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To clarify what I'm referring to, lets use email as an example:
When sending an email, the email has to contain a digital "postage stamp" which contains a specified amount in a traditional or digital currency that is paid out of the sender's account. If the recipient does not receive payment, or receives an invalid payment,
that email is rejected and the payment is returned to the sender. The payment required could potentially be as low as as a fraction of a cent, or even a valueless amount if using a digital currency that is only shared between a select few.
The immediate result is that spam campaigns can become costly, as instead of sending millions of emails for free they are forced to have a financial impact that greatly reduce the profitability of blindly sending phishing or spam emails to endless people until
one bites. However that would also affect legitimate sources such as newsletters or business communication with their customers, which can be rolled into business expenses or paid back using a paid subscription.
It would affect how free email accounts would be capable of, which admittedly can be a double-edges sword. it would establish tiers of trustworthiness with free email accounts presumably being spoofed or falsified but paid accounts having some form of backing.
Premium users such as Microsoft 365 subscribers could see a small balance being included as part of the service, or if email providers anticipate the value of incoming emails to balance the value of outgoing emails they could still be able to offer a free
or low-cost email service.
Additionally all received emails would be immediately traceable to an origin financial account, potentially allowing phishing or fraud attempts to be traced to an individual or country of origin that can then be blocked from sending any more emails to the sender
or senders sharing a blacklist.
Optionally users and/or mail providers can potentially choose which currencies are supported and how much postage costs, restricting senders that do not deal with the recipient's currencies or is banned from holding an account of said currency. High value individuals
such as business owners or celebrities can set significantly higher postage fees or special currencies to restrict received mail to people that can afford the postage fees or have access to the special currency.
Attaching a value to every email also encourages that every email is worthy of being read, adding pressure to reduce the amount of unwanted emails that will never be read.
A significant change of this level does have it's concerns, which should be possible to mitigate. The sender loses a significant amount of anonymity with such a system, which can be mitigated by either having a provider or lender willing to vouch for them -
or by using a digital currency with anonymous walltets that the recipient specifically accepts for purposes such as this.
it may be possible for internet service providers to demand a tax or toll for transporting the email across their networks, which can be used to subsidize the cost of operating a service - or restrict emails originating from untrusted sources.
Another example is with web pages having a charge to read, meaning that journalists can avoid having paywalls by having a standard pay-per-article system that is managed by an account linked to the user's web browser. There would need to be systems in place
to ensure the user is aware of the charges and consents to them. i admittedly haven't explored this in depth as much.
-Graham Fluet
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