Forwarded message:
Date: Sat, 27 Sep 1997 19:18:01 -0400 From: Anonymous <anon@anon.efga.org> Subject: Re: Digital Postage (fwd)
Jim Choate wrote:
[Tim May wrote: ed.]
Some will remail for some form of digital postage. Some will charge too little, some too much. Some will adjust their prices based on market/customer reactions. And so on.
And there are a couple of problems with this:
- it relies on a mechanism not currently in place to interface with other more traditional financial institutions. Which I might add don't look upon this as the most trustworthy mechanism.
Ecash is in place right now.
True, but there are only 3 systems and it is not clear at all which will dominate and be used by all parties. Also there is the issue of security in regards to maintaning anonymity when there is such a small pool of parties to use. Doesn't take a genius to figure out where to hang out and watch the action.
- how do you charge for the postage, per submission? What happens when I want to send 10,000 parties the email. Do I still pay the digi-postage equivalent of $.35? Or do I pay $350.00?
This is easily worked out between the remailer operator and the customer.
How? There is certainly no clear mechanism in place. Does the customer contact each remailer operator prior to sending the traffic, thus opening up N opportunities for anonymity cracking. If the operators agree to a system how do we get there? Is it time to have a anon-remailer conference to settle on distributed payment schemes?
Were I running a remailer, I would charge $350.00. As a customer, I would not see this as unreasonable.
Unless it is pertty serious nobody is going to pay such a fee just to send an email around. The problem I see is one of scale. The infrastructure for handling physical mail is very 'bulky' and requires a lot infrastructure. Email on the other hands effectively rides on the back of an existing Internet infrastructure for nearly free. Because of the historicaly low cost for email this would tend to in general indicate a low market value on anon remailers. This means the cost per msg. must be very low (the aforementioned micro payments) and hence leads to two realizations: - we need a lot of remailers - we need a lot of traffic to invoke economy of scales It is clear that neither of these can exist without the other, meaning this puts us at a chicken-or-the-egg type situation.
I suspect that anon remailers will operate by something similar to ISP's where when the account is setup some fee is paid for use and not on a use by use based fee. The problem with that is it creates a 'concrete' link between the party desiring anonymity and the remailer operator that may be exploited in some (most? all?) cases to break that anonymity.
The way to break the concrete link is with blinded credentials. Of course, ecash already provides this feature without the hassle of opening an account with a remailer operator, writing and deploying new software, etc. etc.
True, but it doesn't have the rest of the infrastructure (some detailed above) in place. To get this to work will take more than a couple dozen operators swapping some digi-cash between themselves. There are entirely too many infrastructure and legal issues for remailers to be any sort of profitable long-term business that will attract non-techie investors. If you know of some investors please let them know of me as I am very interested in commercial remailers (anon & not). ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there | | be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. | | | | -Alan Greenspan- | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http:// www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage@ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|