[miloignis]

I have a radical solution - it should not be possible to contact someone unsolicited.

All phone calls, SMS, emails, and instant messages should be blocked unless the other party is in my contacts or I have reached out to them first (plus opt-in contact from contacts of contacts, etc). Ideally, cryptographically verified.

I would argue this is the real solution to spam and scamming - why on earth are random people allowed to contact me without my consent? Phone numbers or email addresses being all you need to contact me should be an artifact of an earlier time, just like treating social security numbers as secret.

I realize this isn't super practical to transition existing systems to (though spam warnings on email and calls helps, I suppose, and maybe it could be made opt-in). I dearly hope the next major form of communication works this way, and we eventually leave behind the old methods.

Also, SMS shouldn't be used for 2FA anyway.

[cjmoran]

I have an even more radical solution. The real root of the problem is that we use this "money" concept to represent value. If money didn't exist there wouldn't be any reason to steal, hack, or scam.

What do we replace it with? Haha, idk man. How about water? More difficult to hoard in ridiculous quantities, better spend it before it evaporates, and it occasionally falls from the sky (UBI). That's what I call a liquid asset!

[miloignis]

For sure, getting rid of money would help if we had an alternative.

I am actually pitching an alternative though that doesn't seem that out there to me. I'm honestly surprised it isn't already an option in mainstream messengers (or at least Signal).

[wilsonnb3]

How are you going to reach out to someone first if all communication is blocked because they don't already know you?

[miloignis]

Ah, I should have elaborated a bit more - the strict solution is out-of-band only, namely in person or allowing contacts-of-contacts to reach out.

I think practically you'd want to be able to create time-limited, otherwise uncorrelated invite tokens/addresses that you could freely give out and deactivate later.