Seems to me like a straightforward economic analysis. Rates a remailer operator will charge reflect his cost plus. If the rates become too high,
the remailer will go out of business. If customers perceive their privacy is in danger because remailers are going bankrupt and the cloud is shrinking, the remaining remailers will lose revenue and, in extremis, again go out of business. Assuming that all users are using the network roughly equally and therefore paying roughly the same, this suggests there's a critical number of users necessary to keep a for-profit network afloat. But change the assumption about paying equally, and the critical number may approach one. "A small number of high-paying remailer customers" could bankroll the remailer network by providing direct subsidies to the remailer operators or giving out free can-be-used-for-remailing-only tokens to anyone who asks. There might be better ways to do this, but it's late at night and I'm getting pretty tired. But it seems like "yes" is the easy answer to your question. -Declan << Straightforward economic analysis,how refreshing! From our resident comped,bottom feeding scribbler. If its true Amazon just turned a profit then the strong possibility exists that the 1st strong and trusted remailer will eventually do the same.The need for remailing should tend to exponential to anyone with a little imagination.A lot of people right now are looking for a new Hawala,others for spam and AP,other horsemen type uses and counters to the threats they pose.The AP threat to capitalism as we know it should not be underestimated as also the threat to infrastructure from hungry mobs,collapse of govts not prepared for,etc.The dynamic effects and turbulence created could easily tear the large nodes to bits.Slow but steady with distrib and P-P is agent Faustines bet and Ill take her up on it.The fate of the earth might come down to a few decent secret agents leaking us info and possibly taking direct action against insane attempts to start ww4.Its late in our participation in mass extinction events,Im getting tired as well.Say goodnight to joshua.