Declan McCullagh writes:
I don't mean to take issue with much of what Anonymous writes, but some of the examples mentioned can be taken care of adequately by existing payment systems.
Using Amazon's payment system (they have two types, voluntary and pay-for-content), a webmaster can charge as low as $1, I believe, for content, and Paypal is another option.
Naturally, they don't do micropayments, and they don't offer the type of anonymity that other systems do, but the early-cypherpunk-archive- editing project, for instance, wouldn't require anon payments in ha'pennies either.
On November 13, you wrote to anon poster Nomen Nescio:
(If you really wanted to do something that might be useful, you'd pick the more interesting threads from the dawn of the list, insert them into a good search utility, and make that available for searching and .tar.gz downloading.')
Supposing you and others were willing to pay Nomen a modest sum for this service, how could you do so using Paypal or Amazon, and allow him to retain his anonymity? An alternative solution is barter. Nomen could agree to search certain years of archives, or certain topics, in exchange for other people working on other parts of the project, for example. Information barter can be performed while retaining anonymity. Maybe systems to facilitate barter could be developed if anonymous cash remains out of reach.