(Sorry, Cypherpunks, for the ">" in this message--I made the classic mistake of sending this message only to Fen, hence this forwarded form. I'll try to watch this in the future!)
Fen Labalme believes Eric's "penny a hop" is still too expensive, especially for "the poor":
Geeez, Eric! I'd think a penny a hop would be a pretty high price... And given that most messages go through two hops, then you'd really be giving your 2 cents worth!
Note that there can be about 50 cypherpunks messages a day -- if each went through 2 hops at $0.10 / hop, as you proposed, that would be $10 / day in revenues for the remailers. Seems like a lot to me.
I would support the idea if I felt that the system would quiet the flame wars, but I think rather it would simply quiet the poor...
Fen
You don't have to support the idea, Fen, you just have to open your own remailing node! If you think you can do it more cheaply--perhaps subsidizing the costs from your other income, or perhaps just doing it as charity--you are completely free to do so.
The "liquidity" of remailer hops (with the "Mark V" software that handles the grunge automatically) will be quite interesting to see. Some will go for minimum cost (one cheap hop), others will route messages through dozens of hops.
Services will arise which "rate" the quality of remailers, in terms of pricing, security, latency, message sizes accepted, past experiences, etc.
Bandwidths are increasing so rapidly and computer hardware is getting so cheap, that I doubt even the poorest of the poor, in the U.S. at least, will be unable to send these kinds of messages. The costs of transmission are just so trivial compared to other costs that even poor people routinely pay.
(Whether the poor and downtrodden will _want_ to participate in this Brave New World is another matter. My guess is they will.)
-Tim