Your argument is basically that anonymous networks can be spammed into uselessness. That looks to be theoretically possible but practically difficult, but that’s not the main problem with your argument. The biggest hole, from my point of view, is that you think that captchas are a good (or even only) anti-spam measure. They are not.
And, of course, email is a pseudonymous P2P network which used to have a large spam problem and which, by now, has largely solved it.
Here is good write-up of how spam wars work in real life.
Spam wars in real life use mechanisms that don’t work in fully anonymous networks like Freenet. You can’t filter by IP in a network without IPs.
Captchas are obviously not a good (or even only) anti-spam measure. But inside anonymous networks, they’re one of the few things that work. Webs of Trust, which I explicitly mentioned, are another—they just don’t scale well.
Your argument is basically that anonymous networks can be spammed into uselessness. That looks to be theoretically possible but practically difficult, but that’s not the main problem with your argument. The biggest hole, from my point of view, is that you think that captchas are a good (or even only) anti-spam measure. They are not.
And, of course, email is a pseudonymous P2P network which used to have a large spam problem and which, by now, has largely solved it.
Here is good write-up of how spam wars work in real life.
Spam wars in real life use mechanisms that don’t work in fully anonymous networks like Freenet. You can’t filter by IP in a network without IPs.
Captchas are obviously not a good (or even only) anti-spam measure. But inside anonymous networks, they’re one of the few things that work. Webs of Trust, which I explicitly mentioned, are another—they just don’t scale well.