[hermanb]

I had this idea / pet project once where I did exactly this for email. Emails would immediately bounce with payment link and explanation. If you paid you get credit on a ledger per email address. Only then the mail goes through.

You can also integrate it in clients by adding payment/reward claim headers.

[Fnoord]

Bill Gates already had this idea. All efforts to change email were already documented 25 years ago. The biggest changes are it is more centralized these days, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, JMAP innovation, oh... and one more thing! It is HUGE!! HTML email is the default...

[TurdF3rguson]

Yeah I remember this from "The Road Ahead" which I chanced upon one time in the 90s. I thought it was a silly idea.

[zx8080]

Scammers (and spammers) always got $1! That's why there's a lot of the scam ads on google, fb, apple.

So the paywall email firewall will not work as desired.

[Dylan16807]

Not many email attacks are worth an entire dollar. It would be very very effective at reducing spam. And too effective at reducing everything else.

[zx8080]

Emails to CEOs they do worth.

[Dylan16807]

So only CEOs will get spam, and it's effective for 99.9% of people? I would not describe that as "will not work as desired".

[AnthonyMouse]

And it would even still work for the CEO, they would just have to charge more than $1.

The real problem is we don't have a low-friction digital payment system that allows individuals to automate sending payment requests for small amounts of money to each other without requiring everyone to sign up for a merchant account with a financial bureaucracy.

[SJC_Hacker]

> The real problem is we don't have a low-friction digital payment system that allows individuals to automate sending payment requests for small amounts of money to each other without requiring everyone to sign up for a merchant account with a financial bureaucracy.

Its called cryptocurrency