We have been debating payment systems for remailers under the following assumptions: a) Reliable remailers will have to justify professional management by making money for their owners. b) End-of-chain remailers will need to make money to cover for their legal expenses. c) Payment would limit abuse. I already countered the last point. Let me try to deal with the first two to conclude that many professionally run remailers may very well stay free or close to that for a long time: Remailers are only one of many kinds of businesses that have been described on this list. Others will include reputation markets, near-traditional banking systems, stamp issuers, certification agencies, data havens etc... But we have also seen that nearly all other forms of businesses already now cannot but run afoul of a tentacular law at some time or other. We have concluded that many of these businesses would migrate to cypherspace, hiding their locations, owners, books, assets and other information too dangerous to keep in the open. Each such organisation will generate lots of traffic, in part under control of whoever is trying to do business with it. So they are potentially easily traceable and subject to legal or violent consequences. A possible solution is of course for their sites to be remailers too. Lots of non-descript remailers, trading lots of encrypted traffic, a lot of it remailer management info and bogus filler traffic. When you are one of many, and people correspond with you only through limited traffic anonymous response blocks, then the remailers help you stay hidden by providing cover traffic. But for this to work you must consistently attract a lot of cover traffic through your remailer(s). If others undercut your stamp price, or best your reliability status, you are in trouble because traffic will migrate to other more competitive remailers, and you will be left dry on the sand with the task to generate believable cover traffic yourself. You are also competing with the cypherspace customers hiding their own personal traffic under cover of "everyone-a-remailer" remailers. It may well be much simpler for cypherbusinesses to stay competitive on the "middle" remailer market, even at a loss, and to transmit volumes of believable (because real) cover traffic. End-of-chain (or more precisely "clear-text") remailers can be expected to be a minority as, after all, they are only needed to post to public forums. Maybe these will charge a fee. For the others, the most and biggest "porn GIFs" go through (even for free), the better... However, large free remailers may then arise suspicion: There is little reason to run a heavy traffic remailer for free, apart from getting cover traffic. Competition may then settle at a small price, far from enough to keep the remailer running, but enough to not be too conspicuous. Or better, non-profit remailers may become ubiquitous, being used in part to provide cover traffic and in part to transfer money from the cypherspace businesses to cover for the cost of the computers and obvious living expenses. Between cypherbusinesses, everyone-a-remailer operations, and a few real non-profits, most remailing may stay close to free for a long time. Untraceable money will be useful for all kinds of things, but maybe not so much for remailing. Pierre. pierre@shell.portal.com