alt Hacker NewsIt seems to me that ideas like this are unworkable due to income inequality.
$5 isn't much for a wealthy westerner. It's a reasonable amount for an unemployed westerner. It's 12% of their weekly budget for someone earning median wage ($160/month) in Vietnam. But if you put in place regional pricing, it'll be cheap enough that spammers will just operate out of low income countries and buy thousands of cheap accounts.
> It seems to me that ideas like this are unworkable due to income inequality.
There's no reason you can't have an attestation entity that's based on volunteer hours, provided you can convince sites-in-general that your proof-units are good.
The core theme isn't about cash, but that:that:
1. There are kinds of activity someone can do which demonstrates some kind of distinct actual expenditure of time or effort (not self-dealing.)
2. A trusted agent could attest to that activity.
3. Requiring (proof of) activity gives you an decent way to ward off the majority of bots/spam in a relatively simple way that doesn't become a complex privacy nightmare.
It's a similar outcome to sending CPU-bound challenges to a client, except without the deliberate-waste and without a strong bias towards people who can afford their own fast computer.