
Ask HN: When will blockchian or something better replace e-mail? - voaie
Who is working on a replacement of e-mail for both messaging and registration of thirdparty accounts? Open-source SDKs?
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Qwertystop
Email is simple, and works. I doubt anything is going to replace it as the
default for what you list unless something massive and bizarre happens that
brings down email in general so that everyone has to start from scratch and
may as well put together something else.

Blockchain-based systems are... not simple, though they do do work. The
advantage there is... what? The ability to verify sender/recipient? At the
cost of massive power consumption to keep the encryption going, an unnecessary
level of distribution for most purposes, and, as best as I can tell, the
inability to delete anything that nobody involved cares about anymore.

If anything replaces email, it'll be basically email with security built in
(end-to-end encryption and the guarantee that the From address matches the
sender). More than that (maybe a little extra, I might have missed something)
is overkill. Even that much is unlikely to come up except as patches on a per-
provider basis, which might hopefully become omnipresent enough to remove
support for the old version.

~~~
veddox
We've had such a lot of "exciting new technologies that are going to replace
email in x years" that I don't believe anything ever will - at least as long
as we continue to have computers, keyboards and the Internet... (Although
having said that, email is older than the Internet ;-) )

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eb0la
The biggest problem of using a blockchain for email is that you will need to
have a copy of the blockchain to record all the transactions (mesages) sent in
the past.

If you do this in the European Union, you are shooting yourself in the foot.

Why?

First because data protection laws dictate anyone can oppose against the
treatment of his/her data in your systems. Email is considered personal
information here. If you put email in a blockchain you cannot effectively
remove data from it because it breaks the whole chain of signatures.

Maybe you could do something like cyphering the data before dumping it in the
blockchain, and using a smart contract or inserting a special record to make
it unavailable (not erased, but made not accessible).

Second, you cannot distribute / share personal data as you want. In some
countries -like Spain- you need a signed autorization by the Director of the
Data Protection Agency.

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alistproducer2
I just started the Free Data Foundation. The goal of the project is to support
OSS that can replace "free" services that subsist on our data. Interestingly
enough the maiden project is tentatively called Tmail (short for torrent
mail).

It works somewhat like TOR in that it will depend on volunteers to host nodes
that will communicate with existing email providers (outlook, gmail, yahoo,
etc). The reason we need these nodes is that it's practically impossible to
host an email server at a residential location because ISP's block port 25.
Also most people don't have the desire or knowledge to maintain an email
server.

Users can host their own delivery nodes (which will be plug and play software
pre-installed on RPi's). These nodes communicate with the volunteer's host
nodes over 80, thereby bypassing the ISP block of port 25.

There will also be an option for people hosting delivery nodes to share their
resource with people who can't/won't host their own nodes which will allow
people to sign up for email accounts without running their own software (a la
gmail).

It gets way deeper than that, but I'll leave it there. You can follow the
project at
[https://github.com/freedatafound/](https://github.com/freedatafound/). I've
also bought [http://freedatafoundation.org](http://freedatafoundation.org) but
there's currently nothing there.

~~~
voaie
Something like Mail2Tor@onion?

~~~
alistproducer2
No, it's not designed to be anonymous (although it will force encryption). The
goal is to provide a free, community hosted email service to regular non-
technical users.

It is similar to TOR in the sense that it will rely on volunteers to host
nodes and/or relays. The goals of TMail and TOR are, however, fundamentally
different.

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dpc_pw
Blockchains are not the solution to general communication. Platforms like
Maidsafe could potentially replace email in the very long term.

------
upofadown
What does "registration of thirdparty accounts" mean? What is the ultimate
goal here?

~~~
voaie
An authorization protocol like OAuth. By means of e-mail, people can contact
the service provider too. Similar tools include mobile phones, accounts on
Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc. but many will also require us to provide an
e-mail address for password recovery.

