[balozi]

The dig at capitalism is a bit puzzling since this may be the perfect setting to demonstrate the principles of capitalism. Let them deploy their capital and see how market responds. Their theory is that "sending an e-mail should cost something". Maybe that cost is $2.30 per message, and maybe its $0.0000000023 per message. Either way its their capital at stake.

[chadlavi]

right and that... sucks? and is bad?

A lot of the passion/hobby newsletters I receive would not exist if the person writing them had to pay to send the emails. Adding a cost to distributing information does not increase the quality of distributed information, it just increases the percentage of information distributed that is trying to make the sender money.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the article. Are they talking only about marketing newsletters or just any kind of mass-emailing? Because sure, I'd support adding a toll to sending marketing emails. If your intent is to sell something, it should cost you some money to advertise.

[stickfigure]

Any email. But the receiver could refund/credit/whitelist certain senders; there's no reason this mechanism would have outsized impact on hobby lists other than the subscriber would have to somehow mark them as "safe".

In theory, this whole approach should work pretty well. I doubt the practical hurdles are surmountable, however.

The "prove-work-to-deliver" approach seems to have all the same benefits without a complicated, slow, and privacy-impacting ledger.