Thank you, I didn't realize it was that well-known, it's the first time I heard about it. (It seems I'm unsubscribed from cypherpunks, as I haven't received even my own email.) Marcel

-----Original Message----- From: Pawe3 Krawczyk [mailto:kravietz@aba.krakow.pl] Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2005 8:23 PM To: Marcel Popescu Cc: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: Re: WebMoney

On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 01:20:46PM +0300, Marcel Popescu wrote:

...

Second, has anyone seen http://www.wmtransfer.com/ ? Ok, it's Russian, so not a lot of trust in there... on the other hand, it DOES mean it's unlikely to bow to US pressure.

Haven't used it personally yet but in Russia it seems to be equally popular as PayPal in the West. This implies that people trust it. The only problem is that when you would like to use it from the West you'd need to find an exchange and most of them are located in Russia and Ukraine.

-- Pawe3 Krawczyk, Kraksw, Poland ABA http://www.aba.krakow.pl/ ul. Bociana 22a, 30-230 Kraksw tel. (0-12) 4158781

On Wed, 2005-04-20 at 19:40 -0700, James A. Donald wrote:

The fact that webmoney takes security so seriously suggests to me that they are honest - but, of course, the fact that they are russian suggests .....

This isn't the middle of the Cold War anymore. I don't think they are that dishonest, especially after some of the crap the US government has pulled in the last few years. -- Shawn K. Quinn

On Fri, 2005-04-22 at 13:44 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote:

Are you continuing those dots correctly? I assumed they were leading to the words "Russian mob", which has become quite the powerful force in Brooklyn these days.

Even if they are the Russian mob, they're a lot more trustworthy than some US-based corporations. -- Shawn K. Quinn

On Thu, Apr 21, 2005 at 09:15:06AM -0500, Shawn K. Quinn wrote:

...

The fact that webmoney takes security so seriously suggests to me that they are honest - but, of course, the fact that they are russian suggests ..... This isn't the middle of the Cold War anymore. I don't think they are that dishonest, especially after some of the crap the US government has pulled in the last few years.

It's not middle but it's definitely closer to Cold War now than in early 90's, if you look at recent Putin's actions. I still have doubts about using WM but next time I'll give it a try as it's cheaper than Western Union and wire transfers. Technically the system seems trustworthy but that's not enough - any Russia-based money system can be shut down in one day if someone in Moscow decides so. If you look at 90's "denomination", then banks "bankrupting" last year and Lukoil case then you understand why people don't want to send their money through Russia. To Russia (like in my case) - maybe... WM seems to be partially based on Ukraine which slightly gives more confidence after last elections. I hope Ukraine sees this potential. -- Pawe3 Krawczyk, Kraksw, Poland ABA http://www.aba.krakow.pl/ ul. Bociana 22a, 30-230 Kraksw tel. (0-12) 4158781

-- On 22 Apr 2005 at 16:20, Bill Stewart wrote:

Last time I wanted to use an online gold system, I used pecunix as the currency and goldage.net as the payment handler. That was partly because of the fees for the size of transactions I was doing (for small transactions, the minimum fee is more important than the percentage), but partly for convenience - one way to pay Goldage in the US is to go to a bank where they have an account and make a deposit - Wells Fargo is one of their more widespread banks.

A procedure that was, of course, anonymous. You probably made a deposit in cash. In the cypherpunk vision, internet transactions should be blinded, so that the adversary cannot do connection analysis. If Ann pays Bob, the adversary can detect this, and perhaps suspect that Ann actually is Bob. We do however have anonymous deposits and withdrawals from internet transaction services, and weakly nymous providers of accounts. Many foreign banks go through the motions of verifying foreign account holders true names, but not all them try all that hard. E-gold goes through the motions, and sporadically enforces its acceptable use policy, which requires you to submit true name information, but really does not try at all for the most part, unless the shit hits the fan. Pecunix does not require true name information - merely an email account at which you are capable of receiving mail - preferably PGP mail. WebMoney does not even require an email account. If you use their classic security system, their client just generates what I assume is a private key on your computer, and that is your identifier. Though these systems permit governments to do connection analysis, most governments are not terribly interested in doing connection analysis on foreigners, and governments do not work well with other governments. Not that I suggest that any of this is an adequate substitute for true Chaumian blinded transactions, but it is a substitute, and also foreshadows demand for such transactions, and a profitable business model based on such transactions. The real obstacle is that 99% of customers cannot understand WebMoney's security, or use Pecunix's PGP based interface. If you try to sell them Chaumian blinded transactions, the average mobster is going to be seriously boggled. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG /rjlkisXJqOtx4zr4jGWmDeW6blJQ6vawOmxFssX 4BiPlDhZsJ7G0P6TTWXEwYNbNs1ylu/oofbIhlUrv

On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 01:20:46PM +0300, Marcel Popescu wrote:

...

Second, has anyone seen http://www.wmtransfer.com/ ? Ok, it's Russian, so not a lot of trust in there... on the other hand, it DOES mean it's unlikely to bow to US pressure.

Any online payment service that has a convenient mechanism for Americans to add funds has at least one new potential market - cigarettes by mail from low-tax jurisdictions such as Indian reservations. The Feds recently bullied the credit card companies into not accepting payments for cigarettes (probably affects Paypal indirectly as well), so all of a sudden there's a market for something beyond the privacy services. Of course, the kinds of people who smoke cigarettes are not necessarily the kinds of people who are good at exploring privacy-protection services intelligently (:-), but a couple hundred bucks a month to avoid nicotine fits can be enough motivation for some people. If you can believe wmtransfer's statistics, they're probably getting a few thousands of dollars a day on their deposit/withdrawal fees, (if the transactions are denominated in rubles) or a few tens of thousands if they're in dollars/euros. That would imply that a cigarette company would probably be safe risking a couple of days' float using their payment system, because it's almost always worth more money to the payment company to stay in business than to rip off all of their accounts payable and fold. (Probably not worth risking a month's float, especially if the payment system were connected to the US Russian Mafia, who could coordinate ordering a large quantity of cigarettes for resale with absconding with the payments, but a couple of days should be safe enough.) It's certainly worthwhile for cigarette companies to deal with most of the more reputable online e-money companies. The one I'd actually be most worried about is e-gold - they're probably the biggest of them, and one of the most convenient, but the phishers aggressively go for their customers, and they don't do enough digital authentication for Joe Average Smoker to know if he's being phished. They could probably fix that, but of course any other company that made a significant dent in cigarette sales would also become a phishing target as well.