At 06:38 PM 9/27/97 -0400, Anonymous (Monty Cantsin) wrote:
The reason I want to attach ecash is to get good reliable service and to encourage many other people to offer good high quality remailing services. Let's a remailer operator can make $200/month by handling messages at 25 cents each. (That's 800 messages a month, hardly overwhelming.)
Let's assume you want to setup a remailer for profit. You could use a spare machine on your desktop and share a phone line part time by using a PPP connection. But I take it this is not what you are suggesting. I'm assuming you want a commercial quality service. You'll need a machine, colocation space, UPS power, a router to separate from the rest of the internal network, a phone line for complaints and administration, a domain name, and a person who can do programming, server administration, and administrative work, perhaps 20 hours per week. Machine $2,500 Router 800 Domain 100 ------ Startup costs $3,400 Colocation $ 700 Phone line 45 Salary 3,750 ------ Recurring costs $4,495 x 12 months = $53,940 Fixed costs $ 3,400 This makes an estimated business cost of $57,340 for one year, or $4,778 per month, or about $159 per day. based on 4,000 messages per day that gives a base cost per message of less than 4 cents. Actual operation costs would be higher, but even at triple that price, if there is a demand for the service (which I have my doubts) the 25 cent price would make a profit.
Free usually doesn't work very well, and it isn't working well now.
What about the free system does not seem to work well? A free remailer's lifespan even if shut down after a few months or a couple of years does not seem to be to much different from that of any other startup business. 4,000 messages per day on the cracker remailer is not based on the machine's capacity, but is based on actual total worldwide demand today. (at least this is about the highest per day count that cracker has had) I'd be interested in how you think any full time remailer like the Cracker service is inadequate and how making it a pay service would resolve this.
Given the existing infrastructure, per item pricing is the easiest to implement while retaining full anonymity. Digicash and Mark Twain Bank already did the hard work! They already have a bank set up!
I'll admit that I really have not used DigiCash. Maybe someone here can tell me some experiences with it. I found two problems. Last I checked, the bank account reuired to have digicash had a service fee of about $10 per month. Secondly, when I participated in the cybercash trials, I changed ISPs and was never able to get my money transferred from the old email account to the new one. Their customer service wasn't able to help me get it done. Can anyone else tell me about better experiences with ecash? -- Robert Costner Phone: (770) 512-8746 Electronic Frontiers Georgia mailto:pooh@efga.org http://www.efga.org/ run PGP 5.0 for my public key