Show HN: Tanstaafl – Pay-to-inbox email on Bitcoin Lightning

Tanstaafl Mail promises to kill spam by making strangers pay tiny Bitcoin units (satoshis) to reach your inbox. The pitch is simple: your attention = money; friends are whitelisted, everyone else pays. On Hacker News, some cheered—one user claimed this was their long-standing dream: “members of hackernews should be paid” to message each other. Others threw history at it: “What was once will be again”, pointing to Hashcash, an old ‘pay-with-effort’ idea. The vibe? Half “finally, an inbox I want to open,” half “is this just a velvet rope for email?” Cue jokes about turning your inbox into a nightclub with a Bitcoin bouncer.

Then came the pushback. One skeptic sighed: paying senders are exactly the people they don’t want to read. Another ranted about Big Email gatekeepers, dreaming this could “stop letting Google/Microsoft determine what’s spam” and revive private mail servers. A practical voice asked, “What if I hold zero BTC and am deeply skeptical—what steps vs just hitting Send?” The thread devolved into memes about “sats stackers” vs “Outlook button mashers,” but the real battle line was clear: fans say pricing attention will crush spambots; critics say the worst actors will just pay, while normal folks won’t bother.