Bitcoin Extensions to the SMTP protocol
Today’s
post is a theoretical method of a way to reduce spam in email.
An
extension to the SMTP mail protocol that will allow transfer of a very small
amount of Bitcoin in the message transmission process which would alleviate
spam.
Part 1: The Problem.
To
break this process down:
1)
We have email, which is transmitted “under-the-hood”
by the SMTP protocol which is a transmission protocol, language if you like,
communication standard between computers on the internet.
2)
We have spam, which is unsolicited email. We’re
all familiar with this, various mail use drugs or millionaires from Nigeria who
wish to send us millions of dollars, there’s various permutations, and it’s
very annoying. You didn’t ask for it and there doesn’t seem to be any way to
stop it.
3)
Then we have Bitcoin which is a new
crypto-currency which came out in 2009 and it’s a digital means of transmission
of monetary funds. Again, it’s a fiat currency. Like all currencies really,
there is no intrinsic value to the data, or the paper bills that you have. But
there is a value assigned to it currently in the market, which does fluctuate.
But nevertheless, my personal view is that it will increase and stabilise over
time.
Just
using the term Bitcoin to cover all variations on this, there’s Bitcoin,
Namecoin and various other “coins” why are all crypto-currencies but Bitcoin
was the first one and I’ll use that as the example currency but it could apply
to anyone of these currencies, anyone that gains traction anywhere and has
mechanisms for transmission.
So
how are we going to combine SMTP and email and the Bitcoin currency to massively
reduce spam? I can’t say it’s ever going to completely stamp it out. But we
should be looking at a large reduction in spam.
The
way it currently works, email using the underlying STMP protocol: Say I want to
send a message to somebody else. I compose my message in my email composing
program which is probably Outlook or Gmail, if it’s online. And I press send.
That message then is accepted by the machine that I’m working on and needs to
be sent. So it’ll wind up in a queue somewhere. This queue has the destination
domain of myfriend@yahoo.com
for example.
What
the machine, the transmitting server will do, is it will do a name lookup. A
DNS, Distributed Name System lookup, DNS lookup for Yahoo.com, it’ll read that
record and see that there is a mail server allocated to that, or in Yahoo’s
case probably several mail servers.
It
finds the mail server, it then does another DNS lookup which gives it the
numeric address of the mail server. It’ll then attempt to open a connection to
this machine on a standard SMTP port of 25. So hopefully Yahoo’s servers are
listening and an incoming request will be received from my server, or whatever
server is sending the mail for me.
And
then the protocol states a discussion will go on then. Anyway, this protocol,
this discussion between the two computers has a vocabulary. It’ll start off
with a ‘hello’ or an equivalent type
of statement where the machines introduce each other. The other one will
respond ‘hello’ back and then there’s
some addressing information. ‘Here’s the
message for:’ and the user name. ‘Where
is it coming from?’ It’s as simple as that. The message basically is just
transmitted from one machine direct to another one.
Part 2: The Solution.
Now,
what I am proposing is to add another word or two into the vocabulary of this
transmission and include a Bitcoin address for sending Bitcoin cash through
this transmission. Now it needs to be an option though, because obviously at
this point in time, today, there is no implementation of this. So the first
server that implements the additional Bitcoin transmission is going to be
talking to itself.
So,
it needs to be an extension to the SMTP protocol rather than a complete
revision but I don’t know if eSMTP protocol has a similar, extended protocol
with a different ‘hello’ at the
beginning. Maybe, if later on a different word is received most servers will
just respond ‘not understood’ but if
they have the Bitcoin transmitting ability on the top then they will understand
the next verb.
It will be relatively easy to implement an extra Bitcoin verb or “Bitcoin
transmission wanted”-expression.
The
mail servers will have to “loaded” with Bitcoin. This has to be loaded onto the
system in a Bitcoin wallet inside my computer and then as it sends the message
to Yahoo it will send a very small amount of Bitcoin.
Now
the beauty of Bitcoin is that it can be divided into extremely small divisions,
much smaller than a penny or a US cent. You can easily send a thousandth of a
cent or a hundredth of a cent which makes this particularly attractive. The
fact that there’s no transmission cost, there’s no bank involved, there’s no
PayPal, there’s nobody creaming a percentage off every transmission. I can send
a very small amount and all of it will be received.
So
I’d imagine a typical scenario of a husband and wife or some friends who are
probably evenly communicating with each other at a similar rate. The husband
sending roughly as many messages as they are receiving.
Not
only are the messages extremely cheap, we’re looking at over the course of a
year maybe 10 US cents. Or even 50 cents for heavy email going on between two
people, or just one person sending I would imagine. Depending on the price.
But
the key is that the typical person will send maybe 1 or 2 or 3 or 5 or 10
messages a day. You’re looking over the course of a year, let’s say he sends 10
messages which is probably a heavy user I’d imagine. Now this person, if he
sends 10 a day, and there’s 356 days in a year. He’s sending three and a half
thousand messages a year. It’d be costing him even 1 cent which I think is way,
way over the top. What are we looking at there? Is it $30 or is it $3? Anyway,
we’re talking about extremely low figures here.
The
thing is spammers, people who are trying to sell Viagra or con people have to
send millions of messages in order to get a positive response in their eyes.
There’s not that many gullible people and there’s not that many people
interested in viagra. And most people hate spam so they wouldn’t respond to it
anyway. So the trick is that these people, not only is it one way. Whereas
between husband and wife money would be going forwards and backwards all the
time so the net transmission would be extremely low.
These
people, the spammers are sending out enormous amounts of messages and are not
getting anything back so it’s going to start to cost them and I suspect that it
would probably diminish their activities.
Now
obviously, maybe if somebody is targeted. Let’s say somebody responds to some
spam or buys some Viagra. This signal to the Scammers that “they’re gullible”.
Other scammers may then target this person. I believe this is happening
already. The amount of messages you would have to send to his person are a lot
lower. So we may see a refining of the scammers techniques but then we’re
really moving away from the generic spam email to the custom targeted scamming
which exists anyway in the world. So I’m not concerned about the evolution of
this. I just don’t want any spam.
Bitcoin
was developed in 2009. In 2009 I remember thinking as the governments were
turning on the printing presses and targeting inflation as the saviour of the
world. I remember thinking about various alternatives to standard currencies
which were not controlled by the any governments or central banks. There is
obviously gold, - this has been used throughout history as a currency – but has
problems with the supply and storage of it and compared to Bitcoin - its
transmission. I remember considering a unit of energy maybe a “Wattmeter”. A
wattmeter calculation which would be redeemable by going to any sort of power
source e.g. Power company or Solar grid.
But
anyway, I was very pleased a year or two later to discover that a chap named
Satoshi, this is supposedly a pseudonym for him. But he’s come up with the idea
of a digital currency which does satisfy many of the requirements for a
currency. Which is uniqueness of notes, a limited supply. There’s only 21
million Bitcoins will ever be produced. Some form of mining or increase in the
money supply over time. There are downsides to it of course. As with other
currencies you can always come up with another version of it. It’s simple
software so instead of printing dollar bills I can have my pound notes or a
competing currency. So you’re looking at other factors such as stability,
transmission, security and other features of the protocol, of the currency
protocol.
Anyway
it’s interesting times. We had the MtGox failure a month or two ago which
obviously has affected the Bitcoin pricing. But I suspect over time once people
realise the true flexibility of crypto-currencies or digital currencies they
will be swayed. Obviously the exchange rate to traditional currencies need to
stabilise. The reason it’s jumping up and down so much, there’s numerous
reasons, but one of the main reasons is there’s a relatively small amount of in
supply. It is held in the hands of some small groups with large amount of it
which means it will go up and down. Obviously, because it hits the headlines
every time there’s a lot of volatility.
But
nevertheless, this email transmission property that it can be used for. It will
probably help in its acceptance. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a thousandth
of a cent or a hundredth of a cent. The fact is that there is some money being
transferred. If you are an even equilibrium user, you’re sending as much as you
are receiving then you shouldn’t have to load the Bitcoin very often, and of
course they are tiny amounts that you have to put in.
So,
I wanted to consider a company that sends email and how it would impact that
and just look at the numbers too. Of course there will be a cost to commercial
organisations in the transmission. Actually, it’s only transmission that’s
received. If you send a message to… This needs considering… There needs to be
some adherence to a standard so the mail server won’t just sit there and accept
messages for people who no longer have accounts there because they have a
business and people leave and people are still getting messages. You could
essentially make a very small amount of money by accepting their messages for
delivery. Most of the time, companies switch off the email accounts and start
to balance and say, Ann Jones is no longer here so the Bitcoin wouldn’t be sent
to them.
But
what I wanted to talk about was large companies who typically have large
mailing lists. Now I think for the small cost involved, I haven’t got my
calculator in front of me. But if they were sending, what would a small to
medium enterprise, how many customers? If it was dealing directly with the
public, business to consumer. Business to business would be a lot less.
Business to business maybe a thousand. Business to consumer, a hundred thousand
people and they might want to email them once a month. So that’s a 120 000
messages. Yes, I suspect the costs would still be low, even if it was 1 cent,
that’s $1200 a year. But the messages are not going to wind up in the spam bin,
or they shouldn’t.
Now
of course, the fact that you’re sending some money doesn’t guarantee that the
message is not spam. So I’m going to talk about that in a second.
Ok,
so a quick discussion here about how this is not going to be the cure all, this
is not the elixir, the life giving juice the life giving source. An elixir for
removing spam but I think it will, unless it’s worked around it, initially it
would have quite a large effect. So at the moment, a lot of spam filters use
what’s called Bayesian, after the mathematician Bays. Bayesian probabilities
for classifying email into spam. Having spam like structures, word structures,
sentences, words, lack of other words which allow software to categorise it.
As
we know very often spam does still arrive in my inbox in my Gmail account,
Outlook account, my Hotmail outlook account which is being performed by major
corporations who are very good at what they do. So I still wind up with a spam
message in my inbox and real messages going to my spam tray. So it doesn’t work
completely, there’s obviously room for improvement.
Now
I would imagine that the fact that the Bitcoin has been transferred wouldn’t
completely mark it as spam. If the message said something like ‘want to buy
viagra?’ and that was it, and it also sent some Bitcoin. The Bayesian filters
could probably still work that one out, I’d hope so anyway. So I’m not claiming
that this is going to cure everything. But certainly, these things are only
answered in practice.
How developers can make money from this:
The
final part is how can developers, and people in the IT industry make money out
of this? As I say it needs to be in addition to the SMTP protocol, an extra
verb or two and then the transmission to the Bitcoin address and some
verification that this has occurred and then eventual delivery of the message.
So
what we’re really looking at here is an extension to standard software, so
Sendmail or Microsoft SMTP or all the various mail servers that exist in the
world. Either the vendors/developers or third parties could produce software that will
add these extra verbs to the SMTP protocol and be sold as extensions.
Conclusion
I've looked at the problem of spam, and considered a way that Bitcoin could be included in the transmission process to lower the likelyhood that a spammer will want to send messages.
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