-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I think the idea of a token has come up before. I think it is a good idea. The token should have some expiration information in it so the remailer need not keep it around forever (or it could just "forget" all token older than 3 months). Right now there is not much spare room in the Mixmaster headers. There are several ideas for improvements in Mixmaster that will require the adoption of an incompatible message format. I plan to collect them and implement them all at once. One of the ideas is an expiration date in the message to keep it from ever being replayed (even after the remailer expires its record of the message ID). -Lance At 7:43 AM 10/26/95, Adam Shostack wrote:

Lance Cottrell wrote:

| How open is the protocol? Is there and API for it? Does anyone know how big | the coins are? There will have to be room for one per header in Mixmaster. | Do they vary in size, or are all coins identical? There is so much stuff to | try to keep track of all at once! :/

If the coin is bigger than a Mix header has room for, does it have room for an arbitrary token?

I send a message to the mixmaster I'd like to use, containing a coin and a large arbitrary number. I then put that number in a list I maintain of the tokens I can spend with that mixmaster.

The mixmaster cashes the coin at once[1], and puts my number into a list of 'paid' tokens it will accept.

When I want to spend the token, I put that in the message header block. Since its smaller than the coin, its easier to put in the header than the coin.

This scheme also reduces mapability between the coin and the message, since they are not strongly correlated in time as they would be if they were included in the message. This seems to be a stronger win than the size benefit that caused me to suggest this.

[1] Other than the time mapping win, I could also see spending a few bucks at the start of each month to be able to use any mixmaster. The mixmasters would, by cashing my coins early, win on the float between the time they get my money and the time they provide service. Icing on the cake.

Adam

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