[91253] in Cypherpunks

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hashcash spam throttle

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Adam Back)
Tue Dec 2 21:19:19 1997

Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997 00:44:49 GMT
From: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>
To: pooh@efga.org
CC: remailer-politics@server1.efga.org, cypherpunks@cyberpass.net,
        remailer-operators@anon.lcs.mit.edu
In-reply-to: <3.0.3.32.19971202094253.037e0654@mail.atl.bellsouth.net>
	(pooh@efga.org)
Reply-To: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>


Robert A. Costner <pooh@efga.org> writes:
> It's much like spam.  It's a very shortsighted view when a user says "why
> can't you just hit the delete button?"  This is an incorrect answer for a
> user who received one piece of spam, but whose small ISP, being the relay,
> lost all mail services for two days.

See HashCash: http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/hashcash/

Hashcash ensures that the would be spammer has to consume more
resources than you do.  Hashcash is arbitrarily expensive to create
and cheap to verify.  It's also decentralised and anonymous.

Adam


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