Ask HN: When will blockchian or something better replace e-mail? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: When will blockchian or something better replace e-mail?

#11

Post by alistproducer2 » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 1:43 AM UTC

voaie wrote: post #8

alistproducer2 wrote: post #4

I just started the Free Data Foundation. The goal of the project is to support OSS that can replace "free" services that subsist on our data. Interestingly enough the maiden project is tentatively called Tmail (short for torrent mail). It works somewhat like TOR in that it will depend on volunteers to host nodes that will communicate with existing email providers (outlook, gmail, yahoo, etc). The reason we need these…

Something like Mail2Tor@onion?

No, it's not designed to be anonymous (although it will force encryption). The goal is to provide a free, community hosted email service to regular non-technical users.

It is similar to TOR in the sense that it will rely on volunteers to host nodes and/or relays. The goals of TMail and TOR are, however, fundamentally different.

Re: Ask HN: When will blockchian or something better replace e-mail?

#12

Post by veddox » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 12:17 PM UTC

Qwertystop wrote: post #2

Email is simple, and works. I doubt anything is going to replace it as the default for what you list unless something massive and bizarre happens that brings down email in general so that everyone has to start from scratch and may as well put together something else. Blockchain-based systems are... not simple, though they do do work. The advantage there is... what? The ability to verify sender/recipient? At the cost…

We've had such a lot of "exciting new technologies that are going to replace email in x years" that I don't believe anything ever will - at least as long as we continue to have computers, keyboards and the Internet... (Although having said that, email is older than the Internet ;-) )

Re: Ask HN: When will blockchian or something better replace e-mail?

#13

Post by thecupisblue » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 1:07 PM UTC

Qwertystop wrote: post #2

Email is simple, and works. I doubt anything is going to replace it as the default for what you list unless something massive and bizarre happens that brings down email in general so that everyone has to start from scratch and may as well put together something else. Blockchain-based systems are... not simple, though they do do work. The advantage there is... what? The ability to verify sender/recipient? At the cost…

Completely agree.

Email is simple, powerful and everyone understands it. Yes, we need more security, better filtering and all, but not a replacement for it.