Has anyone thought about the consequence of randomly picking a remailing path instead of using the same one?
what if the remailer flips a coin, choosing between final delivery and remailing through another of its ilk. "message delivery with probability one ..."
This is an excellent suggestion. I have to think about the mathematical properties some more, but a few spring to mind. Assume, for discussion, that there is constant probability of delivery at each hop, say p. First, the expected number of hops is 1/p. To see this just sum the following series. $ E(p) = \Sum_{n=1}^{\infinity} n p (p-1)^{n-1} $ Thus the syntax for routing can be extremely simple, just specifying the expected number of hops wanted. If you want to have guaranteed minimum delivery, you can manually route through a few hops, then randomize. Eric