At 3:18 AM -0400 9/27/97, Anonymous wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Just out of a curiousity, why is it that no remailers accept ecash? (This is not a jibe at remailer operators or authors of remailer software. I am really curious if this is a "didn't get to it yet" sort of thing, or if there's something hard about it.)

One item which has been missing is an accessible API. (The Digicash merchant software is, I believe, designed for online use only.) This need is about to be fulfilled. Another item is a service to sell/redeem ecash w/o need of a bank account and supporting client software. This too is about to become available. --Steve

At 03:18 AM 9/27/97 -0400, Anonymous (Monty Cantsin) wrote:

Just out of a curiousity, why is it that no remailers accept ecash?

The brutally simple way to do this would be to generate an ecash certificate, made out to cash, and tack it at the beginning of a message which is then encrypted for the remailer.

The answer to your question may be to first recast your questions and ask why would someone want to attach ecash? I assume you are trying to "pay" for the email you send. This goes against the general model of the internet. Unlike the phone company, the net peers freely with no interconnection charges, so inter lata charges do not have to be tracked and collected. This allows for a flat rate pricing scheme. For remailers, this flat rate is generally zero dollars, i.e. free. There are remailers of various types who offer services for a charge of some sort. This is generally a flat rate fee, either per month, or per year. There is likely no desire to price on a per item basis. If there were, I would think it would be in the millicent range of pricing. If I were to set up a for pay remailing system, I would prefer to have a per month, or per year fee. This is more for the nym model of remailer. I assume you mean the Type-I such as you are using now. It would be interesting to setup as a test, but I don't see there would be any market for it. -- 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

Adam Back wrote:

I think someone did write the code. I think it was Sameer, and I think he ran a remailer with this feature for a while. I expect the code is on the berkeley ftp site somewhere.

Yes, it was a nymserver (omega.c2.org) where the user paid up front per month per nym, and then for traffic over a certain amount. Lucky Green wrote:

You certainly could use DigiCash's software with Type 1 remailers. Though why anybody would want to pay for a service as insecure as Type 1 remailers is beyond me. Type 1 remailers should be removed from service.

Furthermore, the barrier to entry is too high for the consumer. All these problems are about to be solved by third party software. Perhaps then we will see for-pay remailers.

What people often forget is that these structures tend to evolve thru incremental changes rather than the immediate adoption of entirely new paradigms. The 'barrier to entry', is often the deciding factor. omega.c2.org was a failure because, despite having features which (nearly) everyone agreed were desirable, the up-front cost was too high. Shortly thereafter, I started a nymserver which, despite having lower security and fewer features, featured a relatively low barrier to entry. This nymserver was so popular that it became the basis for all the current nymservers. Type-1 remailers were (and are) useful because they provided a system which could be operated with low initial investment. After providing a proof-of-concept, they became the basis for PGP-enhanced remailers, latency and reordering experiments, reply blocks, and finally mixmaster. Various anonymous message pools were tried, and failed. alt.anonymous.messages worked because most people already have a newsreader. Same goes for blind ecash, DC-nets, secret-shared message pools, etc. Despite our conceptual ability to describe the technology that we want, we too often forget the cost of building the infrastructure to support it. So, assuming that for-pay remailers are the goal, how do we get there? If attaching chaum-cash to remailer messages were the answer, everyone would be doing it. I think we need to look at the situation at a more basic level. Money can be defined as the lowest common denominator thing of value shared by the greatest number of people. (Does this describe Mark Twain accounts? No.) So, how else might one pay for remailer usage? Setting up your own remailer is the obvious answer, but there are others, such as selling cpu-cycles. One potential scenario is "I'll let you use my remailer if you let me use yours," where people earn remailer credits by remailing other people's messages. These remailer credits allow one to send anonymous messages via other remailers. Once these remailer-credits become sufficiently valuable, they can be sold using whatever monetary system is popular at the time. Another potential scenario is to assume that a.a.m is going to continue to grow until it becomes unwieldy. Then people will have to pay someone to store-and-forward the messages, or split it into smaller pools for which people can provide their own support by running small news servers on their machines. Both of the above scenarios provide the desired end, which is that people pay for their remailer usage, and neither involves the (unlikely) model where people attach digicash to their remailer messages using the current system.