Remailers and ecash (fwd)

Robert A. Costner pooh at efga.org
Mon Sep 29 15:14:26 PDT 1997



At 07:46 AM 9/29/97 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
>I'm wondering about your co-location machine, from your comments above it
>must be sitting in a field since you don't pay rent (or was that your way of
>saying somebody else pays the rent for you?). Is this so? Since so many of
>your utilities and physical plant are donated I have to question the
>accuracy and utility of your figures as well as the applicability of those
>figures to a true commercial enterprise.

Cracker is a colocated machine.  I've said this before.  The connectivity
charges includes space, electricity, air conditioning, back up power,
network management, bandwidth, and so forth.  For connectivity pricing, I
took the cost of a rack and prorated it for one machine.  Cracker is run by
Electronic Frontiers Georgia (EFGA).  EFGA is a non-profit Georgia
corporation.  No, I never said we were a commercial enterprise.  I merely
outlined what the equivalent cost to a commercial enterprise would be.  In
Cracker's case, that is $50K per year based on prorated prices, not the
full charges.

Of course I left out our donated legal time we have.  When used, that is a
chunk of money.  $50K per year would not begin to cover the costs of
operation for a standalone commercial remailer operation.  It does
represent what Cracker currently is using, including current donated
resources.

To run Cracker as a standalone commercial enterprise would take a lot of
ecash, and I don't think it would be feasible at this point in time.  For
an existing internet business, adding a remailer may be very inexpensive, a
cost of practically zero, except for the complaints.



  -- Robert Costner                  Phone: (770) 512-8746
     Electronic Frontiers Georgia    mailto:pooh at efga.org  
     http://www.efga.org/            run PGP 5.0 for my public key







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