A killer app for Bitcoin? – Spam and Phishing Emails Killer

http://spamandphishingemailkiller.wordpress.com/

by spek • 13 years ago

45 46 13 years ago

spamandphishingemailkiller.wordpress.com

mfincham• 13 years ago

Have a look at http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt and make sure you can rebut all the points :)

mark242• 13 years ago

Specifically, "Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once"

oleganza7• 13 years ago

This have been solved by Bitcoin. People driven by greed are cooperating on building one blockchain. Then, they'd be happy to pay pennies for safe, secure and clean email system.

ozh2• 13 years ago

Heh, neat. Interactive form: http://ozh.github.io/your-spam-solution/index.html?908856741... :)

simondlr2• 13 years ago

There's similar ideas being thrown around in the Bitcoin community by using the network to create identities that is cheap for good users, but expensive for spammers, by sacrificing a portion of BTC to the miners of the network (and then showing verifiably proof). See: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140711.0

bausson• 13 years ago

The idea seams really nice, really.

Being easily cynical, I will say that those who currently own Bitcoins are those who would make a buck if it was adopted, so it's not surprising to see that kind of idea there. But that's just me being cynical.

JohnDoe365• 13 years ago

I call this realism.

netcan• 13 years ago

This is part of the reason bitcoin is succeeding. Early adopters become like investors. There never was an explicit quid quo pro, but overall people involved early in bitcoin ended up owning a bunch of bitcoin.

Anything that increases adoption increases demand for bitcoin and benefits current owners-participants. Cynical is a cynical way of describing this. Interest doesn't necessarily mean sociopathic. It's good for people to have an interest in making bitcoin successful.

Our current sensitivity to financial bubbles is confusing here. Currencies are basically always bubbles. They have value only because and to the extent that people believe they will have value in the future. To make a new currency, you need to make a bubble.

IMO, what bitcoin needs is exactly something like this: uses as a medium of exchange. A lot of the current interest/value is centered around bitcoin as a value store, if that's what we want to call the current speculative investing. To really make an impact as a currency, people need to be exchanging bitcoin for goods & services.

nadaviv• 13 years ago

Also see: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Fidelity_bonds

Edit: Also, a comment I wrote a while ago with some more thoughts and information on fidelity bonds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6048650 (starting on the 3rd paragraph)

jka• 13 years ago

This sounds very similar to Microsoft Research's concept 'Penny Black' - which, worth noting, was itself inspired by real postage history.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/

zamalek2• 13 years ago

If you happen to think this is a good idea, please register your approval by making a tiny payment (eg one satoshi) to 1SPEKXiV6NF9Xg6Ridw2qUtV83T8TRJZZ. Larger donations accepted, if you like ;-)

This is a strange way to cast a vote. Nonetheless I doubt spammers would have any problem with creating bitcoin accounts with a small amount of money in them - one email/bitcoin wallet could send millions of emails before anyone takes action via the "sentinel" route.

And as mark242/craphound points out: "Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once"

oleganza7• 13 years ago

Killer app for Bitcoin is Bitcoin itself. Digital gold that can't be easily confiscated, can be cheaply stored and transferred and resist a lot of censorship.

It can also encode various cool contracts that are impossible to do otherwise: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/58240549599/contracts-without-... (well, this requires a UI, but it's already supported by the network).

PeterisP4• 13 years ago

In what way is Bitcoin harder to confiscate than fiat currency (in, say, anonymous Swiss account) or gold (hidden in a secret location) ?

In all cases, you apply physical force or legal imprisonment until confiscation succeeds, it's that simple.

oleganza7• 13 years ago

1. It's easier to hide even the fact that you have some Bitcoins. When you buy some Bitcoins for cash from random people on the street and keep in different wallets (or even "brain wallets"), no one would know how much do you have. In case of Swiss or any banking account, there's always a paper trace somewhere. And recently US was cooperating with Swiss to uncover all accounts belonging to US citizens.

2. Even if someone knows that you have some bitcoins, they don't know where they are stored and how keys are encrypted. "Civil forfeiture" or "freezing account" are very cheap and are used a lot. Irrelevant against Bitcoin savings.

3. Legal force is more costly than "civil forfeiture", but then you can always multiple ways to preserve the money: by sending it to someone else you trust, by locking it up in multisig transaction with someone you trust (who is outside jurisdiction), by saying "my hard drive has crashed" etc.

In other words, the cost for anyone to confiscate your coins is much higher than with paper cash and even higher than with bank accounts.

M4v3R• 13 years ago

The problem with this idea is that with current Bitcoin protocol implementation it will not work. As of Bitcoin 0.8.2 the network doesn't relay transactions with "dust" outputs - transactions that are sending 0.00005430 BTC or less [1]. This check was implemented, ironically, to prevent spam, because one could flood the network with one-satoshi transactions which could take much space and bandwidth.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2577

josu• 13 years ago

Wouldn't it be possible to implement an option to send a really small amount per wallet per week? This would prevent people from flooding the blockchain, but it would still allow to send small amounts.

dwaltrip• 13 years ago

As far as I understand, sending amounts smaller than the dust cutoff does not violate the network protocol. The difficulty is in finding miners who are using software that deviates from version 0.8.2 by not performing this check, and will include the micro transaction in blocks they mine. I'm only 85% confident about this though.

simondlr2• 13 years ago

Yes. That's correct. You would've had to find a miner to include the transactions in the blockchain. However, in upcoming versions, setting output as OP_RETURN (which basically allows you to embed additional data) will be a standard transaction type, but immediately prunable. Hence, for the 'currency' part of Bitcoin these transactions won't form part of the bloat, but nodes that want to keep track of it, can (https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=290).

Miners will still choose whether to include them or not (being a good citizen and adding a tx fee is still recommended), but now other nodes will relay them so they can find their way to a miner. Other Bitcoin developers can correct me if I'm wrong.

flashmob• 13 years ago

Interestingly, some of bitcoin's roots originate from spam fighting. The idea of the 'proof of work' function that is used by bitcoin came out of the idea of Hashcash http://www.hashcash.org/ (as referenced in Satoshi's white-paper).

The hashcash idea wasn't so successful, although it's still around and somewhat useful. One problem of hashcash was that the difficulty didn't adjust, making it somewhat unfair, not taking in account GPUs, etc.

On the other hand, bitcoin solves the difficulty problem that was with hashcash. Perhaps in the future, bitcoin could be used for ensuring the smooth delivery of priority emails.

ozh2• 13 years ago

I don't think spending a satoshi is a problem for any serious spammer.

user24• 13 years ago

The problem as I see it is that, contrary to popular belief, sending spam is not free, so this merely increases the cost a little.

The difference between free and $n is greater than that between $n and ($n * 2).

jpcosta• 13 years ago

What if someone flags your emails as spam deliberately, just in order to cause harm?

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

Yup that's what comes to mind. Easy way to get a target's email marked as spam all around the world for a buck or two.

PeterisP4• 13 years ago

"Addresses being flagged and becoming useless" is not a solution to spam, as it happens already currently.

In particular, even if everyone suddenly agreed to reject every mail without this deposit (which won't happen), the proposal allows for setting up a new address, making the (small) deposit, blasting a million emails before it gets blacklisted, and using a new address the next time.

Houshalter• 13 years ago

Junk mail was (is) common even in the physical world where there are printing costs and relatively high postage.

eof• 13 years ago

Interestingly, someone has proposed basically this idea in 1997 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

The idea is that sender has to do a non-trivial amount of computation to find a hash below a certain threshold for receivers to accept it; but the amount of computation would be low enough to not adversely effect day-to-day email transacting; something like 1/20th of a second worth of computation of a cpu would probably be about right.

As a side note, spam hasn't been an issue for me for a long time.

LinaLauneBaer• 13 years ago

I like the idea but wouldn't that also make a lot of legitimate use cases of email too costly? Think of a service like MailChimp.com: They allow you to easily manage and send out newsletters. Computing the hashes for 5000 newsletter receivers would take approximately 5 minutes of raw CPU power.

Also: The CPU power needed has to increase every year because CPUs get better and better (and thus cheaper).

Then again: Let's assume Hashcash would eliminate spam or reduce it: This would probably mean a production boost (no humans have to detect spam anymore) and spam filters cost CPU as well...

In the end it may be a 0-sum game but reverse the burden. The more I think about it the smaller the potential problems seem to be...

Jtsummers• 13 years ago

Hashcash is actually used by some spamfilters, but not as a sole determining factor. For legit services like MaichChimp, they could be whitelisted (so always clear spam filters) or they can get a bonus to their rating (negative? whichever way would make it less likely to get marked as spam) and then determined to be spam on its contents rather than the absence of a Hashcash value.

rikf• 13 years ago

I was going to post the same thing, have always like the idea of hashcash and surprised it hasnt recieved greater usage specifically for things like captchas although in the case it would be a reverse captcha :)

edit

Could potentially be used a a form of ddos mitigation if the browser was required to design a tiny bit of hash cash for each request, although I haven't really thought through all the details.

alixaxel• 13 years ago

I completely agree! I implemented Hashcash a couple years ago into my email wrapper and the algorithm is (in it's essence) suprisingly similar to Bitcoin: given this data, find a hash that has a consecutive number of x zeros in it.

I don't know about the 1/20th of a second though. Back in the day, the slowest Hashcash stamp with 5 ending zeros I could produce (with optimized code of course) was marginally above 1 second. But the good thing about Hashcash is that, much like Bitcoin - the difficulty scales. Just ask for more zeroes and it'll take longer. Email clients could also use the number of zeroes to help email classification: 0 zeros = SPAM, 5-8 zeroes = HAM.

betterunix3• 13 years ago

HashCash is not surprisingly similar to Bitcoin; HashCash was the inspiration for Bitcoin. HashCash is one of the few examples of previous work that the Bitcoin paper bothers to cite.

rb2k_• 13 years ago

And for the lazy ones, here are the "votes/donations" on his Bitcoin address:

https://blockchain.info/address/1SPEKXiV6NF9Xg6Ridw2qUtV83T8...

bayesianhorse• 13 years ago

Arguably a hacker would value a phishing E-Mail landing in a "trusted" folder more than I would want to pay when sending legitimate mails...

Of course, this proposal doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell, so arguing about it is equally pointless and I'm just too bored not to comment...

betterunix3• 13 years ago

This sounds like an overcomplicated version of HashCash...which was the inspiration for Bitcoin in the first place.

thisiswrong• 13 years ago

This is a solid idea, that has been suggested and talked about before ( on shows like letstalkbitcoin ).

However, the world should and most likely is looking to move away from insecure emailing. This is especially true for corporate and political figures.

Free software like bitmessage are revolutionary in nature and are surprisingly easy to use. Bitmessage also uses the bitcoin protocol to relay messages across the network in an untraceable & encrypted manner. A spammer would need your public key in order to send you anything. You can also block messages that do not originate from predetermined public key addresses.

The bitcoin protocol and blockchain have so many innovating alternative uses outside of finance and currecny. Also, bitcoin overlay protocols such as mastercoin are already gaining traction.

bagosm• 13 years ago

Anyone care to explain to me why just having X wallets and tranfering ammounts from these wallets to X new ones isn't going to work? Just let some addresses get marked as spam then move to new addresses?

joshdance• 13 years ago

This is a cool idea, but one thing kills it dead.

Requiring the user to pay to report spam will not work. It is just one more point of friction. How many report spam right now in Gmail when it is free?

A killer app for Bitcoin? – Spam and Phishing Emails Killer

Related Stories