The proliferation of AI demands a new “proof of work.” Personalized, intelligent spam is still spam. Personalized, intelligent unwanted sales calls are still…unwanted. Humans “just checking in” can now be superpowered and never drop a ball again…which means all communication is going to be so crowded as to be unusable.
Bitcoin’s origins date back to a system called Hashcash, proposed by Adam Back in 1997 (“Hashcash was originally proposed as a mechanism to throttle systematic abuse of un-metered internet resources such as email, and anonymous remailers in May 1997”).
Postal mail requires a postage stamp, and that small cost prevented abuse. Want to send out a billion letters? That’s going to cost you a few hundred million dollars. That explains why you don’t get 1000 pieces of physical junk mail every day.
But email? Virtually free. Hence subject to abuse.
Hashcash would force the *sender* to do a certain amount of [then!] CPU work, which the recipient could instantly verify. An intentional asymmetry. 20 seconds to send, .001 seconds to verify.
It never took off because Bayesian etc spam filtering got better, things like CAN-SPAM were passed, etc. But I implemented Hashcash back in the day, and thought it was the right solution since it used the laws of economics to control the problem. Increase cost, decrease supply. Ensure it’s not worth the cost unless enough economic value is created.
Fast forward to 2026. AI-powered email, phone calls, text messages, and all other forms of communication are about to explode. And given AI’s “computer use” wizardry, everyone can just have AI use existing systems to pump out more, more, more…and look indistinguishable from humans.
The Turing test has been rendered essentially obsolete, so we don’t need a better Captcha. We need an economic solution.
Bitcoin took proof of work and turned it into a currency / a store of value. One option is to simply “charge” per receipt/connection, to create an economic constraint. Another is to force/throttle based on proof of work in a way that hopefully is brute-force GPU resistant — which is the exact same thing as “charging,” but without a currency.
But we are quickly headed towards a communications catastrophe, and rather than forcing agents to get “smarter” and sneak past more filters (a never-ending virus v anti-virus battle), there’s a real opportunity to create a proof of work standard and use an economic solution.
