspired by real postage history.

[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/pennyblack/](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/pennyblack/)

------
bayesianhorse
Arguably a hacker would value a phishing E-Mail landing in a "trusted" folder
more than I would want to pay when sending legitimate mails...

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...

------
thisiswrong
This is a solid idea, that has been suggested and talked about before ( on
shows like letstalkbitcoin ).

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.

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rb2k_
And for the lazy ones, here are the "votes/donations" on his Bitcoin address:

[https://blockchain.info/address/1SPEKXiV6NF9Xg6Ridw2qUtV83T8...](https://blockchain.info/address/1SPEKXiV6NF9Xg6Ridw2qUtV83T8TRJZZ)

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bagosm
Anyone care to explain to me why just having X wallets and tranfering ammounts
from these wallets to X new ones isn't going to work? Just let some addresses
get marked as spam then move to new addresses?

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joshdance
This is a cool idea, but one thing kills it dead.

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?

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betterunix
This sounds like an overcomplicated version of HashCash...which was the
inspiration for Bitcoin in the first place.

------
ozh
I don't think spending a satoshi is a problem for any serious spammer.

