Re: Remailers and ecash
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Matthew Ghio wrote:
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.
Good point. I appreciated the following detailed discussion. But, I disagree on a few points.
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.
An economist was walking down the street and saw a hundred dollar bill. The engineer with him snapped it up. Later, the engineer asked why his friend hadn't taken the money. "Well, the economist explained, I knew that it couldn't really be there because if it was, somebody would have gotten it."
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.
Think of ecash as "remailer credits", only somebody else has gone to the trouble of solving all of the hard problems (including infrastructure), and you can get remailer credits by doing any productive activity for anybody in the world who will pay you in dollars. Some people will get ecash (i.e., "remailer credits") by running remailers. Others will get it by working for Microsoft and converting part of their income to ecash. Ecash suits the bill perfectly and it is available and working right now. It is actually easier to use ecash than to write some sort of "remailer credit" system from scratch.
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.
Again, there seems to be this idea that it's hard to get set up using ecash. If it were, long discussions about how likely it would be to work with the remailers might be worthwhile. But, the fact is, it isn't hard to get a remailer to accept ecash. So, we should get a bunch of remailers accepting it and see how things go. It should also be quite easy to modify existing client software to put ecash into chained messages. Consider premail. Raph would have to add a keyword to his remailer description table which means "accepts 25 cents ecash". Premail could have a command line option to add ecash. The ecash itself could come from a file of blocks of ASCII ecash made out to cash, which are automatically clipped by premail and then pasted into the message. Easy, right? Nobody even has to interact with the ecash application from the program. So where do these files full of blocks of ASCII ecash going to come from? People with ecash accounts can generate them by hand or by having a program call the ecash software to generate them. Then they can give or sell them to their less fortunate friends who don't have an ecash account. If you don't use up all the ecash ASCII blocks, they can be redeposited. It's that easy. It will work. Monty Cantsin Editor in Chief Smile Magazine http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNC66rpaWtjSmRH/5AQHVEAf+MZai7O4vzm18BQy8NDjRFzQcvGT8YT7Q lCdY8+NcTIKntsdoLET/u3nZIq8zv3CLKSQMJDwYpBXmgmQtLL4pOct+6noDa94a qTdPO+yqG0LMjBSPPfN0l5f1kggcWQcAHPdLgBu32NQRtQOwFT9sNky9Jb53Vwce 4UGDfZ96DplBVQXS3MP6v7rf0jRH5qnRUAfFLobrtmebDAG20X4OnoFNmbTYeUTw jY5CA7HvKClHHuUUf3p9f03RLq/KdRJ0pegsxx7mGNv0LU78f6yY+olaeyM31suk tq9mDJbJBwCMuIq9x7oHrOFcrifHLMGoll9vPdRZe+MTYxUHV3xpFg== =IPLp -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
At first I thought some of the stuff Monty Cantsin was discussing was interesting, but it has gotten out of hand. I've asked the question before, Why would remailer operators want to accept Ecash? After seeing the conflicting messages coming from Mr. Catsin, I to rephrase it, why does *Mr Catsin* want remailer operators to use Ecash? The first answer I got was so that remailer reliability could increase. The theory as I understood it was that remailers were run like a hobby, not a business, so the money would be an incentive to bring in professionalism. So I proposed, and documented, that the minimum level to achieve this would be a $50K investment over a year's time. This is in fact, more or less what the Cracker remailer takes to run. Most of the resources are donated in some way, but this is their equivalent retail value. Even so, with Monty's pricing structure and Cracker's current level of traffic it would be enormously profitable. Then Mr. Cantsin seemed to go back to the all you need are some spare parts theory of remailer operation. Enormous profits of $200 per month, or even $5,000 per year. Well, Cracker handles close to 25% of worldwide remailer traffic of it's kind[1]. And it's not much. I would say this is due mainly to the user interface. Making remailers more difficult to use by adding Ecash is not going to increase traffic significantly.
I recommend that people start pricing at a quarter per message per hop
In my opinion, and I've been known to be wrong, this is a seriously messed up comment. A quarter per message is too much, much less a quarter per hop. A price of 1/100 of a penny per message is closer to a proper valuation. But the problem here is in the pricing model. It should not be transactional unless to encourage the very casual user. A pricing model should be flat rate. One price for a month, or even a year's service. The net is based on a peering price structure, not an inter-lata structure. Trying to compute or add charges at each hop is against the nature of information flow for the net.
We are talking about how to get a working payment system up for remailers which gets us great service and provides privacy and security.
The point I have never gotten past is how you expect a payment system to change the level of service? The next point I'm still shaking my head over is what about remailer services is not up to your standards? The only thing I have heard you mention is latency, which is a feature programmed into the remailers. If anything, people would pay to add latency, not to take latency away.
Remailers are used by a small highly specialized market of perhaps a few hundred people.
There is some truth in this statement. But there are also remailers run by a variety of companies such as hotmail, juno, and the like. They encompass millions of users. Millions of users who want a remailer, but will not tolerate the level of entry required for a Type-I or Mixmaster remailer. Until client software can be improved and made as easy to use as an integrated spelling checker, the "advanced" remailers will have no true market share. (Oh, I forgot. Most of the world uses email clients without integrated spell checkers.) FOOTNOTES: [1] Cracker handles 27% of worldwide traffic based on adding all the stats found at www.jpunix.com, though I would assume some remailers are not on this list. -- 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
Robert A. Costner wrote:
At first I thought some of the stuff Monty Cantsin was discussing was interesting, but it has gotten out of hand. I've asked the question before, Why would remailer operators want to accept Ecash? After seeing the conflicting messages coming from Mr. Catsin, I to rephrase it, why does *Mr Catsin* want remailer operators to use Ecash?
Cantsin feels that the remailers are too slow or too unreliable, and believes that by offering a suitable financial reward, he can induce someone to provide him with a more reliable service. That may be so, but this analysis neglects to account for a fundamental issue: Anonymity is one thing which you cannot have without also giving it to others. In order for a remailer operator to afford himself the benefits of anonymous communication by establishing and using a remailer, he must allow others to use the remailer also. This is why it is economical (for some people) to operate free remailers. It has been suggested that it would be possible to increase the number of remailers by providing financial incentives to the remailer operators in the form of a small fee per message relayed. While that tactic might achieve its stated purpose, it would simeultaneously reduce the number of remailer users to those who were willing to pay the fee. This decrease in the number of users will serve to decrease the degree of anonymity provided. Consumers are unlikely to pay more money for a service which provides less anonymity, thus making pay-per-message remailers uneconomical. That's the problem. It has nothing to do with which payment system is used. The problem is the economics of the proposed pricing structure. Monty Cantsin wrote:
The ecash itself could come from a file of blocks of ASCII ecash made out to cash, which are automatically clipped by premail and then pasted into the message. Easy, right? Nobody even has to interact with the ecash application from the program.
So where do these files full of blocks of ASCII ecash going to come from? People with ecash accounts can generate them by hand or by having a program call the ecash software to generate them. Then they can give or sell them to their less fortunate friends who don't have an ecash account.
If that's how you want to do it, then just have the remailer make up some ASCII blocks that it will accept as payment, and sell them to people who sell them to their friends. In fact I think Karl Barrus ran a remailer with this setup a few years ago. The question is, what's the point?
participants (3)
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ghio＠temp0120.myriad.ml.org -
nobody＠REPLAY.COM -
Robert A. Costner