I'd rather have a system where there's a small investment cost to making an account, but you could always make another.

Imagine A system where there's a vending machine outside City Hall, you spend $X on a charity for choice, and you get a one-time, anonymous token. You can "spend" it with a forum to indicate "this is probably a person or close enough to it."

Misuse of the system could be curbed by making it so that the status of a token cannot be tested non-destructively.

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gzread an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Something Awful made you pay $10 for an account. Directly to the forum. If you got banned you could pay another $10 to try again. Somehow this didn't lead to that bad incentives even though you'd think it would.

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tlonny 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’d love something like this implemented for email.

Sending an unsolicited email to a random person X requires you to pay a small toll (something like 50p).

Subsequent emails can then be sent for free - however person X can “revoke” your access any time necessitating a further toll payment.

You would of course be able to pre-authorise friends/family/transactional emails from various services that you’ve signed up for.

This would nuke spam economics and be minimally disruptive for other use cases of email IMO…

	▲	jimmydorry an hour ago \| parent [-]
		>transactional emails from various services that you’ve signed up for These are one of the main culprits of unwanted emails... and a toll system would make them all the more valuable for the even worse actors to take advantage of.

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JimDabell 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you think there is a price point that locks out spammers without locking out poor people?

	▲	bobthepanda 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		probably not, the problem is that spammers/scammers are looking for whales, and if you are talking about draining the retirement accounts of an American who's been saving all their life, that's quite a big payout in the six or seven figures.