Latency Costs of Anonymity

[Wei Dai]

On Sat, 7 Jan 1995, Timothy C. May wrote:

> The good news is that many of the messages that people want
> anonymity for are *text* files, e.g., offers of services,
> controversial data or opinions, etc. 
> 
> There's a kind of tradeoff in size and urgency. To wit, it is seldom
> "urgent" that a 1 MB or 100 MB or whatever file get through. (Sorry I
> can't draw my favorite little diagram here showing the space of
> messages, with "urgency" and "size" as the axes.)

The points Tim makes here are quite good.  However, I'm more concerned 
with a slightly longer time scale, when people focus less on FILES, 
but more on CONVERSATIONS and INTERACTIONS.  It is then that latency 
becomes more problematic.

Can anyone give me an estimate of when truly anonymous video conferencing 
will become possible?  This is not just to help me make the point, but 
I'm really wondering.

Wei Dai