Digital Postage (fwd)

17 Dec 2003

      Hi,

Forwarded message:
...
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 1997 23:18:02 -0700
From: Tim May 
Subject: Digital Postage
...
At 8:56 PM -0700 9/26/97, Jim Choate wrote:
The point is that some remailers will remail for free.
And consequences will be:

 -  in general intermittent reliability with boxes going up and down
    like yo-yo's. I suspect it will be like BBS's were in the early
    80's when everyone put one up for two weeks.

 -  limited traffic bandwidth, why would some kid or hobbyist be
    willing to spend (for example) $1k/month to keep a T1 going so
    others can use it.

 -  parties who would not use a fully commercial site because they
    don't want to pay for it will flock to such servers. Because
    they loose nothing if it goes down they have no reason to
    consider the impact of their actions on themselves.
...
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.

 -  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? What about intermediate
    remailers and their desire to get a cut of the pie?
...
What _others_ think is not really too important.
Really? Tell that to the DA when some bozo from the local Scientoligist shows
up and starts harrassing you with legal actions. No, CyberPromo is a clear
indication that what others think can in fact sink your boat no matter how
big a bilge pump you might have.
...
It seems fairly obvious that some form of metered service--remailing for a
fee--is likely to evolve.
It must evolve or else we won't have anonymous remailers. People in general
are not going to build these sorts of systems out of some philanthropic
streak. Even if they did, it is equaly obvious they won't be reliable for
long-term use.
...
Charityware remailers will work for a while, so
long as the usage is low and the expectations are even lower. But
eventually those with an actual need for anonymous communication will pay
for the service. How much, and when, and in what form, all this remains to
emerge.
Agreed. However, I do not believe that anonymous remailers have a
sufficiently parallel structure with physical mail to carry that system
over. When the Austin Cpunks had kourier up about a year and a half ago
it became clear that financing such an enterprise is not trivial. 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.
...
I call this metered usage "digital postage" because that's what it is. It
has to be untraceable, obviously, and so some form of blinded cash, or
blinded token (e.g., "use once tokens") has to be used.
The problem is that it shuts out people like one of my customers who still
uses a 2400 modem, even after I offer to give her a spare 14.4 that I have.
While I can appreciate the desire to expunge such luddite thinking as a
gear-head but as  a business I don't care about their philosophy unless it
leads me to their purse strings.

If remailers are going to work as a business we can't turn our back on
traditional payment mechanisms. The problem, as I see it, is that there is
no clear mechanism for me to write a normal check and have that turn
into a anon account easily without involving 3rd parties and their
concommittent extra costs - further increasing the end-user cost to do
business. There better be a reason or they won't pay for long.

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