I remember reading about Microsoft Research's "Penny Black" project, where an e-mail could be essentially certified as non-spam by various types of currencies. (Such as computational cycles, cash, etc.) What I'm curious about is how this would stand up to the networks of spam-bots... Again, it might drive traffic down for a bit as each of their infected computers takes longer for each e-mail, but I would assume they would just try harder to infect more.
I understand that cycles can be stolen easily, but somehow I think cash might be a tipping point. The reason that spam works is that they only need a 0.00(ridiculous)1% response rate to make money. The risk of getting caught stealing versus the reward of what they'd make sending spam would probably get way out of balance if cash was required to achieve that response rate.
> If it requires real money, spammers will steal that.
If you raise the cost of sending a single piece of spam sufficiently, spam will vanish. Exactly the way junk snailmail would, if the US Postal Service did not subsidize it.
If you raise the cost of sending a single piece of spam sufficiently, spam will vanish.
Assuming that sending spam costs the same as sending other mail, the cost is limited by what people will bear for their legitimate mail. I claim that spammers can simply steal enough money (possibly out of users' mail clients) to pay for their spam.
AFAIK a lot of spam comes from botnets, which are stolen resources. Also, one might argue that spammers are just people who are too dumb or too chicken to engage in real cybercrime, given that it appears to be more profitable.
(Link here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/)
Do any spam experts have an opinion on this type of idea/project?