-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Alex de Joode wrote:
: Then Mr. Cantsin seemed to go back to the all you need are some : spare parts theory of remailer operation. Enormous profits of $200 : per month, or even $5,000 per year. Well, Cracker handles close to : 25% of worldwide remailer traffic of it's kind[1]. And it's not : much. I would say this is due mainly to the user interface. : Making remailers more difficult to use by adding Ecash is not going : to increase traffic significantly.
Basicly most of those 3400 message cracker handles daily are cover trafic,...
How do you know this? If the remailer network works properly, you should not have any knowledge of this at all.
...a big chunk of the rest is from people "playing" around with the remailer, then there are those few that needs some form of anonimity so they can inform a mailinglist/postmaster/complaints department, and then maybe once a week or so there is that message that would be paid for if remailers were for pay.
This is like saying we should only encrypt messages which are really secret. You should encrypt all of your messages - then nobody can tell when you have a secret. If you are arguing that nobody wants their security, I hope you are on the wrong list. Many of us have gone to great effort to get some security and to create tools for other people's security. It is hard to believe that it's worth a few nickels and dimes to us to expose our traffic to Big Brother or anybody else.
So in short, if remailers were to be paid for, traffic would halt.
Only if implemented in a foolish way. Look, there's no need to say "my remailer is now a cash only remailer no others need apply". You can say, "people who pay cash get better service." Or even, "people who pay cash have a higher probability of getting better service." While I can't speak for the other remailer users, I certainly have no problem shoving a little money towards the remailers. Like many who read this list, I am not poor. I would like to be able to help defray the expense of my traffic. Hopefully other cypherpunks with jobs will feel the same way. The important thing is to get things rolling. Are the remailer operators going to get rich overnight? Maybe not. But we can definitely get some market activity going and start generating some real remailer traffic. Let me now note that this dialogue has been somewhat surreal. Am I really begging the cypherpunks to use ecash? It's a good idea to get ecash in now because it will be harder to incorporate payment methods later when there is more infrastructure to change. (Look at the mixmaster problem. It can't (according to Lucky) be used for ecash without modification.) However, it appears that part of the problem with the remailers is that nobody uses them. We should be making a concerted effort to do so, and not just for cpunk traffic. We should use them for everything. It won't take that many people to reduce the message delays substantially. It will also advertise the remailer network to our friends who may not yet be cypherpunks. The tools exist to do this. It is somewhat ironic that we complain that Joe Sixpack won't use tools that we will not (or even cannot) use ourselves. Monty Cantsin Editor in Chief Smile Magazine http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNC/9MZaWtjSmRH/5AQGsgQf+N+EebBi8gSgAt9u7KlIjhRCj9KfWym1H VQjxEkJ8Q+8n/TE2PSc90RRm2OKFtUayuGtVRtGakkvL3t009r8JLWAe3YLmbGNB EkuvuvHT56/zkbcA6r9NeW5V7NsuYOsLHp34loaK76EURQJv6YhsFfvhzelg6kID VCk+PlKQnaKAj2i3irGNwPJmM4iDB5K/0/GwjVRuULGVYF1xxIrJ45823F/FwjHA ERxu8qZV0lmK3GaTYAKd5GNY1O7w/UWQ0xzBvXa+xEjssqbXqRE7mnG6hwVxyU8T JZYFLjYeHkxDIJvA5+syNDzV/+iOklTp9FMd0ODT7TWxfBQtKzamCw== =RQr+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----