It's still important to think about how much $10, the current Urbit ID price, represents in some parts of the world. The World Bank has a poverty line of ~$3-4 per day and over half of India lives (or did in 2017) on less than that and the official rural poverty line is around $6-7 a month. If we're setting up the next internet we really shouldn't be locking out anyone due to price.
Even for someone living on $3/day, paying $10 once every ten years represents 0.09% of their income. You could also plausibly impose alternative costs, like making someone solve captchas for an hour. Then people in rich countries pay $10, people in poor countries spend an hour (which to them is significantly less than $10 of their time).
that's like 500-1000 USD for the average middle class american - a steep price to pay for a membership with no obvious benefits
I wonder why can't score IDs by page-rank them - one's identity gets credibility based on the social score - hacker news manages to be quite effective at preventing spam using this technique
> that's like 500-1000 USD for the average middle class american
Which would be $50-$100/year, i.e. still not very much.
Recall that it costs significantly more than that to have internet access.
> a steep price to pay for a membership with no obvious benefits
The obvious benefit being that you get to be in the same network as the people in rich countries, and that network is not overrun by spam or controlled by a multinational conglomerate that uses its ownership of the means of communication to cost you significantly more than $10.
> I wonder why can't score IDs by page-rank them - one's identity gets credibility based on the social score - hacker news manages to be quite effective at preventing spam using this technique
What do you do with new IDs that have no reputation? If they can't post they can't earn a reputation, if they can post they can spam.
