>While I think it would be fun to talk with the gentleman about his >bitcoin thinking, the key part that I intended for this group was the >situational analysis involving spam and how bad guys behave.
The historical discussion is pretty good, give or take some minor sequencing errors. (Web mail is a lot older than he makes it out to be, for example.) The bit at the end with bitcoins and reputation bonds is just nonsense. (It's longstanding nonsense -- back in 2009, one of Satoshi's first messages to the cryptography list suggested using them for epostage, and I responded saying that wasn't likely to be a good idea, thereby making me a bitcoin pioneer in the eyes of the Wall Street Journal.) I will spare you the long rant about why it won't work, but the rant touches on the facts that bad guys have access to more computing power than good guys, that bitcoin transactions are not fast and not inherently cheap, and bad guys are just as creative as good guys and are good at subverting systems intended to keep them out. What I think will actually happen is twofold. Many mail operators will tell their users that if they let the mail system look at their mail under tightly controlled conditions (for some definitions of tight and control) their spam filtering will be a lot better, and about 95% of the users will say yes. For free webmail systems, it'll be a condition of service, since the tight control will include using the mail contents to target ads. For the other 5%, strong crypto will presumably include a hard to forge signature from the sender, so they can whitelist senders with some painful way to get new senders into your local whitelist. I think it's a very open question whether E2E crypto on mail will turn out to be so painful that people won't bother, outside of small clusters of people who already know each other and so can exchange keys in ways that are formally hopeless but in practice work OK. R's, John _______________________________________________ Endymail mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/endymail
