
Attention Bonds - pmoriarty
http://wiki.asrg.sp.am/wiki/Attention_bonds
======
hammock
So the value provided in the email has to be greater than the value of the
bond, or else the recipient will just collect. Yet the bond value has to be
great enough to incent opening in the first place. That seems like a large
hurdle.

Not to mention if the value imparted is informational, once you read the email
(to judge whether spam) the value has already transferred, making it easy to
double-collect by hitting spam.

------
mathgeek
"Opinion polls suggest an extremely high level of resistance to any kind of
financial cost potentially being involved in sending e-mail."

I think this is the most important point of the whole concept. Make people
pony up cash to send email, and they will send their messages in some other
way.

Remember when SMS messages used to cost money no matter what service you used?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
And remember how people sent a billion of them? Opinion polls are different
from, how people will actually respond. They'll gripe, then they'll pay up.

~~~
mathgeek
My point was that once services appeared that let you send them as part of a
package or even for free, people flocked to them. Of course people complained
and used the service when there was no alternative.

I'd say that in that limited scope of an example, opinion polls and consumer
action were very similar.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I'm wondering if email could be sold as a pay-to-play (not pay-per-email) sort
of thing? We already pay our ISP, so I guess that's happening already. The
only question is then, how much more would we pay for good email? SPAM-free
email, with messages vetted by authentic origin.

~~~
JoshTriplett
The problem is that you don't care about paying, you care about _other people_
paying. Email exists already, and email sent without paying must continue to
arrive.

Also note the myriad issues associated with mailing lists and similar.

------
PMan74
Maybe a naive question - is Spam that big an issue any more? For me (both
corporate and personal email managed by GMail) I rarely see Spam messages.
This article is from 2004, maybe it was a bigger issue at the time.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I think it's a much smaller problem for end users these days - the cost to our
attention is down to something like 1% at best.

But there's still a very large cost to systems, sysadmins, etc. - because all
of that spam _still_ gets sent, so processors still have to devote cycles to
sending it, receiving it, and classifying it, and someone pays for the
bandwidth as well.

------
imgabe
What's to stop you from signing up for every newsletter available and then
marking them as spam to collect money? Is there anyway for the sender to
appeal?

~~~
patrickmay
Signing up could require posting a bond as well, so the sender could recoup
the cost if you reneged on the agreement.

------
chrstphrhrt
I like to think that some day when the main currency is energy rather than
money, one of the primary things it is exchanged for is attention. Seems to me
that these are the most fundamental scarce resources that need to be managed
sustainably.

Attention bonds would combine perfectly with cryptocurrencies to provide a
general basis for contracts. Perhaps it could make for an honest ad business!

------
Kinnard
It's interesting to compare/contrast this with hashcash one of the precursor
technologies of Bitcoin:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash)

------
anonymousDan
Obvious question is whether some kind of blockchain based implementation would
address enough of the disadvantages to be useful.

~~~
thechao
I feel like what I'm about to suggest must have been thought of: is it
possible for me to somehow attach a "one time crackable key" such that if
someone wants to send me an email, they have to do a nontrivial amount of
calculation? Like... a turing email address, where they have to compute the
actual address, and the computation is nontrivial?

~~~
pontifier
Check out HashCash, another solution proposed around the same time.

