At 8:15 PM 01/09/95, L. McCarthy wrote:
- - From what I've seen so far, accepting payment would seem to make anonymous _operation_ of a remailer well nigh impossible. Anonymous operation with revenue would require a corresponding level of anonymity in the transfer of money. Until such time as conversion of funds from a net-liquid form to a conventional form becomes unnecessary (or just commonplace ?), financial traffic analysis can't adequately be thwarted. All this bodes ill, IMHO, for the prospect of guerrilla or quasi-guerrilla remailers charging for service any time soon. There's just too much infrastructure to which they'd need to be tied at the moment.
Well, that's certainly true, for the reasons you gave. Right now, it's enough of a chore just to get non-anonymously run remailers charging for operation. And it's not easy to set up an effective guerilla remailer either. I think the set of tools and environments that make it possible to run a remailer anonymously and charge for it certainly aren't going to exist until the component problems of charging for a remailer at all and running a guerilla remailer at all are made easy. I think once both of those problems are dealt with, it won't be too dificult to deal with the combined problem of guerilla for-pay remailers. Or at least, exactly what things are neccesary to solve that combined problem will be obvious.