A startup friend of mine started chatting with me about his “new” idea. “I know there are many bad ideas in cypto, but I’ve been thinking,” he said, lowering his voice like he was about to reveal a state secret. “What if every email required you to buy a little crypto? Like, just a tiny amount. It would totally solve the spam problem.”
He sat back, clearly bracing himself for the round of applause he was sure he’d earned. This was it—his magnum opus, his lightbulb moment, the kind of idea that sends tech bros spiraling into overfunded startup ventures. He looked at me, expecting awe, maybe even a tear of gratitude.
And I just stared at him. Because here’s the thing: his “big idea” wasn’t just not new—it was literally based on a core piece of crypto: proof of work.
How Spam Control Invented Proof of Work
To fully appreciate the irony here, we have to hop in the time machine and head back to the 1990s, when email was changing the world and spam was ruining it just as quickly. This was the golden era of junk messages—the wild west of chain letters, dubious sweepstakes, and invitations to claim your long-lost inheritance from a distant relative in a country you’d never heard of.
People hated it. Everyone hated it. And somewhere in the midst of this chaos, two computer scientists, Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor, had a simple yet brilliant idea: make sending emails a little harder. Not impossible—just hard enough to make spamming unprofitable.
Their plan? Every email sender would have to solve a tiny computational puzzle before their message could go through. For you or me, the effort would be negligible. But for spammers trying to send millions of emails, it would be like trying to run a marathon while carrying a refrigerator.
This was the birth of proof of work. Yes, the same proof of work that would later become the backbone of Bitcoin. And here’s the kicker: it was invented to deal with spam. Not world-changing finance. Not decentralized economies. Spam.
Fast Forward to My Friend’s “Revelation”
Now let’s jump to the late 2000s, when Satoshi Nakamoto decided to dust off proof of work and give it a new job: securing transactions on a decentralized blockchain. What started as a clever way to keep inboxes clean became the foundation of a multi-billion-dollar cryptocurrency industry.
And yet, here was my friend, pitching the exact same idea to me as if it had just struck him like a bolt of lightning.
“Isn’t that genius?” he asked, beaming. I could practically see the mental PowerPoint presentation he was assembling, complete with an inspirational quote about disruption.
“Actually,” I said, trying not to laugh, “that’s, uh… that’s where crypto came from. Like, that’s in origin story.”
He looked at me like I’d just told him Santa Claus wasn’t real. “Wait. What?”
“You know proof of work?” I asked. He nodded eagerly. “Yeah, well, it was literally invented to fight spam. Crypto just took the idea and ran with it.”
There was a long pause as he processed this information. “So… what you’re saying is, I accidentally reinvented Bitcoin?”
“Sure,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “Let’s call it that.”
Ignorance is (Sometimes) Hilarious
Here’s the thing about my friend: he’s not dumb. Far from it. But his enthusiasm for “disruption” sometimes outpaces his understanding of… well, anything that happened before 2015. The way he delivered his pitch, you’d think he was about to solve humanity’s deepest problems with one quick dab of blockchain. And honestly, that confidence is what makes him so fun to be around.
It’s also what makes moments like this so delightfully absurd. He didn’t just miss the fact that his idea was old—he managed to pitch me this core part of cryptocurrency like it was fresh out of his own brain. The whole thing felt like watching someone “invent” the wheel but decide to call it a “rotational ground interface solution” to get venture funding.
In fairness to my friend, his enthusiasm isn’t such a bad thing. Sure, he “reinvented” something that he should have known already existed, but if we spent all our time pooh-poohing ideas with, “Been there, done that,” we’d never have any startups. Innovation thrives on the belief—even if misplaced—that there’s something new under the sun, some overlooked detail waiting to be reimagined. A little ignorance is what gives someone the confidence to try in the first place.
This post was almost entirely written by GPT-4o with the prompt:
Write a blog post in my style about my startup friend who said, “I can never find a good use of cryptocurrency. But some startup guy told me about an idea. What if every time you sent an email, you had to buy a small amount of crypto? This would resolve the spam email problem!” Write the blog post about how the basis of crypto is based on proof of work. Give a history and write about how this was originally used in controlling spam.
Write about how humorous and crazy it is that this crypto idea is already embedded in spam protection. He’s looking at the problem completely upside down.
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