First Prize Winner (Blockchain Track - Gnosis) - InOut Hackathon 4.0
Spam prevention is costly. According to a study in 2012 by American Economic Association, it costs the world $50 billion and earns the spammers about $50 million. This is one of the more modest estimates. The study also reported the cause to be the ease of sending spams, and suggested a heavier negative penalty would do the world good.
The idea is based on market predictions which involves betting. The sender "bets" that the email he sends is NOT a spam. The receiver reads the email and bets accordingly if the email is spam or not. If both parties agree, it is not a spam, we have to do nothing and we save on AI costs (AI is trained using ML and checks if the email is really spam or not). However, if the receiver bets that what he received is a spam, after a third party AI (oracle) has verified, the receiver wins the bet and the sender loses money. Some money also goes to the AI for the work it does.
We used the Gnosis platform to create mini prediction markets with two participants(email sender and receiver) and outcomes. This is based on the ethereum technology.This facilitates our _ betting _.
All of us were new to the idea of blockchain and prediction markets using ethereum, and it took some time to digest those concepts. Moreover, we had to spend a lot of time convincing ourselves that the protocol we have described works, and any misuse (bug) that we could think of is actually a benefit to the society (feature).
- learnt and implemented blockchain/ethereum technology
- came upon an idea we could not push ourselves to imagine outside a hackathon
The technology is already there, and is easy to use, thanks to APIs like Gnosis. We would only want as many people as we can to know about the protocol and realize it's true potential.