On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, dmolnar wrote:
Isn't this a description of Hawala?
Maybe. I regret I'm not familiar with Hawala. I'll go google it.
Gee, it's even in the cypherpunks archives. Sorry, everyone. Yes, as described sure sounds similar. The point of doing it over PayPal would just be to make it easy for people on this list to pay Nomen. Even though hawala works in the real world, I'm not so sure we could just start it and expect it to work here. One thing that came to mind while reading about it -- does it buy us anything in a MIX-net to separate control messages from payload messages? This came to mind because one of the descriptions of the hawala network seemed to imply that payment would come in from one source and then the name of the recipient would come in from another. The analogy in a MIX-net for e-mail would be having a message delivered to a MIX, and then later forwarding instructions for that message delivered by someone else. (said instructions identifying message by hash or something). Another way to look at this is putting delay in the hands of the client. Not clear to me that it helps; maybe make an adversary think a certain node is the final destination? I can't think of a MIX design off the top of my head which does this. Anyone else? something like this discussed way back when? -David