As an ex-Bitcoiner who also worked on a large email service, I'll have to disagree with Jameson here. His retelling of the history of SMTP is engaging and accurate, but there are two points near the end where this essay goes off track.

> In 1997 Adam Back realized that the root problem of spam was that it was cheap to send ... Why wasn’t hashcash widely adopted? One reason was that there was a chicken-and-egg problem

The root problem of spam is not that email is cheap to send. This is an incredibly common mistake that I've written about before. Bill Gates made the same error. Hashcash was ignored because it's a bad idea built on faulty analysis, not due to chicken-and-egg problems (DKIM etc faced the same challenge yet were deployed).

There are enormous numbers of bulk emailers that are useful to their subscribers. Mailing lists, newsletters, Substacks, purchase confirmation emails, notifications from social networks, company-wide announcements etc. Users don't report these as spam because they want them, even though the senders may rack up millions of emails per day.

The ability to message anyone on the internet, from universities to third world internet cafes, instantly and for free, is an astounding civilisational capability. Only rich western elites could look at email and conclude that the best improvement is to charge lots of money for it. This conclusion is especially ironic in the face of the next much bigger mistake in the article:

> If you think about it, much of Bitcoin’s scaling debate was a fight against an attempt by large companies that were trying to capture the network and improve the user experience "for our own good."

If I think about it I remember that much of Bitcoin's scaling debate was a fight by random unaffiliated individuals like Gavin Andresen and myself against extremely well funded companies like Blockstream, and, unfortunately, a number of fanatics who did things like rent botnets to attack any individual or company who wanted Bitcoin to scale up.

The scaling "debate" was never actually had. Or rather it was had and those who were against it lost. That's why they resorted to systematic censorship and criminal attacks on everyone else: their position simply couldn't survive actual debate.

Jameson is strongly implying here that email would somehow be better if it was frozen in time in 1991, with the same number of users - a platonic ideal of decentralisation in which the only participants are, uhm, the military, universities and corporations, who interconnect only with other similar institutions and only grant email accounts to employees. It's an elitist vision in which the only people who deserve email are nerds with PDP-11s, and everyone else gets to stick with paper letters.

Yeah, no. To paraphrase The Simpsons: Your ideas don't intrigue me and I wouldn't like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Email is an enormous success story because computer systems exist to be used. They aren't art. We as engineers may try to optimise various aspects within that constraint, like performance, usability and decentralisation (however it's defined), but those are means to the end: utility. Deciding that you have to sacrifice real world utility to preserve decentralisation is like classic joke about the man who manages to make a perfectly secure computer by never switching it on.

Email has evolved in the way it has because all industries do. Expectations rise, meeting the new bar requires specialisation. Bitcoin could have had a great future: most nodes would have been run by specialists and companies, just as Satoshi envisioned would happen, and a few nodes would have continued to be run by hobbyists and smaller operations, just like how people do in fact successfully run their own email servers today (Jameson asserts otherwise but he's wrong). It's investments by the big players that make that possible in fact.