As a cypherpunk, when I first heard of bitcoin I was incredulous. But after many months of research and experimentation I became satisfied that the bitcoin protocols don't have any obvious flaws. God how I wish I could have saved some of that time with a nice summery video.
However, far more importantly then bitcoin I want to know why the hell we don't have proof of work as an email spam filter yet!!!!!!
Given that in the long term the cost of mining bitcoin is in the ballpark of the electricity cost of the proof-of-work (in that being cheaper encourages more people to mine and more expensive means mining would run a loss). You could effectively outsource the cost of the proof of work by having bitcoin validated email. Send a fraction of a bitcoin with an email to let it past.
If email clients maintained the wallets you wouldn't need to even worry about the cost if you had a balance of in/out mail. You could still white list anyone you want to email for free. A cost of $0.001 per message would have very little impact on regular users. A botnet would still need to get the funds somewhere to bulk send, if they cracked the mail programs internal wallet they could drain that and send a small number of emails, but beyond that they'd need funds, and quite frankly if they could get at the wallets they'd just take the money direct.
It raises an interesting question. what is the value to a spammer of an individual email? The return from advertising/scams/phishing/whatever divided by the number of emails sent. It's got to be tiny.
This would incentivise spammers to get people to send emails to them, they could probably do this by signing up lots of fake accounts to services that send registration emails.
> A cost of $0.001 per message would have very little impact on regular users.
I wonder about mailing lists - a couple of thousand members isn't too big a list, but $1 a message adds up. Who pays it? What keeps someone from adding fake accounts to run up the costs of lists they dislike?
Payment isn't compulsory. You could have a number of mechanisms to clear mailing lists, white-lists would be easiest. Since joining a mailing list should be by user decision, provided the user interface is simple and painless you should be able to include adding to the whitelist as part of that process.
Proof of work as an e-mail spam filter isn't effective protection for two reasons: botnets, and specialized hardware that can compute proofs of work faster than general-purpose PCs.
That would assume that all spammers use botnets or can easily obtain specialized hardware (which are mutually exclusive).
It's still a deterrent and makes it non trivial to be a spammer. Also even on botnets each node is large numbers of emails, so it increases the odds that the owner of the infected computer would notice all the work being done.
Makers of specialized 'spam' hardware could potentially be targeted by law enforcement easier then dispirit spammers (especially if the hashing algorithm could be designed to be specific to email systems).
I can see some arguments as to why it's not 100% effective, but I don't think it needs to be 100% effective to add additional value. That's why I'm amazed it's still not being done. Just like I'm amazed that we still don't have easy to use email encryption, yet demand it for the web (email traffic is far easier to eavesdrop on, and often far more sensitive).
However, far more importantly then bitcoin I want to know why the hell we don't have proof of work as an email spam filter yet!!!!!!
Because it's not very useful until nearly everyone supports it.
If a non-trivial amount of people don't implement it (which is highly likely when it's first released), then you have to accept non-proof-of-work-emails, or you'll miss the emails. That is the hole in the system that spam will get in through. So why bother supporting it yourself if it won't stop spam?
I disagree. Anything that improves the 'this is not spam' rating is helpful even incrementally. Then once all the email clients support it it's a huge win. Combine that with proper digital envelops (i.e. encrypt all email), and we might finally have a proper email system.
yep, as you probably know the proof of work idea came from Hashcash which was designed as a spam filtering system. I guess we've all just got locked in to email as it is. Looks like Spam assassin supports it, I wonder if mutt can be configured to support it.
Online learning, yes. However, what is wrong with writing? Why this youtube mania for making videos of everything? Not everyone wants to listen to hours of videos of some guy droning on about something that they could have read in a few minutes, with random access ability to concentrate on the few bits that they don't know.
I am not saying that this guy does a bad job but, in general, I avoid videos like plague after many bad experiences with them. Especially those where there is just scrolling text and some god awful soundtrack with it.
Secondly, from what I can tell, writing is inferior to the human physical expression, which includes speech. It exists to mimic and preserve thought or speech. But it can never be precise, simply because the human body augments speech. When writing gets close to accurately doing that, it become verbose and tedious.
Or, to put it another way: Would your kids prefer to read or be read to? Would you prefer the lyrics or the song? The script or the movie? You might, most wouldn't.
Writing is not inferior when it hosts a subject being studied. To quote your example, yes, lyrics would be preferred to a song if the meaning is being studied, script would be prefered to movie if dialogues are being studied.
Atleast in the current context, books are faster to reread compared to rewinding a video, which can break your flow.
They're just different I guess.
Writing is easier to skim, I can scan a 1000 word article in a few seconds to tell if it's likely worth my time to read. I can't do that easily with a 10 minute video. It's also easier to edit.
OTOH speech conveys emotion better and feels like it has less mental overhead to consume and produce. I know a few people who are excellent speakers but very poor writers for example.
Let's not discount the fact that most people need the social pressure that a live classroom brings to bear.
Most people--even us self-motivated HN people--are far more likely to do hundreds of hours of coursework if there's a real class, human teachers, and other students than if it's online to pursue at your leisure, or in a book sitting on your shelf for that matter.
Sure, but that very same social environment can be an impediment at least as well as it can be a motivator.
The overwhelming majority of my formal education (through high school and most of college) consisted of classes where most of the students either didn't want to be there, or weren't interested in the course beyond its impact on their grade and future transcript, and so were disruptive to the learning process.
While this is a point worth making, another is that there's also little to no vetting or editing required to publish "information" on the web compared to getting it into a book and into distribution.
Of course the latter isn't perfect and comes with its own evil hegemony and other assorted issues, but the point is that there is so little barrier to entry to posting on the web that praising speed in and of itself ignores relevant and important issues.
Fair point, but I would argue that "known" and trusted organizations, such as Khan Academy or Coursera, backing a given instructor or set of materials constitutes a form of vetting. It's not like they pick their material out of a hat, and they're all fully aware of the potential repercussions of publishing quackery.
They were here for such a long time, way before anyone else and yet they are practically forgotten now. I wish it had been given the attention it deserved by the good folks at MIT.
By the same turn, it's also much easier to propose and make corrections. If I discover an error in my computer graphics textbook, I'd have to...call the publisher and see if they can fix it in the next edition, I guess. Perhaps the textbook industry's fixation on keeping students buying the newest editions of their books has actual benefits...
I did. I skipped all the math and just said that is a game where people guess secret numbers that fit a pattern, and when they find one that fits, they get points. Everyone uses computers to help guess, and some people agree to sell real stuff for points. She didn't care enough to challenge my explanation. The hard part of intuitively grasping bitcoin is explaining why money works at all, not why mining works.
However, far more importantly then bitcoin I want to know why the hell we don't have proof of work as an email spam filter yet!!!!!!