

Show HN: Wrte.io – Charge for each email you get - ivanpashenko
http://wrte.io

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keesj
Is the payment to get the email delivered or to get guaranteed response?

I'd prefer the latter for two reasons: 1) as a receiver I don't want to miss
out on a potentially interesting email just because the sender couldn't pay
(for technical or financial reasons), and 2) as a sender I'd like some sort of
guarantee if I'm going to pay for something.

It's probably the more difficult approach of the two so I suggest testing both
approaches and see what works best.

Congrats on getting this far already. Like you say it's not a new idea, but
who cares about ideas. It's about execution anyway. Looking forward to the
launch!

~~~
ivanpashenko
Thanks!

1) I think the fact of paying is already a good enough barrier. The price
could be just a couple of dollars, which would be enough to convice sender to
spend sometime on writing a personal email instead of using cold mail
template.

2) Because of this barrier user will receive much less email + with much
relevant content. As a result sender will have much higher chances for reply.

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onion2k
What a great way to make sure you only get emails from rich, tech-savvy
people.

~~~
ivanpashenko
Hahaah :)

We think it will work for public people with tons of cold emails daily, like
pg

~~~
onion2k
The problem is that as soon as you tie the ability to send someone an email to
your bank account you immediately put poor people at a grotesque disadvantage.
I wouldn't presume to speak for pg, but I doubt any savvy investor would be
happy passing up the opportunity to be the first to hear about the next
Google/Uber/Facebook because the founder couldn't afford to send you an email.
If you want to limit the number of emails people can send then you need to tie
the ability to something else.

That's why Bill Gates' idea was so good - his plan was to make people's
computers have to do useful work (say, Folding At Home or the distributed Seti
search client) rather than merely transferring money around. Wealthy people
wouldn't be at an advantage because the work unit would be _time_ : a rich
person with a fast laptop that can test 1,000,000 protein folds in 2 minutes
has to do 1,000,000 tests to send their email while a poorer person whose
hardware can only do 1,000 folds in 2 minutes only has to do 1,000 tests to
send their email. Time is effectively the same for everyone. It's a
_beautiful_ solution. Far better than boring old money.

~~~
MetaCosm
While we are getting good at proof-of-work stuff -- we aren't great a proof-
of-power.

Meaning, it would be easy for me to emulate 10,000 slow computers with one
powerful one, doing 2 minutes of work 10,000x parallel (claiming each of these
computers is very weak) and that completely bypasses the "beautiful" solution.

Sending BTC works because it isn't gameable (at this point). I like the idea
of a ฿0.0001 (or even ฿0.001, 20 cents) fee for each email sent to me. It is a
little over 2 cents US -- would absolutely stop spammers (most it cost
prohibitive for them), but hopefully would not stop normal users.

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MetaCosm
This could be interesting with an API to control pricing, that way it could be
adjusted by BTC => local currency -- but also based on other things.

I for example, would like a multiplier based on my backlog. I might start at
20 cents an email -- but if I have 1,000 messages waiting for me to read, I
would increase the price to contact me to $20 an email -- because at a certain
point I can't keep up and the value per email drops to 0.

------
olla
If you have to pay for an email anyway, would You instead call or pick some
other way of direct communication? Not quite sure that replacing the indirect
communication, where You can procrastinate to some extent, with direct one
will solve the issues it promises.

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mister_l
Why limit this service to bitcoin if the generalized version for any currency
exists already? Head over to [https://ningo.me](https://ningo.me)! Shall we
join forces?

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dkaigorodov
Is it like $100 or like $0.01? Look like very old idea of Bill Gates.

~~~
ivanpashenko
You can hover with a mouse the bitcoin price and it will show you amount usd.

Probably it is Gate's idea and many others :)

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aminok
Nice!

Any plans to use micropayment channels?

~~~
iovdin
micropayment channels ([https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-
micropayments](https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-micropayments)), are
used between 2 parties to send a lot of micropayments. But here there is only
one transaction even small. Also micropayments may help against spam but not
agains cold emailing

~~~
aminok
You can have a micropayment channel between the user and their email provider,
and between email providers.

When User A wants to send an email to User B, he sends a micropayment through
one of these channels to his email provider. His email provider in turn sends
a micropayment to User B's email provider. User B's email provider sends a
micropayment to User B.

So in this way, value can be transferred without any on-chain BTC
transactions, zero fees, and instantly.

