[...] There's a *large* number of people still in the 386 world, who are financially unable to upgrade. That same hashcash request that will not inconvenience my hardware will probably kill their box for the better part of an hour. You are concluding that they therefor have an interest in paying to receive spam???
Yup. I am.
If anything, spam is a *bigger* problem for those on older hardware, simply because they have fewer computrons available to process it - so you're basically creating a regressive tax here.
And I'm not going to apologize for proposing it.
Look, the phenomenon of spam is already a regressive tax, in and of itself. I'm just looking for a way to get some useful work done in exchange for receiving it. And I certainly won't mind if someone else is interested in paying me for the option to use the result of whatever useful work your CPU has to do to get your message in front of my eyeballs.
Just because the Internet routes around censorship doesn't mean that we have the moral right to censor those people who need it the most - those in underdeveloped countries with repressive regimes.
Who's talking about censorship? I'm not proposing that we outlaw SMTP.
-- j h woodyatt <jhw@wetware.com> that's my village calling... no doubt, they want their idiot back.