On Tue, Dec 24, 2013 at 5:09 AM, danimoth <danimoth@cryptolab.net> wrote:
A problem which could rise is the 'incentive' for peers to continuosly providing bandwidth and disk space to store messages. I'm a simple dude, with a mailflow of ~5 email per day. Why I should work for you, with your ~10000 mail per day for all your mailing list?
I think this is one of many design choices to be made. Extra bandwidth is hard to avoid, unless the topology is point(sender)-to-point(recipient). Yet with that, there is no effort made to hide who is physically talking to who. We want to try to defeat this type of analysis, so we can't be simply point-to-point. ie: bittorrent and today's email are point-to-point, no multihop. Next is storage (mix) vs. latency (tunnels). This seems less clear to me when up against analysis. Filling circuits (tunnels) with chaff seems interesting. And with deliverey directly to your recipient over some tunnel circuit, you don't have to build in complex message redundancy protocols (more storage float outstanding) to ensure your message 100% gets there when 90% of the nodes go offline taking your stored message with them. You also get direct realtime delivery confirmation too.
Somewhere on this list (or p2p-hackers?) there was a post of mine, regardings an economic incentive between peers, which could be a solution, but as always technical problems arose, like pricing the services and a fair exchange between peers.
The question arises, how does one provide free anonymous transport to those anons who simply can't pay because they are anon? How do you 'get users' when the mentality is 'for free'? Bittorrent/Tor are free and seem to work ok. Though it's also probably not unreasonable to suggest (and harder to enforce) that you get 1:1 what resources you donate to it. ie: I need to push 1GiB this month, so I need to provision at minimum 1+Nx1GiB to do that... 1 for me, Nx1 for the net due to my use (where N is some impact ratio inherent in the design of the net, such as number hops.)