Paying to write someone (ie, physical mail) was the standard for all communication before we had widespread telefax/internet messaging adoption. I don't know how bad the spam problem was there, but the concept doesn't strike me as being necessarily awful. What's your concern?
For every legit paper mail, I've had 5-10 garbage leaflet advertisements shoved into my mailbox by half-legally working teenagers earning $1-2/h in exchange for everyone's annoyance. 99% of these went into trash immediately without looking.
Fair point — but think about who cold-emails you today that you actually want to hear from: recruiters with real opportunities, potential clients, investors, journalists, conference organizers. These are people you'd talk to if you knew they were serious.
The gate doesn't exist to let spammers pay to reach you. It exists to filter signal from noise. Spammers won't pay even $0.08 per message because their whole model depends on sending millions for free. A recruiter with a real $200k offer? They'll happily pay a few cents to prove they're not a bot.
And anyone you already trust (contacts, colleagues, existing correspondents) bypasses the gate entirely — zero friction for people you know.
In a world of spam, the cost of reaching an actual person for soliciting is very high for a genuine free lancer like me. I wish the cost was not so much and I could reach effectively the people i want to reach by paying them even.
Hashcash was brilliant — Adam Back essentially invented proof-of-work for email in 1997. But it had a fundamental problem: the cost was computational, not economic. The sender burned CPU cycles that went nowhere, and the receiver got nothing.
TANSTAAFL flips this: the sender pays real money (Lightning sats), the receiver actually gets paid, and trusted contacts bypass the gate entirely. It's not proof-of-work, it's proof-of-value.
The other difference: hashcash couldn't scale with the sender's intent. A recruiter reaching out about a 00k job and a Nigerian prince both burned the same CPU cycles. With economic pricing, the gate amount signals how much the sender values reaching you.
Even though the OP didn’t write their posts or the code or the text on the website, we at least know that some part of the project is original: only a human could come up with a project name so terrible. Speaks to the problem of vibecoding: anyone can generate a bunch of output but still, taste matters.
Earn.com (since acquired by Coinbase, originally called 21) tried this idea for a while — also using Bitcoin — but couldn’t make it work. Paying to email people just isn’t a compelling idea. Do you have any thoughts on new things you’re bringing to the table that will allow your project to succeed where others failed?
Maybe 20 (edit: 15) years ago Flattr launched a tipping service that failed because people didn’t want to tip people and then a decade later things like Kofi and Patreon came along and have been a huge success because attitudes shifted. Maybe now is the time that pay to email can work?
Just say I'm a sender who wants to send an email to someone on this system, and who also holds zero BTC and is justifiably deeply skeptical of anyone pushing it, exactly what steps would I need to take with this system vs hitting "Send" from Outlook?
You don't need to buy into the "Bitcoin will replace the U.S. dollar" narrative to buy $5 worth of bitcoin to send a few hundreds or thousands of emails..
No one goes to an arcade wanting to play a game and says "I don't know about these tokens, though..."
You buy bitcoin somewhere (if you can't figure this out yourself you arent trying)
And send it to whatever address this app provides to you..
No one seems to want to answer your practical question. As I understand it, you receive an email with a payment link. When paid, your email is received by recipient.
I am unsure whether you could use e.g. Apple Pay to pay directly, or if you’d have to follow the microtransaction playbook to buy a greater amount of currency which you can spend.
If you're a foreigner visiting Bangladesh or Reykjavik, you're probably skeptical about their currency. But you'd still have to use it to buy stamps if you want to send a letter somewhere.
Bit tangental, but if this was a real thing, we could hopefully stop letting google / microsoft determine whats spam. Private mail servers would hopefully more common and actually work. Super annoyed, I use cloudflare + protonmail for my custom domain, but I have the feeling that some outgoing emails from my domain gets blocked... 90% deliverability means practically useless.
This is exactly the problem we're trying to solve. The current email ecosystem punishes anyone who runs their own mail server — you're guilty until Google decides you're innocent.
With a pay-to-inbox gate, reputation doesn't matter. The payment IS the reputation signal. A self-hosted mail server with TANSTAAFL works just as well as Gmail because the economic proof replaces the reputation system entirely.
We're actually running on Cloudflare Email Routing + our own backend right now, so we know the pain firsthand.
It's not locked behind a paywall — it's opt-in by the receiver. You choose to turn the gate on for unknown senders. Anyone in your contacts or trust list emails you normally with zero friction.
Think of it less as 'paying to send email' and more as 'strangers proving they're not bots.' The 100 sats (~$0.08) isn't really a paywall — it's a spam filter that actually works because it's economically impossible to send a million of them.
You can still receive all the email you want for free. The gate only activates for cold contacts who haven't been whitelisted.
Cool! This is something I've been thinking about and wanted to build too.
I don't want it to be like I'm a valuable person and lower people pay for the privilege of my attention, but I do like the idea of making it so that senders have skin in the game and can't just infinitely generate emails that waste other people's time.
What I'd like to see is different costs based on how I classify the email.
So, everyone except trusted contacts pays $5 per email to me. If I think your email was pure spam, I keep the $5. If I reply, you get your money back. If I do nothing and never classify the email, you get back $4 after 30 days. And I can manually override like reply and keep the money, but those are the defaults.
$5 is probably too much, tho. I'd be looking more at the $.2 to $1 range.
Maybe a 3 to 4 tier inbox. Known and trusted user being able to contact you without paying, a high value inbox for the $1+ range, a low value inbox for the $.2 range emails wont be auto-deleted in and a very low value inbox emails will be deleted in depending on the amount paid, with free mails being gone within e.g. an hour, all the way up to e.g. a month for $.19 mails.
Then unify those inboxes and set up notifications to the users' likings.
Also, I'd normalize e.g. 10% going to the e-mail service providers and enshrine that amount into the protocol right away. Otherwise the protocol wont get a lot of attention from the major providers and if it does, the provider taking his share is going to become normalized anyway. But then the split isn't going to be in favor for the users. Which isn't negative per-se, but it'd be nice to have at least one type of service where this is split is reversed. And it is fair to assume whoever takes the larger split has more influence on the prices, potentially either making this feature useless or pricing very casual users out of the service.
I don't like it. All kind of legit services use email, such as Steam when you made a purchase, or health service. The idea that they won't move the weight of the loss to you, is ludicrous. Ergo, price goes up, and you either get paid or lose out more. It is a race to the bottom, kind of like using Brave to block ads and show their own.
It also adds to the adagium that all spam solutions ultimately do not work, and Bill Gates proposed all of them (a meme, too).
Furthermore, email is a broken protocol not because of federation (something alternatives usually lack) but because of lack of E2EE.
How is the whitelist built and managed? I have several thousand emails that I would need to whitelist, many that don’t email me regularly, but I wouldn’t want them to get hung up or worse receive an auto response that I expect them to pay me.
this is backwards. advertisers WILL pay you money for your eye balls. legitimate senders will not because it's insulting to ask them for money. this is like dating vs prostitution. if you rate what to let near your eye balls by the highest bidder, you'll get all kinds of diseases.
Advertisers will still pay, but they would need to adjust their strategy to target their ads more carefully to those who are likely to result in sales.
For legitimate senders, the attached fee would end up being spent by the receiver to send a reply, like a "refund", so it ends up zero-sum.
But for spammers it becomes an expensive option. Nobody is going to reply to the spam to "refund" their fee.
Awesome. This was actually my idea too when I said that members of hackernews should be paid for messages to reach them by other hacker news members. But you came up with much nicer.
implementation. I like it.
Here was my idea https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44277071
I think it was yours or someone else's idea in a thread which had somewhat of the same idea and I had even thought of making something like this but just in general. So it is pretty interesting to see this project as well when I had read comments like yours sometime ago.
Though I don't quite remember if it was your comment exactly or if it was someone's elses comment which had the same idea as this.
Thanks! Just read your original post — you nailed the core insight: attention has economic value, and the current system lets anyone drain it for free.
The key difference in our implementation is using Lightning micropayments instead of on-chain Bitcoin. A 100 sat payment (~$0.08) clears in under a second, costs almost nothing in fees, and the receiver actually keeps the money. It's not burned like hashcash PoW — it's a real economic transfer.
If you want to try it live: send any email to niko@tanstaafl.email. You'll get a payment link back, pay 100 sats, and watch the email land. The whole flow takes about 30 seconds.
Would genuinely love feedback from someone who's been thinking about this problem.
I'd recommend you to take a look into nano cryptocurrency as well which supports zero gas fees or sei cryptocurrency which can actually allow Stablecoins like USDC to be used.
BTC lightning can have some flaws too IIRC and I am curious how you handle it.
I have worked somewhat with nano just out of curiosity and it was a decent experience.
It's a shame that nothing like nano has been built for stablecoin itself properly. There is a exchange provider (nanswap) which has nanusd idea and I have even talked to the creator of that project but they are a sole proprietor and the business even after talking to them doesn't feel sadly trustworthy enough that I can recommend it at any scale given that it essentially boils down to that I have to trust them with my money.
The way I see it, the parties who may want to pay to write me an email are the ones I don't want to read anyway.
Paying to write someone (ie, physical mail) was the standard for all communication before we had widespread telefax/internet messaging adoption. I don't know how bad the spam problem was there, but the concept doesn't strike me as being necessarily awful. What's your concern?
> I don't know how bad the spam problem was there
For every legit paper mail, I've had 5-10 garbage leaflet advertisements shoved into my mailbox by half-legally working teenagers earning $1-2/h in exchange for everyone's annoyance. 99% of these went into trash immediately without looking.
That’s not quite the same - you were paying for delivery by a third party, and you still do that when you pay for your email provider.
This is pay to play to contact someone - more akin to donors paying politicians for access at a dinner.
The concern is that free alternatives exist now, so you have to explain to people the value they get out of paying to contact me.
Fair point — but think about who cold-emails you today that you actually want to hear from: recruiters with real opportunities, potential clients, investors, journalists, conference organizers. These are people you'd talk to if you knew they were serious.
The gate doesn't exist to let spammers pay to reach you. It exists to filter signal from noise. Spammers won't pay even $0.08 per message because their whole model depends on sending millions for free. A recruiter with a real $200k offer? They'll happily pay a few cents to prove they're not a bot.
And anyone you already trust (contacts, colleagues, existing correspondents) bypasses the gate entirely — zero friction for people you know.
In a world of spam, the cost of reaching an actual person for soliciting is very high for a genuine free lancer like me. I wish the cost was not so much and I could reach effectively the people i want to reach by paying them even.
> Spammers won't pay even $0.08 per message because their whole model depends on sending millions for free.
Your LLM forgot that SMS exists. Even a 0.01% success rate on tens of thousands of messages can be lucrative.
The irony of someone using AI to create slop to talk on HN about spam. Maybe HN should start charging people to write comments.
AI slop response.
You created an account to say that.
Inefficient human response.
Just raise your price then. Until it becomes lucrative for you
Well. At least I would get paid for clicking "delete". Good for me.
What was once will be again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
Hashcash was brilliant — Adam Back essentially invented proof-of-work for email in 1997. But it had a fundamental problem: the cost was computational, not economic. The sender burned CPU cycles that went nowhere, and the receiver got nothing.
TANSTAAFL flips this: the sender pays real money (Lightning sats), the receiver actually gets paid, and trusted contacts bypass the gate entirely. It's not proof-of-work, it's proof-of-value.
The other difference: hashcash couldn't scale with the sender's intent. A recruiter reaching out about a 00k job and a Nigerian prince both burned the same CPU cycles. With economic pricing, the gate amount signals how much the sender values reaching you.
did an llm write this or do you just speak like an llm now
Even though the OP didn’t write their posts or the code or the text on the website, we at least know that some part of the project is original: only a human could come up with a project name so terrible. Speaks to the problem of vibecoding: anyone can generate a bunch of output but still, taste matters.
LLM or not, it provided more value than this thought/question directly from your brain
AI slop response.
Earn.com (since acquired by Coinbase, originally called 21) tried this idea for a while — also using Bitcoin — but couldn’t make it work. Paying to email people just isn’t a compelling idea. Do you have any thoughts on new things you’re bringing to the table that will allow your project to succeed where others failed?
Maybe 20 (edit: 15) years ago Flattr launched a tipping service that failed because people didn’t want to tip people and then a decade later things like Kofi and Patreon came along and have been a huge success because attitudes shifted. Maybe now is the time that pay to email can work?
Just say I'm a sender who wants to send an email to someone on this system, and who also holds zero BTC and is justifiably deeply skeptical of anyone pushing it, exactly what steps would I need to take with this system vs hitting "Send" from Outlook?
What are you skeptical about?
You don't need to buy into the "Bitcoin will replace the U.S. dollar" narrative to buy $5 worth of bitcoin to send a few hundreds or thousands of emails..
No one goes to an arcade wanting to play a game and says "I don't know about these tokens, though..."
You buy bitcoin somewhere (if you can't figure this out yourself you arent trying)
And send it to whatever address this app provides to you..
No one seems to want to answer your practical question. As I understand it, you receive an email with a payment link. When paid, your email is received by recipient.
I am unsure whether you could use e.g. Apple Pay to pay directly, or if you’d have to follow the microtransaction playbook to buy a greater amount of currency which you can spend.
If you're a foreigner visiting Bangladesh or Reykjavik, you're probably skeptical about their currency. But you'd still have to use it to buy stamps if you want to send a letter somewhere.
Bit tangental, but if this was a real thing, we could hopefully stop letting google / microsoft determine whats spam. Private mail servers would hopefully more common and actually work. Super annoyed, I use cloudflare + protonmail for my custom domain, but I have the feeling that some outgoing emails from my domain gets blocked... 90% deliverability means practically useless.
This is exactly the problem we're trying to solve. The current email ecosystem punishes anyone who runs their own mail server — you're guilty until Google decides you're innocent.
With a pay-to-inbox gate, reputation doesn't matter. The payment IS the reputation signal. A self-hosted mail server with TANSTAAFL works just as well as Gmail because the economic proof replaces the reputation system entirely.
We're actually running on Cloudflare Email Routing + our own backend right now, so we know the pain firsthand.
AI slop response.
Why do you use Cloudflare in that case? They are also massive responsible for internal centralisation
That would be lovely, but I don’t think the ability to send email should be locked behind a paywall.
It's not locked behind a paywall — it's opt-in by the receiver. You choose to turn the gate on for unknown senders. Anyone in your contacts or trust list emails you normally with zero friction.
Think of it less as 'paying to send email' and more as 'strangers proving they're not bots.' The 100 sats (~$0.08) isn't really a paywall — it's a spam filter that actually works because it's economically impossible to send a million of them.
You can still receive all the email you want for free. The gate only activates for cold contacts who haven't been whitelisted.
AI slop response.
Cool! This is something I've been thinking about and wanted to build too.
I don't want it to be like I'm a valuable person and lower people pay for the privilege of my attention, but I do like the idea of making it so that senders have skin in the game and can't just infinitely generate emails that waste other people's time.
What I'd like to see is different costs based on how I classify the email.
So, everyone except trusted contacts pays $5 per email to me. If I think your email was pure spam, I keep the $5. If I reply, you get your money back. If I do nothing and never classify the email, you get back $4 after 30 days. And I can manually override like reply and keep the money, but those are the defaults.
$5 is probably too much, tho. I'd be looking more at the $.2 to $1 range.
Maybe a 3 to 4 tier inbox. Known and trusted user being able to contact you without paying, a high value inbox for the $1+ range, a low value inbox for the $.2 range emails wont be auto-deleted in and a very low value inbox emails will be deleted in depending on the amount paid, with free mails being gone within e.g. an hour, all the way up to e.g. a month for $.19 mails.
Then unify those inboxes and set up notifications to the users' likings.
Also, I'd normalize e.g. 10% going to the e-mail service providers and enshrine that amount into the protocol right away. Otherwise the protocol wont get a lot of attention from the major providers and if it does, the provider taking his share is going to become normalized anyway. But then the split isn't going to be in favor for the users. Which isn't negative per-se, but it'd be nice to have at least one type of service where this is split is reversed. And it is fair to assume whoever takes the larger split has more influence on the prices, potentially either making this feature useless or pricing very casual users out of the service.
Stamps for email?
This idea has been discussed for decades now. I like it
https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Anti-spam_20_27stamps_27#124...
I don't like it. All kind of legit services use email, such as Steam when you made a purchase, or health service. The idea that they won't move the weight of the loss to you, is ludicrous. Ergo, price goes up, and you either get paid or lose out more. It is a race to the bottom, kind of like using Brave to block ads and show their own.
It also adds to the adagium that all spam solutions ultimately do not work, and Bill Gates proposed all of them (a meme, too).
Furthermore, email is a broken protocol not because of federation (something alternatives usually lack) but because of lack of E2EE.
How is the whitelist built and managed? I have several thousand emails that I would need to whitelist, many that don’t email me regularly, but I wouldn’t want them to get hung up or worse receive an auto response that I expect them to pay me.
this is backwards. advertisers WILL pay you money for your eye balls. legitimate senders will not because it's insulting to ask them for money. this is like dating vs prostitution. if you rate what to let near your eye balls by the highest bidder, you'll get all kinds of diseases.
Advertisers will still pay, but they would need to adjust their strategy to target their ads more carefully to those who are likely to result in sales.
For legitimate senders, the attached fee would end up being spent by the receiver to send a reply, like a "refund", so it ends up zero-sum.
But for spammers it becomes an expensive option. Nobody is going to reply to the spam to "refund" their fee.
Looks great! Can you comment a little bit on the name?
I love this. But why does it have to be bitcoin? Why not just good ol credit card
Credit cards aren't big on tiny transactions, but I'm sure any payment method could work.
Awesome. This was actually my idea too when I said that members of hackernews should be paid for messages to reach them by other hacker news members. But you came up with much nicer. implementation. I like it. Here was my idea https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44277071
I think it was yours or someone else's idea in a thread which had somewhat of the same idea and I had even thought of making something like this but just in general. So it is pretty interesting to see this project as well when I had read comments like yours sometime ago.
Though I don't quite remember if it was your comment exactly or if it was someone's elses comment which had the same idea as this.
Thanks! Just read your original post — you nailed the core insight: attention has economic value, and the current system lets anyone drain it for free.
The key difference in our implementation is using Lightning micropayments instead of on-chain Bitcoin. A 100 sat payment (~$0.08) clears in under a second, costs almost nothing in fees, and the receiver actually keeps the money. It's not burned like hashcash PoW — it's a real economic transfer.
If you want to try it live: send any email to niko@tanstaafl.email. You'll get a payment link back, pay 100 sats, and watch the email land. The whole flow takes about 30 seconds.
Would genuinely love feedback from someone who's been thinking about this problem.
All your replies are substantiative-- can you make a comment (or add text to OP) where you talk about the following:
1) Previous work 2) Your differentiation 3) What's your business case for this personally? 4) Potential problems etc
Please don't use AI for messages. your idea is nice but don't use AI.
AI slop response.
I love the idea. Sending you positive vibes for the innovation !
I'd recommend you to take a look into nano cryptocurrency as well which supports zero gas fees or sei cryptocurrency which can actually allow Stablecoins like USDC to be used.
BTC lightning can have some flaws too IIRC and I am curious how you handle it.
I have worked somewhat with nano just out of curiosity and it was a decent experience.
It's a shame that nothing like nano has been built for stablecoin itself properly. There is a exchange provider (nanswap) which has nanusd idea and I have even talked to the creator of that project but they are a sole proprietor and the business even after talking to them doesn't feel sadly trustworthy enough that I can recommend it at any scale given that it essentially boils down to that I have to trust them with my money.
Polygon chain with USDC can come close.