RE: Monetary bonds in email

Joachim wrote:

> Brett Watson wrote:
>
> > Where a blackhat has access to illicit credit card details, spam was
> > probably involved in the process of obtaining those details in the
> > first place.
>
> Which does however nothing to alter the fact that recipients'
> attention should come at a price.

That's one proposed solution to the problem, not a requirement.


> > In short, I don't think that the "bonded sender" style of anti-spam
> > can work, even in principle, because spam has changed. Whereas
> > before we were hit primarily by junk from "legitimate" businesses
> > who saw spam as a very cheap means of advertising, the larger
> > source is now the hard-core scammers and criminals who see it as a
> > safe way to conduct extremely profitable crimes. It's not clear
> > that we can defeat this crowd with economic pressure, because they
> > don't play by the rules. If something is too expensive for them,
> > they steal it instead of buying it. The economics of crime and the
> > economics of commerce are different things.
>
> Your last statement may be up for philosophical (or criminological,
> maybe) debate.  In any event, you are basically saying, let's uphold
> the barter system!  Money is easier to steal, especially in large
> quantities, than the goods it could buy you.  While that's true, most
> modern societies have found it to be more efficient than trading cows
> against tools.

It's not clear that monetizing email would work at all, and you have to
consider the side effects.


> > Making email a more expensive thing simply makes it a more
> > attractive target of theft. Cybercrooks have little incentive to
> > hack your email account when they can set up new free accounts
> > easily, or just generate spam directly. Make your email account
> > valuable, however, and they may decide that it's easier to steal
> > yours than start a new one.
>
> By making paper with some numbers on it worth something (or, say, by
> minting coins with no gold in them), societies have long created value
> that is, technically, relatively easy to counterfeit.

While it is easy to counterfeit a low-value coin, it rarely happens
because you can't spend many of them without getting caught.
Counterfeit paper money is nowhere near the level of credit card fraud.

Monetizing something that has very low inherent value, with a payment
scheme that is easy to defraud, sets the stage for crimes that are
individually too low-value to prosecute, though very detrimental in
aggregate.  That is already the case for people who write bad checks for
amounts much larger than these proposed email bonds, yet below the
several thousand dollar threshold for the attention of law enforcement.
Only people who could afford to set very high bond requirements on their
inboxes would generate enough real damages to warrant prosecution.  A
good solution would not have that attribute.


> But yes, I do agree that it is scary how easy it is to steal
> information.  The answer should be to better protect that information
> rather than making it worthless.

Remember, this is being proposed in order to protect email.  If the cost
of protecting the monetizing information (bandwidth, CPU cycles and
privacy), is larger than the value of what you are communicating, email
becomes a luxury rather than public infrastructure.

--
Seth Goodman